Cancel Culture and Wokeness

[Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] good evening and thank you all for being with us today for what i hope will be a very insightful and possibly controversial lecture about two of my favorite subjects uh cancel culture and wokeness my name is matthew konichnik i'm a journalist i based in berlin work for politico i'm the chief europe correspondent there but this is a an issue uh that i think goes well beyond europe we're going to be focusing i think on the situation in the united states for the next hour or so and then later on in the evening i think we can also explore a bit of the the global dimensions of these of these trends uh so it's with with great pleasure that i introduce our speaker this evening john mcwhorter who's a very accomplished professor of linguistics at columbia university he's recently started writing a opinion column for the new york times he's written a number of books too many uh to mention i'll mention only the the most recent two the first is called nine nasty words english in the gutter which came out recently and it's a lot of fun um and i highly highly highly recommend it for people who are interested in uh language and profanity and especially how how language just changes uh so quickly around us um his other book which is is coming out next month is is more topical to our subject today uh it's called woke racism and i believe john will be speaking a little bit about that we're going to give john the floor for about 20 minutes or so and then um i'm going to start a conversation with him and i would also like it like to open it up to questions from the audience before we close we have an hour all together so with no further ado john the floor is yours thank you um thank you all for coming and listening to me especially in this format i'm sorry that i couldn't be there physically but i guess i'd like to introduce this subject by doing a little bit of history and that would be for the united states to go back to about 2014 where the idea was that what we're concerned with is free speech on for example college campuses and the idea is that a group of influential people connected to colleges and universities seem not to understand that the heart of education at least higher education is supposed to be that we're open to various ideas and we're going to contest them in a search for the truth the idea is that nothing is off limits and that people having different and even conflicting ideas is something that we should expect and even welcome so that's the ideal of the university and especially by about 2015 it was observed that many people connected to universities both students and faculty and administrators seem to think that that was no longer true and that there were various things that were not supposed to talk about on the campus or anywhere else so the way this issue has often been framed is that they're people connected to universities who are against free speech that's a mistake that's missing the point here and part of why that's missing the point is because nowhere could we ever have a complete commitment to free speech we're all only here for about 80 years at a time there's only so much time we can spend talking to each other and i think there's an informal and useful understanding that there are going to be some things that we're not going to discuss i don't think that we need to discuss whether just maybe slavery or genocide are okay we don't need to discuss whether or not women should vote they're things that really you might have some sort of discussion about these things but we're pretty sure what the conclusion would be and we really don't have time there is a such thing as moral and intellectual advance so there's never been a complete commitment to free speech on college campuses rather what has crystallized especially lately is an idea that what is off-limits is a much broader swath of topics than anybody ever thought until relatively recently the idea is that there are great many things that will not be said that will not be countenanced that should never come up in a classroom that no professor should even put up as a point of discussion to the point that many people feel rather strangled not to mention persecuted by this new ideology now too often you look at an ideology like this and you decide that the people promulgating it are evil or that they're crazy that there's something wrong with them but that's not constructive because almost never are people crazy almost always people have coherent reasons for behaving the way they do and what's going on at this point is not a prescription of free speech on campuses that's oversimplified rather there is a certain way of looking at things that has come to be highly influential and it's so influential that many of the people who espouse this way of looking at things don't even know that it's a way of looking at things just like fish don't know that they're wet and what's going on is something that has its roots in what 40 years ago was titled critical race theory today it's not the legal articles that critical race theory began as but a more general ideology that flows from it that has such an influence and it's based on something that might sound very dry in isolation but this is what the problem is this is why i'm talking to you this is why i wrote a book about this it's this particular idea that idea is that battling power differentials is supposed to be central to all intellectual artistic and moral endeavor that's what it is the idea is that there are various things in the world there are various ways of looking at things there are various things we might go about but the battling differentials in power is to be our central focus not anything else that and particularly in the united states the power differential in question is usually focused on race the idea that whites in america are on top there is white supremacy that is inherent in the system and that people of color especially black people also latinos and native americans are on the bottom unjustly subordinated and that we need to de-center whiteness and battle white supremacy that's the idea so we have this idea that power differentials is not just one thing that one might address i don't think very many people would argue that there does need to be a constant concern with the fact that power can be destructive with the fact that there is inequality and injustice baked into any modern society these things must concern us but the new idea is that those concerns have to be central they are the main meal nothing else is terribly important now no one puts it this way but that is the critical race theory idea that is the idea that has acquired such influence on college campuses and what it means for example i live um this is a sidebar i live in new york city i live in queens it's summer my window is open and i hope you are not hearing the trucks and children that are going by i hope this microphone is cutting all of that out in any case what all of this means is that for example if you're studying literature then what's most interesting about literature is its implications for power differentials so that would be especially the way you're supposed to read books in the past but then even here in the present there is to be a central concern with differentials in power not the other things that might interest one about literature but differentials in power are to be the central focus of the way we engage with literature that's a postulate that a lot of people believe nowadays and there's nothing crazy about it you might decide that battling power differentials is something that you want to focus 95 percent of your attention upon because of the nature of injustice there's nothing incoherent about that but it is a minority view it is a particular way of looking at things that probably not most even enlightened people would choose nevertheless it's not crazy but this not crazy view means things such as i'll bring up since i'm quote unquote in berlin that there is um a popular idea well quote unquote popular i'll get to that shortly popular idea that music theory is white supremacist in the way that it's set up in the writers who are most focused upon and there's one person who has been listened to with respect uh a black music theorist in the united states who has claimed that beethoven was actually uh better than mediocre but hardly excellent composer who only gets the attention that he does because he was a white male and i stress to you that this person's ideas are being taken very seriously by the musicological establishment in this country this person speaks widely and his ideas have had an effect upon syllabi in music teaching in the fall of 2021 it means that if you look at history history becomes easier in a way because since there's so many horrible things that are involved in the history of any society you can frame history as supremacist that essentially american history has been nothing but a crime spree against black people for example and i can certainly say that black people have suffered a great deal in the history of the united states and sometimes here in the present but to frame the whole history of america which is a very complex and in many ways interesting and experimental thing as a crime spree as a social tragedy what that really is it's kind of a simplification but it makes sense if what you're committed to is not something that we're going to call barring free speech but a commitment to battling power differentials as the only thing that is of central concern in intellectual engagement so that's what we have the media call it critical race theory there's a confusion because none of this is what the people who originated critical race theory itself were thinking about but that is the new ideology and the problem with this ideology is that in itself it's very interesting i remember when i was in grad school i happened to attend a lecture by a kind of uber version of this sort of person and they were talking about the musical my fair lady which i know has done enough in germany that you all my fair lady and she was talking about my fair lady as being all about white supremacy and that that was what we should take from the whole thing and i remember thinking i like the music and i like the story and i it brings a smile to my face it's very unusual to me to hear that what it really is is a product of moral barbarity but i also know that in a way she's right it was an interesting perspective it was part of what i thought of as my education but it's when this becomes so front and center that everything else is shunted to the side and we're discouraged from thinking very hard about anything else and a whole generation is coming of age under this environment that's when things get disturbing and people start writing articles and books because what's happened is that this crt this critical race theory way of looking at things is no longer being wielded as one perspective out of many it's become a religion and i don't mean like a religion it is a religion it actually has replaced for many of the people who wield this ideology what for example devout christianity would have done for them say a hundred years ago we are witnessing the birth of a new religion i feel almost privileged that within my lifetime i have witnessed a new religion being born and as with all religions that are born the people who think this way don't think of themselves as religious no christian in 1400 thought of themselves as something called religious the word didn't exist it was thought of as just the way things are it was thought of as truth well now there's a new religion and what this means is that people aren't only expressing a view what they're telling you is that if you don't agree with this view you're immoral you're not supposed to be in the room and as a result not only are we dealing with people who for example won't let you enjoy my fair lady that was fine you know in 1995 when i heard it the idea is that if you don't think of power differentials as at the very focus of all intellectual moral and artistic endeavor you're a heretic you don't deserve your job you can't participate in a conversation and more to the point you should be tarred on social media as an immoral person as a racist as a white supremacist the idea being that we will not tolerate anybody who dissents from this particular point of view because it's immoral and because the people who think this way honestly see themselves as having found a truth a kind of truth that it's worth even a little bit of nastiness and even a lot of nastiness in order to forge there's an expression that if you want to make an omelette you've got to crack some eggs and no revolution is tidy the idea is we are going to forge ahead and if some people get hurt feelings and if sometimes some of this gets overdone and in the final reckoning some people will be revealed not to have been moral actors well that's the way things go but i sincerely believe that the people who are members of this religion think of themselves as bearers of a truth that's not crazy that's not evil but it's also extremely dangerous and so if you just pull the camera back you see that yes power differentials must be battled sure but for that to be the central focus of everything that we concentrate our energy on is something quite different and what it really is i hate to say is that it's anti-intellectual for one it's a very important and yet rather easy way of looking at the world that discourages engaging with nuance that discourages engaging with complexity and discourages engaging with roughly 96 of what any intellectual endeavor consists of in favor of thinking about the power differentials they're even people arguing and being given attention that subjects like physics need to change that they need to open up to ways of analyzing things that aren't about getting the exact answer that aren't about something as quote-unquote white as precision that physics needs to be more holistic and if you wonder what that means you should and whatever it means it's diluting physics to look at it that way it's it's quite simple that's a dilution of the marvel that physics has become if we're talking about art for art to only be about battling power differentials for that to be what's considered the most interesting art for any art that isn't sufficiently engaged in that to be dismissed and sometimes even condemned that's less art that is a weaker literature that is weaker painting that is lesser music it's just a subtraction of what art can be when we look at say the scholastics way back read something written in france in 1250 and you notice the constant obsession with god and jesus everything has to be consonant with that way of looking at things everything has to come back to whether or not god exists and so you see someone like thomas aquinas who clearly has an iq of 717 but he's limited in a way because everything has to come back to that and we see ourselves as having advanced beyond that kind of concern there's nothing wrong with being concerned as to whether or not god exists but we would most of us wouldn't want to go back to the idea that theology must ground everything that we engage notice that for them that was what all morality intellectual endeavor and art were about we've gone beyond that we're going back to it this particular crt idea is in that way it's incurious and in its way it's medieval the parallels with the way somebody who engaged in the life of the mind or the life of the artist or the intersection between the two seven and eight hundred years ago in europe and the way we're being encouraged to think now the parallels are almost eerie the only thing that's different is the vocabulary used and this new religion uses a particular suite of words that are elegant and somewhat frightening white supremacist for anybody in america to be called a white supremacist scares you to your socks and as a result it's easy to think that it's sophisticated when actually it's a rather blunt brusque and crude religion it's not a good religion if you ask me and some people have started asking and so i've started saying it this is the problem with the new religion and what's important here is that the religion is not wokeness i'm not talking about being a leftist that's not a religion i'm talking about woke people who are mean i'm talking about woke people who are coming over the hill with pitchforks trying to hurt people because they think that that's necessary to creating a better world that kind of religion the problem with it is that it rules not through consensus not through genuine suasion but through fear people are afraid of being called names if there were no social media this wouldn't be happening a lot of this is twitter's fault what happens is that the people who are members of this religion if you cross them call you a white supremacist on twitter next thing you know you're being called all sorts of dirty names on twitter and most people aren't up for that it's frightening luckily in a way i was first subjected to that kind of treatment within my own subfield and linguistics about 20 years ago i remember how it felt at first all these people are saying these terrible things about you or sometimes it's just two or three and you wonder is it going to destroy your career are they perhaps right what did i do most people aren't up for that we have we're buying food we have children we have vacations you don't want to be called a racist on twitter so for 99 people out of 100 you just keep your head down you pretend to agree with the sorts of things that you're being told and as a result there can be two out of 15 people on a committee who think this way but all 15 will sign their names to some document or some kind of ideology because you're afraid of being called names if you don't toe the line that's a reign of terror that's not intellectual and moral advancement and from what i see especially over the past couple of years in the united states which is what i can attest to because that's where i've been there is a reign of terror it's not that all of thinking america is coming to feel that battling power differentials is supposed to be the only thing that the intelligent person is truly concerned about that's not what most people think because it's a very controversial difficult to defend position what people are realizing is that you have to pretend to think that way in order not to be called a racist on twitter in order to not have your job threatened in order to be able to hold your head high at the neighborhood get together that's not good and there are signs from what i see that's happened this is happening in other parts of the world and it frightens me because it's not a revolution it's backwards social media has allowed a backwards-ness to spread throughout thinking people in america and beyond not to mention people who are not reading the new york times people who are not reading you know their spiegel etc but people who are living their lives and hearing you know from outside that we are supposed to have these power differentials at the very heart of existence and having no idea quite what to do with it all of this worries me and i think someone needs to stand up against it i think it's gradually happening and i think it's important that among the people who stand up against it are people of color such as me i am fully aware that as a black american my saying this will be interpreted by some people including black ones as disloyal as my not understanding something about how power differentials work but i actually i do and i'm very committed to battling power differentials and injustice however i don't think that it should be the very centerpiece of everything that we do and think about because when that happens we're back to the middle ages that's my spiel so what happens now well thank you uh very very much for that tour divorce [Applause] [Music] let me just start by playing uh devil's advocate for for a moment you know a lot of people would listen to to what you you said and and would say ah well it's really not that bad i mean it's really why you know why is it being characterized as so dangerous this is really just about being you know more sensitive having respect for other people in a way that we haven't before um you know you compare it to the middle ages and then though you know in the middle ages people didn't have the same kind of access to information that we have now and there certainly is in the united states uh a very rigorous debate about about these issues and i think you know roughly half of the country the half that that votes for donald trump uh is is not going to embrace cancel culture uh or wokeness uh anytime soon could you explain a little bit more about why you think this is uh so insidious why why is it so uh dangerous and maybe give us a couple of examples from from the u.s uh where i know they're they're kind of daily examples of this kind of thing going on but to make it a little bit more plastic for people here sure people are getting fired for reasons that don't make any sense out of a basic commitment to the idea that power differentials are everything and so for example one of many of this kind uh white oldish reporter at the new york times had a conversation with some teenagers on a field trip where he used the n-word in referring to it he wasn't calling somebody that word he used it to refer to it in passing that's something that all americans did comfortably as recently as 20 years ago things have changed lately and you're not supposed to ever use the word at all those of you in germany where you're beginning to embrace that same way of looking at that word should know that it wasn't that way here until about 20 years ago there's been a major sea change so he used it in passing one time to refer to it in criticism and he was fired from the paper because he said that's just not right and the only reason that a person could get dismissed from the paper on the basis of that instead of you know being given a talking to are talking to he would not have been given 20 years ago is because of an idea that there is a religion afoot and he blasphemed that's really what it means he basically took the lord's name in vain by saying that there was something wrong with someone using that word that wasn't right and the problem is that in the course of human events sometimes things just go wrong but that story could be multiplied by 50. i could literally sit here and name 50 things like that that have happened since last summer in the wake of the murder of george floyd and so there's something wrong there and another problem with it is that an underlying premise of all of this is that black people are very very delicate and that black people are hopelessly oversensitive about things that really don't matter in terms of what black problems actually are it casts black people as unintelligent babies to suppose that we need someone to lose their job because they use a word in passing it casts us as dimwits in that they're people arguing that there shouldn't be standardized tests because for various reasons that one could address black kids tend not to be very good at them the idea is that it's racist therefore to have the tests matter in anything at all there's a short step from that to black kids aren't very intelligent and then once somebody writes a book about how black people are on the average not as intelligent as other people they get called a racist and everybody yells about them on twitter this isn't constructive the idea is to teach black kids how to do better on the standardized tests and to point black kids to the resources that are available to do that often black families don't know those resources are available these days you just say get rid of the test it's racist which makes you feel good there's a certain kind of person most of them white who see you saying that and think that it makes you a good person because you're being a good christian so to speak but it ends up hurting black kids both in not teaching them how to take tests because it's going to keep coming up and then also in implying that black people aren't smart enough to take tests and then wondering why people think black people aren't as bright none of this makes any sense and so someone needs to speak up against it so the interesting thing about one of the examples you you cited there uh the new york times reporter don mcneil who worked at the paper for decades as you said um he was also uh in in the um in the coverage of of covid um a real expert in public health and uh was sort of looked to i think in the us as one of the pre-eminent experts uh you know about pandemics um and and yet his knowledge which was widely shared beyond i think the print readers through podcasts and and uh other channels was not seen as sort of outweighing um this incident which actually had occurred a couple of years before uh the pandemic if i'm remember that's precisely what i mean that we weight this power differential battling over everything else so some people might be thinking isn't he exaggerating about the centrality but no because that man's career as one of the world's best reporters on one of the worst plagues ever to bedevil humanity was considered less important than the fact that he used that word in criticism one time that's sick well and and the other detail there that i find interesting is that he actually uh apologized ended up apologizing um fairly profusely and and uh you know very very publicly in in a press release that the paper put out are are you seeing a a lot of these kind of public maya cultures of people who who actually don't really think that they did anything wrong but are pressured to kind of go to the whipping post as it were yes there is a ritual that we see at this point where a person apologizes and often you can tell that they don't really think they did anything wrong but the idea is to keep your job and to maintain your respectability and the thing is the apology never works the idea is that you have sinned that's why this thing is a religion you have no redemption and so unfortunately you know religion is one thing but this is not a very good religion in that there's no room in this religion for forgiveness once you sin you are forever a sinner the people in question leveling the judgments don't think of themselves as bearing a religion but that's exactly what this is and notice that in that it's not a very reflective or subtle religion it's crude that was a perfect example so you work for the um colombia obviously and and uh the new york times which are both institutions i think most people would associate it being you know really hotbeds for uh both wokeness and cancel culture you write for the opinion pages not too long ago the opinion editor of the new york times was forced to resign because he ran an op-ed that many people on staff objected to um how how are you perceived in in these environments and how do you how do you get away with working there and why do you do it given the kind of criticism you must face okay i'm going to answer your question in 15 seconds i have a mundane situation with some very loud guinea pigs behind me i have to fix something i will be right back ah okay well we i don't think we've heard we hear the guinea pigs i hear them okay trouble okay i'm back the um the institutions that i work for are multifaceted places and i've been working for colombia since before i was especially prominent for writing about issues such as free speech but the truth is there is a certain amount of room in institutions like this for what might be called a diverse view i think frankly to an extent because i'm black there's a little bit more latitude given to me i also think that because things have been so extreme over the past year and a half i think there's a bit of a pushback and so for example i never thought the new york times would ever hire me now the new york times has used me for book reviews they've interviewed me they review my books you know they the new york times is not a stalinist place but i always thought never would they want me for anything regular and i think that part of the reason that they're taking a chance on me now is because of a certain amount of complaint against how extreme the the persecution of heretics has become so we'll see you know come back to me in six months and it may turn out that i was feeling a little bit too comfortable about my places of employment but i'm trying to do my best because i think that most people deep down see that this religious placement of crt is a subtraction of humanity that's what it is anybody can see 99 out of 100 people in any university can see this i have all indication that most people who work at the new york times understand that what happens is that we end up buckling under to the views of a certain minority because we don't want to get called names online i don't mind being called names online but i'm in a unique position most people don't want to be bothered with it and that's the problem it's not the whole institution it's the influence of a vocal and threatening minority upon those institutions i mean one of the things that you've said about that minority which is a numerical minority not a demographic minority i think um is that you you can't really convince them they can't be convinced you're not going to kind of pull them back into uh you know the the realm of uh reason as it were um that it's necessary to coexist with them in the same way one would coexist with uh religious zealots um why do you think that why do you think they can't be um kind of renormalized partly experience when you try to break bread with people of that ideology and find that beyond a certain point the conversation just can't go anywhere and partly because the parallels with religion are so much that i actually think of it as a religion i don't mean that as a rhetorical ploy it's a religion and how often can we talk somebody out of their religion if somebody deeply believes that jesus loves them and that they're going to live in jesus grace if they do certain things during this lifetime what are the chances that you would talk somebody out of it if you didn't believe that it can happen but so seldom does that happen that you have to learn to coexist with certain ideas and so my point is that to try to to speak to the i call these people the elect in german that there's going to be a german version it's the aus elven which i like trying to talk to that kind of person and to change their mind or sometimes even to make them understand you is simply impossible you know we all as i said we only have so much time on this earth and so much energy so the idea is not to chase them out of the room but to get them to sit back down it used to be that they were seated at the table with the rest of us they stood up last summer and started just you know bopping people over the head but no you can't reach them it is very very rare that you can reach a person like that we just have to stop letting that kind of person run the show because if we let them run the show they will just like if we could run the show we would we have to make them understand that there is pluralism and that they are one of many elements amidst the pluralism that they cannot be our leaders i do want to come to the audience questions so please think of your questions and i think we have a microphone that we'll go around um in the meantime though i'd like to get your take on on how far along you think this process is because in the united states specifically because i think it's something that you know has started to emerge a little bit in in europe um but also mainly in academic environments on uh university campuses a little bit in the media but it's certainly not as kind of pronounced um as it is in in the us um you know where where where is the u.s on the on the scale on the kind of wokeness uh canceler cancel culture uh scale at the moment and and how likely do you think uh it will be that uh you know it can this can be turned around and that it can be you know kind of prevented from kind of taking over culture completely yeah um i've had trouble answering that question until relatively recently but i think that some natural processes are happening one is that this ideology is so extreme and it has so clearly hurt so many innocent people that a certain pushback was inevitable and so i think it's at the point where there is a movement gradually building among moderate thinking people that you have to stand up against this ideology let twitter go aflame against you and realize that there's a certain safety in numbers that a lot of people agree with you i think there's a there's a there's an agreement happening and there's also something else there is a an aspect of this that it would have been very hard to see a year ago but looking back and seeing how the change has gone i feel safe saying that a lot of what happened last summer it wasn't only george floyd it was the pandemic it was the fact that everybody was stuck by themselves at home living their lives on a laptop i think that was very frustrating for a lot of people and it meant that everything happened on zoom no offense but when we hear about these firings when we hear about these meetings where things happen these decisions all of it was on zoom it wasn't people sitting in a room and if you're on zoom you've got this chat function and when you read about how a lot of these things happened a lot of the fire and brimstone started in chat you're sitting there in a meeting but you can have this very articulate and detailed side conversation that can keep going and then spill into the general parameters of the room i think that all of life happening on that platform for months and months encouraged a certain kind of person to one express themselves and two acquire a certain kind of influence it's as if a certain kind of hyper woke person could stand up on a chair and start yelling at a room and to show that they were about to call the room racist on twitter if they didn't behave that made it a lot easier now that the pandemic is not what it was and we're able to sit in rooms to an extent again i think that we're going to see a certain humanity and humanism coming back because we're looking each other in the eye i think that in some ways zoom can lead to a kind of extremism because people aren't looking one another in the eye so i think that to an extent the ferrari over excessive wokeness that people like me started railing about in about june 2020 i'm quite open to it looking a little quaint in 10 years because it turns out really it was a byproduct of pandemic frustration but we live our lives month to month and i'm trying but i think that had a lot to do with it too another another point you've made and then i'll go to the questions is that a lot of people pushing this ideology are are not um members of racial minorities they are in fact uh sort of middle-class white people um could you talk a little bit about that this virtue signaling and and and you know what what is sort of driving that aspect of this it's a religion and so for example i'm known in the united states for writing things about race that make certain black people angry and i understand that but my upcoming book about woke racism as i call it the person in my mind is white really there are black people who have this ideology there are too many if you ask me but the person i'm really writing to is the white enablers of this sort of thing the white people who are in charge and treating black people in these ways and what it is is a form of of comfort so it used to be that what you did to show you were a good person was demonstrate your religious faith in this religion what you do to show you're a good person is to show that you're not a racist that's the goodest thing that you can show yourself to be so it really is virtue signaling where the virtue was not faith and god but faith in battling power differentials and so you show that you're a good person by doing that to the extent that you'll do it even without much concern for what actually helps for example poor black people to become less poor what you're doing is showing that you're a good person don't we all do that but unfortunately the woke racism channels it in a really destructive direction okay let's go to the uh to the audience for questions does anybody have a question up here in the front row please with the microphone i know i think they bring it to you it's coming hi okay thank you very much for your talk um considering that you're calling it work racism and you're still against banning it are you actually in favor of teaching racism in schools and universities of course one must learn about racism one must learn that racism is not just name-calling one must learn that history is not just a procession of victories certainly i was taught all those things i think a lot of that has been in place for a long time what i'm against is racism being the focus of education the idea being that all subjects must be focused around teaching about battling power differentials which is happening in a lot of schools there's a big confusion over that in in the united states there's an idea that anybody who's against what's going on doesn't want students to be taught about the senior sides of american history by no means that would be quite unsophisticated in itself but the idea is that the heart of education is not supposed to be to teach people about battling power differentials that's just too simple i mean one of the interesting things about your biography is that you describe yourself as a as a democrat kind of a a liberal in in the united states uh political um jargon meaning somebody to to the left a lot of people who have taken up this cause um are people more on the right uh people like you know who are associated with the right whether you know fairly or not but you know people members of what they call the intellectual dark web for example brett weinstein jordan peterson those types do you feel any any kinship with them and do you do do you feel that you're now being kind of pushed into the uh sort of right uh corner of the political spectrum as a result of your views on on free speech no that's something that people were talking about a lot a couple years ago actually whether or not i for example am part of the intellectual dark web i think it's become rather clear over time that my agenda here is rather different from theirs and a lot of the people on that list have not looked too good lately for various reasons and i don't think you're ever going to see me being an anti-vaxxer or anything like that so no there has there has been some talk of me being part of that group who are idw and yeah i've you know i've appeared on sam harris's podcast i did a couple of things with brett weinstein last summer i know them but that's not what i'm doing i frankly feel like i'm protecting black people against a certain kind of misguided religious woke white person they have different agendas than i do so no i can see people associating me with them because we all are busy and we we classify and we lump things together i certainly do but i'm trying to do something that i would associate with various democrat liberal black thinkers who don't agree with the idea that if you're not hard left you are immoral which is what the idea here is if you're not hard hard left you're missing something and you're white supremacist and you're part of the problem that is not what glenn lowry coleman hughes chloe valdari thomas chatterton williams camille foster or me are about we're not idw we're just we're just ourselves i think okay we have another question in the front row here thank you very much i'm i feel freer and better since i have heard your speech because i'm suffering a phenomenon like this in germany and in europe two in within the feminist debate within the left debate even within the equal debate and in the anti-racist and it's even entering partly the anti-semitic debate so against against against i'm the generation which had the honor uh to see martin luther king still alive and then to get this shock so for me as i'm a feminist theologian myself i can understand well when you make the relationship or the comparison which is serious to religion but what is your explanation that in a way it seems for me i have not been so often the last years in the u.s but it seems to me that the religion of martha luther king and the theology of him and his coup what is mitch writer activists and so on and even in the field of music in the field of literature that this religion is a way is or it is a minority now only or in a way it's is it put aside by this extreme left sectarian forms of thinking and has it something to do that maybe in general political debates got with the help of facebook internet and instagram and so on and not just with trump but with these technology that the level of political debate went down it became empty in words and looking into the eyes i think um yeah we have a problem which is that the way that you show that you're important is by having your fist up against the machine and that was true of the black power movement that took a lot of the wind out of dr king sales in the late 60s before he was assassinated and that same attitude is a lot of what animates this white wokeness you're not a real person you're not a good person unless you are battling power differentials and only that and the problem is that it is a less sophisticated religion that see that makes the christianity the southern christianity of dr king's movement with the emphasis on non-violence with the emphasis on the great beyond all of that ends up seeming soft and sentimental and not flinty enough to deal with reality when of course we know that what dr king accomplished changed reality more vastly than anything that this particular kind of movement could and in terms of how we talk to each other what we've got now is what would happen if everybody could be in a room yelling at each other it would be very hard to get a word in thoughts would be rather telegraphic twitter allows that to happen it makes you know it creates this village of people who don't have enough to do and have too much education and are yelling at each other yeah it's a problem because what people end up doing is just scaring each other and you know behaving like kids in the sandbox except with big words like intersectionality it's a sad situation that can't be fixed we're not going to be rid of twitter and i'm certainly on twitter but it's a problem there's a coarsening of exchange because we can just do so much of it we have another question here on the left the third row um i i was just wondering um so when speaking about cultures of denunciation um you know another historical parallel that springs to mind is the chinese cultural revolution and i'm wondering to what degree you think there's a generational divide um and what role that plays uh in in this new religiosity you know there is definitely a parallel with the cultural revolution and it's interesting in american culture only so much is known about the cultural revolution there's no one book there's no one movie that everybody's seen chinese as a language is so far from our language that it can be hard to get a graph it can be hard to even get a grasp of the names involved but really there are huge parallels including the way people stand on the sidelines and watch terrible things happening because they're afraid the whole issue of the struggle sessions which now happen all the time at universities but i don't know if it's generational because to tell you the truth in academic and college town circles there have always been i hate to use an epithet but the gray ponytail people there have always been people of a certain age who thought this way but only had so much influence a lot of the people who were doing this a lot of the people who are getting people fired what always what always impresses me is that a lot of them have gray hair a lot of these people are mature people who have finished paying off their mortgages and will sign these barbaric manifestos will watch somebody's head roll without you know without a thought it's partly the kids and so you can look at um the netflix mini-series the chair and think that this is only people 22 and under but it's also grown-ups who are thinking this way many of whom i think are seeing a kind of imprimatur given to ideas that they kept quieter until roughly last summer so yeah kids are fire fierier about these things than adults usually but what i'm seeing is something that is typical of what you might call blue american souls i think it's pretty widely spread in terms of age i get hate mail from people in their 70s about this sort of thing so i see what you mean but what alarms me partly is that it's not just people who are young and full of beings it's it's just people but but what do you think the ratio is of people who are true believers here who are adherents of this religion as you call it and uh people who are just going along to get along uh because as you say there are pretty dire consequences for a lot of people in in certain spheres i mean i i think in a lot of americans lives they're not as directly affected by this but certainly in academia in media in a lot of corporate environments uh if you say the wrong thing or perceived to have said something inappropriate you can be you know out on your ear within a few few hours um but but how many uh how many people do you think are just kind of doing this because it's expected and they don't really believe it oh the vast majority and i don't have any figures nor do i even have an intelligent estimate because the fact is during the the rise of most of this one has not been in physical places to observe for example i don't think i've been on the center of columbia's campus in a year and a half i've been on the edges but it's not something that one can observe but my thumbnail impression is that it's about one in 25 people in college town culture in blue america culture in media culture who think this way about one in 25 the other 24 are just scared to death of what that one in 25 is going to say about them on social media and knuckles under i really do think it's it's that bad and it's progress in a way that people don't want to be called racists that wouldn't have been a useful weapon as recently as 35 years ago but there's this unpleasant byproduct which is that people are so afraid of being called racist that they'll do things they don't really believe and they will they will accede to dumbing down our culture in the name of something that isn't real yes i think it's a it's a small minority of people but you know the the other difference to the cultural revolution is that the cultural revolution obviously had mao and i have my little red book here um total coincidence uh but but there isn't really a single figure i think that uh or correct me if i'm wrong that people would associate with cancer culture and and wokeness it seems somewhat more diffuse and you know if you if you kind of turn back to the uh to the religion metaphor you know if you look at sort of you know mormonism you had brigham young and people like that i mean there's not this doesn't feel like a real sect in the traditional sense i mean why is it so successful despite that it is successful not to be repetitious but successful because there is a kind of social media where you can be tired and feathered before the populace instantly and really severely but also there are there is no mao there is no one person but this religion does have star priests and so where this religion started it didn't start in june 2020 it really coalesced in the early teens and the priest was ta-nehisi coates and i'm not saying that as a as a knock on him but the way his writings were regarded for a few years could you explain his information not as argument but as scripture he was treated as basically a god he is no longer the fad right now but robin deangelo in her book white fragility which i know is there in german and it has a it has a title that i like because it actually spells out what the book is about better than white fragility i don't think it's fragility it's something else but that and then also um ibrahim kendi and his books such as how to be an anti-racist those people are regarded not as thinkers but as priests nobody puts it that way but if somebody observed the place of ibrahim kennedy in society especially since roughly last summer where he is you know speaking on literally most college campuses in the country a great number of corporations and frankly many people would be hard-pressed to say exactly what he said but you're supposed to listen anyway i think an anthropologist would actually see his role not as thinker but as priest the language isn't going to keep up with it but there are people there's a there's a bible it could be ta-nehisi coates is between the world and me robin d'angelo's white fragility any brahm candies how to be an anti-racist if those three things were put together and considered testaments of a new bible that would be the best-selling book in the history of the united states of america at this point and that's because i think they they are regarded as priests as much as they're regarded as writers and and we'll have to put together a book list at the end of the lecture for people um but i i would just add these are people who were fairly uh you know not very well known uh until a couple of years ago and because of this whole movement have really risen to to prominence well beyond the kind of confines of the academic sphere um is there another question here there's a question on the far right of the room please hi so well when the way you put it is very differentiated and interesting um i'm just uh curious for people who uh want to engage in this debate on twitter what do you recommend because i mean i i follow it and i don't do it but uh how do you avoid like sounding like a racist or like or is it or should people just avoid twitter altogether and not no no the issue is not how to avoid sounding like a racist you will be if you participate meaningfully in this kind of debate on twitter you will be called a racist you cannot stop these people from doing that they will call you a white supremacist when you disagree and they'll really believe that they're doing the right thing and doing it what we have to do is get used to being called that on twitter and understand that in the vast majority of cases life will go on and we'll be okay we have to deprive that epithet of its sting or you can just be an observer and watch how the conversations go and get a sense of how people make sense to themselves but if you participate we all have to get used to getting rained on people are going to call you names that don't make any sense and you get up the next day and you keep going and that's what we have to do somebody's going to say well you're just contributing to white supremacy let them because after a while when they realize that doesn't make people run away they'll just have to sit back down not leave the room but just sit back down we had another question here in the second row sorry um you uh thanks for your speech very interesting you you call it a religion i was wondering if there was any point where you got a criticism on that comparison that made you actually think about maybe if you were wrong i am so sorry but i couldn't hear that and i it may be my system i don't know maybe i speak a bit louder and closer okay so i was wondering you call it the religion and it's you're making quite a good case out of it as well but i was wondering if you ever received criticism on that comparison that made you reconsider or wonder if you maybe be on the wrong track like yeah no there there are already people who don't like my calling it a religion they they accuse me of not being an expert on religion and not understanding the the subtleties involved and they're correct in both of those things and i would just have to say that why i call it a religion is specifically because there's an aspect of religion that requires suspension of disbelief where you're not going by logic anymore you just have to have faith in certain non-logical tenets that's part of how most religions work and there's an element of that in this where you don't have to make sense you just have to believe to me once that started happening you had not an ideology but you had a religion where the only thing that matters centrally is that you show that you're battling the power differentials even where it doesn't make sense so to go very quickly the dialogue on black america is that black america's biggest problem is that white cops kill black men too much now white cops kill everybody too much frankly as do the black ones but yes now and then a black man is killed by a white cop in a situation that is not justified and the cop is not is not prosecuted that's a problem but then on the other hand black men kill one another in poor black communities in alarmingly high numbers if you are a black man in that community the chance of you getting killed by a rogue white cop is infinitesimal the chance that you're going to get killed by someone just like you who lives around the corner unfortunately is often high so the main problem unfortunately is the black on black crime not what happened to george floyd as terrible as that is you're not supposed to say that what is the person more in danger from the crime in the neighborhood what allows you to talk about racism george floyd so that becomes more important that makes no moral sense at all as accustomed to it as we are the only way that makes sense in human minds is if we have a religion about racism not just an ideology but a religion because it's almost inhuman how little concern many people have with what really murders most people in poor black communities it's religious that's what i mean that you have to realize that there's a part of this that is based not on reasoning from a to b but upon a different aspect of cognition which is unreachable so yeah i'm not a theologian and i also know that for people who are religious i'm going to come off as sounding kind of disrespectful but i think the analogy is so useful that i'm sticking by it regardless but you mean more like the taliban than sort of traditional normal religions right i think that might be the distinction um so you know when when you talk about sort of resisting this standing up and so forth i mean a lot of people's uh you know reaction at least in kind of let's call it the middle america uh would be to vote for somebody like donald trump how great do you think the danger here is with this polarization as as this movement kind of really takes hold of media and culture that a lot of americans just say you know i we need somebody like trump to to clean clean this up i mean that is one of the reasons that we ended up with trump to begin with and and so what do you think the chances of a return to that are i don't think trump can happen again i say with not enough authority because it already happened and it was such a horror that i think that some things could be in place to keep that from happening again maybe a trumpy kind of person but never an utter unmitigated disaster such as him again nevertheless that kind of ideology yeah i think that this does play a part in it there are white people who get tired of being told that they're evil just because they're white the idea that a white person who has trouble paying their bills and has trouble with their children and is just getting by being told that they have privilege because they're white and that they have a privilege over all black people including the ones who make three times as much money as they do that only works from a religious perspective and they're people who get tired of that kind of recreational reflexive anti-whiteness that's part of this religion and especially when it gets to the point that you're watching poor black people who don't know any better who are being egged on by this kind of ideology to riot in communities after say an unpleasant altercation or even a murder murder incident between a cop and a black man the idea that it's okay for black people in that particular town to come out and start burning buildings down including stores owned by other black people that that is political activism rather than just barbaric rioting that no human being should be allowed to get away with or should be you know pardoned for doing people get impatient you're not going to see that in patients on the pages of say the washington post but people in the real world get impatient with that sort of thing and it can make them vote for those who call for law and order we've seen that in the past in the united states and it could definitely happen again what do you think this all means for the for the future of of universities because uh one of the things that we've seen recently there was a statistic out this week showing that enrollment in american universities male enrollment has gone down quite dramatically and i'm guessing that's mainly uh white males who are not going to university anymore what do you think the kind of long-term ramifications of this will be for the academic world well my prognosis there would be that since this religion is entrenched especially deeply at universities to a point that i'm not sure that anything could be done to reverse a lot of the trends that we're seeing i'm imagining i'm not a sci-fi writer but i'm imagining a future where universities are increasingly what an anthropologist would call churches churches of hypervocism that a certain kind of person goes to in order to be instructed in those particular kinds of teachings they'll still be called academic education the language won't keep up with it but i wonder if it's at the point where academic endeavor will just be completely taken over by that way of looking at things and they'll have to be an alternate set of institutions that go back to at least approximating what real education is there are a few experiments like that that are being funded already right now as i speak now what role this new ideology is playing in these white guys choosing not to go to college i think that there are larger factors involved there i'm not aware that that's due to the hyper elect vocalism at schools however it is going to start discouraging a certain number of people from undergoing that kind of indoctrination instead of actually getting an education i'll be very interested to see what the progression of that is over the next 20 years because there's a certain kind of academic who is now getting hired who will be the gray-haired person making all the hires in just a generation and i don't see that kind of person changing their tune i see wider society pushing back against this but i think in universities i'm not sure i could see how it could start going any other way so we'll see hopefully i'm being alarmist here but i am starting to wonder whether anything can be done about the typical university when it comes to these questions so we're just about out of time um but i i didn't want to end on too pessimistic you know what what do you think the outlook is how how optimistic are you that you know these divisions can be healed in in in the coming years or i think it's going to get worse before they get better there will be no healing what we have to have is coexistence among people who probably won't like each other very much with the result being that society moves ahead based on a rough kind of commonality between all the views where the hard hard hard left informs what we think of as where we might like to go but cannot impose its conceptions of diversity equity and inclusion on everybody just via fia so there won't be healing because the elect can't be reached the idea is just to have them be one of many voices at the table again so that we can have our crabby and tense kind of collusion in moving society ahead i hope that doesn't sound pessimistic but i think that's about the best that we can do at this point well thank you very much sir for your time and thank everybody for their questions and for tuning in we're going to continue the discussion uh in a little bit with nezrin malik and olivier goes who have their own thoughts on all of these issues so please tune in for that we'll begin in about half an hour thank you for now thank you thank you thank you i got a red rose for you so a virtual red rose i am pretending that that is here in the room i love rose thank you that smells doesn't really smell but anyway thank you again

Channel: internationales literaturfestival berlin

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Length: 68min 31sec (4111 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2021