Daniel Hannan: Individualism and the paradox of affirmative action

platon it went wonderful to be back here thank you to Greg and to Tom for arranging it it's great to be I think I was lost here in February in this hotel since then of course Australia has had 26 new Prime Minister's but still not managed to finish this bloody tram line which was disturbing my repose even in February of last year and shows no sign of being any more efficient than any other state sponsored infrastructure scheme I came across a remarkably good article in the Financial Review yesterday by a chap called Tom Switzer which seemed very germane to the issue of the defence of Western civilisation and the Enlightenment and this was the story that tom was telling about the Ramsey Center for Western civilisation and Sydney University's reluctance to take money in order to promote the common values that have made this country what it is and the I'm gonna quote the grounds on which objections were being made because I think this is a phrase that can sustain a certain amount of parsing quote the only people the only people who invoke Western civilization in anything other than a critical spirit are the racist right I think that means you right now on one level you dismiss that comment as what George Orwell called duck speak the larynx issuing noises without the higher brain centre being involved at all racist right right it's one of those phrases that trips off the de-facto well himself said that the word racist now simply means something of which I disapprove so if you say James Bartholomew is a racist all you're really saying is I don't like that fellow Bartholomew so on one level it's it's just the the idiom of our times the the facile slogan izing of the modern left but I think there's rather more going on it's like why is it that racist has become the all-purpose boo word of our age I I randomly Google's just before I came down this evening I randomly googled things that have been called racist just to see what would come up and on the front page of Google things that have been called racist were among other things white meat apparently the the leg of a turkey or chicken is tastier and it is only our subliminal racism that prevents us from seeing it allowing your children to dress as moaña or other Disney characters for Halloween appetite it seems that this time of year airport expansion do you know airport expansion is racist or was that there was a huge protest at London City Airport by the UK branch of black lives matter against airport expansion which is racist because apparently it leads to climate change which is bad for black people you don't really need me to add I'm sure you've all worked out that the protesters were all white the UK chapter of black lives matter it would have been impossible to imagine a black person making that argument although my favorite current one is a poo from The Simpsons who has now been removed because he is a stereotype well no my god you know to say Holmes Oh a stereotype in a cartoon I mean what on earth do they think a cartoon is you know what are all the other characters that the fighting Irishman and the grumpy Scots and the shyster lawyer in the Italian American mobster eats our cartoon for heaven's sake but what do you see in the elevation of these sillier and sillier examples is what one might call competitive virtue signalling phrase that somebody nicked from me I think competitive virtue signalling right it's not enough in this day and age to object to the wording of a Kipling poem right that's too easy what you have to do is to find something that everyone previously found absolutely no ffensive and then show how terribly sensitive you are by noticing a flaw that nobody else had spotted you know it is shocking that there are no positive LGBT QWERTY role models in Harry Potter or it's shocking that there aren't enough black people in friends'll the more inoffensive the original subject the more you get in your own eyes to flaunt your work credentials now of course to any normal person all you're really doing is is flaunting your extreme priggishness is what you're what you're really doing is trying to say to everyone else I'm better than you are because I spotted the political incorrectness nonetheless extraordinary that we're living through this constant expansion this accelerated and aggressive competitive offense taking you see won't quite do to say this is political correctness gone mad something far more serious is underway in defining statements by the identity or color of the person who speaks them rather than by any intrinsic truth or lack of it in the statement we are reversing the idea on which the Enlightenment and indeed the whole of Western civilization is based consider if I were to stand here and make a statement like Islam has a problem with homosexuality that statement will be wholly judged by whether I was Muslim or non-muslim whether I was gay or straight or it would have almost nothing to do with people trying to assess whether it was valid and we are in other words returning to this rather pre-modern idea of caste the idea that we are born with an identity and that everything we say and do is unchangeable we are turning our back on the whole basis of modernity there was a a long-serving prime minister between the wars backed Prime Minister for most of the interwar period in Britain Stanley Baldwin a rather solid anti intellectual businessman from Worcestershire and towards the end of his life he gave an interview and he was asked whether he had been intellectually influenced by any theorists or any and rather surprisingly he said yes Stanley Borden was not not a man who read many books but rather to the astonishment of the interview he said yes I was as a young man I was very influenced by the works of the jurist and historian Sir Henry Maine and it was through coming to know his corpus of work that I came to understand that all of human history is a move from status to contract and then he paused and frowned and said or was it the other way around now it's a nice little illustration of how even the most brilliantly original idea can become dull and smooth through repetition but just for a second pause and ponder the brilliance of that original insight status to contract for ten thousand years since we first discovered that if you put seeds in the ground crops would grow in the same place all human relations had been mediated by birth caste and tradition the essence of the Enlightenment the essence of the modern world the root of all the things that we take for granted that make our lives prosperous and comfortable and reasonable is the notion that each of us is free to enter into one of contracts with other people as autonomous individuals already like Baldwin we find that idea so obvious because we've we've been habituated to it it no longer seems radical is a very difficult thing to grasp quite what a huge break it was from the history of post agrarian humanity but perhaps what's happening now is simply that we're reverting to the norm perhaps the three hundred years of wealthy and liberal enlightenment was the exception because I can't help noticing as I observe our current discourse that we have revived this idea that what we're allowed to say and what we're allowed to do should be determined by random external characteristics that we're born with let me here's a list of news stories as I plucked at random before I left the UK Jamie Oliver was in trouble for producing something called but Jamaican Jerk barbecue is apparently it is improper for anyone who isn't a Jamaican to produce cuisine that is Jamaican inspire me to be fair I'm quite in favor of destroying Jamie Oliver on grounds of his repeated sins against the Curia nary tradition of all countries but it does seem unusual to single out this Jamaican right rather than his for example abominable attempt at paella or you know it is of course the essence of of cuisine that you're constantly cross fertilizing an actor called Jack Whitehall very funny stand-up comic was in trouble for accepting the part of a gay character in a Disney production despite not being gay I'm bound to think what but he's an actor you know the essence of being an actor is that you're pretending to be someone else they all eat with the possible exception of Michael Caine they all do that right it's it's it's the it's in the job description there were two stories side by side and this is where you realize that we've cast off whatever ropes attached to us to to reality two stories side-by-side is it on the one hand there was a terrible row because a woman who was going to sing the part of Maria in West Side Story was not Latin American not a fellow Latin American I should say having been born and brought up in limo a reminder that we are a heterogeneous bunch we Hispanics and at the same time there was this sort of witch-hunt for people who did not uncomplicated lis celebrate the news that the next James Bond might be Idris Elba now one or the other right I mean either it's important for people to play a part that is defined by their physiognomy or it isn't but you can't simultaneously or at least you shouldn't simultaneously demand both it becomes very difficult to keep up with what the next offensive thing is going to be when the rules are constantly being changed now for what it's worth I think it is resolved it would be a brilliant James Bond James Bond has now become an iconic figure he may have been you know Scottish and and Swiss in the books but long ago he cast off whatever literary roots and just became a figure of contemporary British why he stays the same age as the technology advances and the cars get better in the m's and queues come and go he has been acted on stage by English actors by Irish actors by Scottish actors and by one Australian we can discuss whether a plank of wood would have done a better job than the Australian did but nonetheless I think we've established that this is a figure that transcends nationality but what I'm saying is it's very difficult to have it both ways and yet people do there was a wonderful example of how Saturn devours her children how the revolution ends up gobbling them all up when the the nation which is that the main sort of lefty paper in in the US at this huge route because it published I thought a perfectly sensitive and well-written poem that was written from the point of view of a homeless black woman and it was written in black American vernacular apparently very authentically according to experts in that subject but it then turned out that the author was not black or female and this led not only from him but from all of the editors to the kind of self accusatory show trial statements that we would have associated with Stalin's Russia or Mao's China and you've got to wonder how on earth can you keep up if somebody is determined to take offense they will manage to take offense there's no defense now in saying but that's inconsistent with what you were saying five minutes ago because everything is defined by the feeling of the recipient their feelings Trump your facts and in that situation it is literally impossible to avoid giving offense so for example you are simultaneously told by exactly the same people that gender is a social construct that is all imagined that none of it is innate and yet with the next breath that it is an absolute right of every human being to change their gender in law and have that recognized oh it doesn't but not both at the same time we're told that race is a construct that we're all the same under the skin and yet at the same time we're told that everything from who plays James want to University Admissions should be determined by these physical characteristics just to demonstrate how bizarre and arbitrary that is if you were example of when it started what's now called affirmative action in the United States in other words discrimination in university entrance on the basis of membership of an ethnic group which is deemed to be under represented that was something that was practiced by almost every fascist government in continental Europe between the wars the underrepresented group according to these fascist governments was of course the non-jewish population their argument was there are too many Jews at universities we need to level this the scales and of course by too many they meant as a proportion of the overall population they didn't mean as a proportion of the educated population or the urban population or indeed the number of people applying right very comfortable now let me suggest that the sorts of people who are now demanding racial quotas in university would be horrified to be told that it was exactly the same policy as was being pursued by fascist regimes in interwar Europe and yet it is an identical policy it's simply that the labels have changed and if you think I'm do you think I'm laying that on a bit too thick if you think I'm going too far with this analogy consider this in one of the states of Brazil where there was an official government sanctioned affirmative action program it turned out that people were turning up on the basis that it was a number of reserved places for black students people were turning up who didn't look black enough because I had a black grandmother or whatever so guidelines were laid down I'm not making this up saying the applicants need to be phenotypic ly black and there were people measuring their noses and the extent to which their hair curled now I hope all of you will find that a repulsive idea and yet it's different only in degree from what happens throughout the West either as John said either you judge people by the content of their character or you decide that something else has primacy and for me the essence of civilization is precisely that you give everyone a chance to function as an individual that we judge people by whether they're kind courteous intelligent entrepreneurial industrious we don't define them by accident of physiognomy the essence of of individualism is that we reject collective identity now again people can on one level almost everyone would agree that to define people wholly by membership of a group or primarily by membership of a group is unfair and a denial of their rights right when when a state engages in collective punishment of another population we all recoil but we have to extend our logic if collective punishment is objectionable collective entitlement it's surely equally objectionable inescapably and on precisely the same ground this bizarre malady of our age this sickness that has stolen over us is per tick advanced on campus the reason that Sydney University seems to have problems with something calling itself Western civilization is because it really does have a problem with Western civilization if by Western civilization we mean diversity variety floral ISM and the elevation of the individual over the collective now you might say you know academics and students have always been left is true something new has crept in very recently which is this determination to internalize everything to make everything about you and how you feel to give you an example I was at Oriel College Oxford this was the college which had the statue of Rhodes of Cecil Rhodes which attracted such furious protests two years ago now I can imagine a group of angry students protesting against the diamond magnate in the 60s or the 70s or the 80s and that protest would have been in those days essentially a a bullying kind of process it would have been an assertion of what they regard as a better ideology we will not allow a symbol of Western colonialism to stand because ours is the new age and we get to set the rules as an aside I think you will struggle to find anyone in Africa at the time of Rhodes of any color who was closer to modern sensibilities than he was this is the guy who campaigned strongly to enfranchise natal or rather campaigned against the attempt to disfranchise natives in Cape Colony he was a guy who funded the newspaper reports now the ANC he was a liberal in the Victorian time literally a member of the Liberal Party a big donor to it leave that aside the new thing was that people were choosing to be hurt rather than simply to assert their values the that that there was a unique and unprecedented tone of injury that had crept in to the discourse I suffer pain every time I have to walk past the statue we heard over and over again by the way I say statue it's it's a sort of two foot tall guano encrusted mannequin set up in a niche do you really have to Crane your neck to see the thing that you're determined to be offended by but this is a very recent and sudden phenomenon before the the year 2015 I don't think anyone had heard the term microaggression or the term cultural appropriation or that safe space or the term trigger warning the sudden fragility of our universities is a new and alarming phenomenon what is it it's got to the point where again it's just just if I stick with Oxford law undergraduates are now given a trigger warning before they are allowed to read about violent cases that might upset them would you would you hire a lawyer who had that background how did this happen so quickly well there's a there's a fascinating book that came out about six weeks ago by Jonathan hight and Greg lekanoff called the coddling of the American mind which assesses where it came from Jonathan hight is a behavioral psychologist very very brilliant man and he goes beyond he doesn't just do the easy book about what a bunch of wimps and snowflakes he looks at changes in child-rearing from the 90s that led to a more fragile generation and though wonder anyone here with kids all his grandchildren the one thing that he says at the end is we need to give our children time when they are unscheduled and unsupervised the thing that they're not getting anymore and which is leaving them very badly prepared is an afternoon that they have to fill themselves without any adult involvement they have to set the rules of the game they have to decide who's in what team they have to work out what happens if they fall over and gash their knee all of us took that for granted but if you rapped those children in bubble wrap literally in the sense that playgrounds have now been made safe and so on if from the moment they go to school they are taught in anti-bullying classes that anything that somebody says that is hurtful should be regarded as a kind of abuse then when they get to university they are of course not able to understand that a difficult opinion or a disagreeable person is not a form of violence against them this has become ubiquitous I I have a my my youngest child is two I was looking at some looking around some schools a few weeks ago and almost all of them now on their wall have a statement of anti-bullying aims I think this is a global phenomenon and they all define it as any kind of behavior or action that somebody finds hurtful well I mean you know I might find eating a turkey sandwich hurtful I mean and yet this is this is what it's all about it this is as as francis fukuyama says the modern form of identity politics prioritizes the internal and subjective feeling over empiricism over whether something actually happened ideas in other words certain ideas are sacralized are lifted out of the realm of free inquiry and are made in vulnerable to criticism now again this is a pre-modern idea for a long time humanity operated on the basis that all truth was contained somewhere usually in a sacred book not necessarily I mean the Marxists treated the tomes of their founders every bit as literally as a fundamentalist religious person in an earlier age but what there wasn't was any allowance of the idea that because we were ignorant because our knowledge was limited the best thing we could do was to allow other ideas to flourish and then see if somebody knew something that we didn't that's not a an idea that comes naturally it characterized particularly in Britain and the West the last couple of centuries but it's not an innate sense any in sacrificing certain ideas now ideas to do with race gender and so on rather religious ideas the authorities behave very like the old religious authorities because they don't really believe any of this stuff when somebody says Western civilization is racist oppressive and so on they don't actually mean that you would have been better off as a poor person an ethnic minority a gay person in an alternative civilization they're not actually standing there saying ie no it would have been better down the years to being poor or gay or a minority in Persia or Abyssinia or Russia or Japan they're making a statement that may not be questioned but that they don't actually have to sustain so I was saying to Sarah Switzer just over dinner when that when the Galileo trial happened the position of the church was fascinating they they didn't say all of this is untrue and you're not allowed to believe it they said it's perfectly okay to act as if the Sun was orbited by the planets and as if the solar system were heliocentric for the purposes of navigation and geography so you're allowed as long as you don't assert that this is true from a source that is non biblical and that I would say is an almost exact description of where our campus sensors are on issues of identity politics now this talk is about the West and Western civilization and I wanted to stress in a sense why Sydney University is right to find the Western idea objectionable from their point of view let me do it by way of a little thought experiment suppose that you had been a visitor from another planet orbiting the Earth 500 years ago looking out from your flying saucer at the fragile blue globe whom would you have put your money on to be the dominant civilization of the next 500 years put it to you that your eye would have been drawn to the mighty civilizations of Asia a Ming and mogul and Ottoman empires with their extraordinary technological superiority over the West with ocean going ships at gunpowder they're paper money they're cartography they're astronomy they're canals perhaps your I would have drifted over to the broken scattered tribes at the western tip of the Eurasian landmass you would have had no doubt that China was going to sail around the Horn of Africa and discover Portugal rather than the other way around why didn't that happen I don't want to oversimplify part of it was that Europe never became a centralized state it remained a diverse plurality a competing system of varying states that were able to pilot new ideas trial new schemes copy what worked best abroad the thesis actually due to a very brilliant Australian historian called al Jones who wrote this wonderful book the European miracle where he exactly described that the essence of European civilization was not becoming a super state but I don't need to make that speech anymore because we won the referendum two years ago and what the EU now does going down the road to the Ming mogul Ottoman harmonization is its problem I'm glad to say rather than mine but the other reason that the West ultimately came to dominate the last half millennia was because it prioritized the notion of science and empiricism here was a civilization that said we don't know everything a guy that I don't like may nonetheless have something useful to say it's better for him to say it and then to measure the truth of his assertion by some objective yardstick that idea may seem obvious to us right that's because we're products of a system that is inculcated in us that idea since we first went to school it's not one that comes naturally right why was this country settled from the the West rather than from any other geographically closer civilization again your your alien peering out of that porthole would not have put money on Australia being colonized by was as far as you could get from it and still be on dry land well actually the story of how it came how Australia came to be discovered very neatly illustrates the supremacy of of science and the supremacy of empiricism in Western thought 1769 was a year of the transit of Venus and in Britain people thought this is a great opportunity to true use triangulation to try and work out how distant the earth is from the Sun it was knowledge for its own sake but it was the product of a civilization that valued free inquiry so they sent people out to the most remote bits of the world to try and get distant measures to do the trigonometry and on the way of course James Cook discovered this rather significant landmass Australia is in other words literally a product of free inquiry and the scientific mind a settlement and story of this land could otherwise have been very different but as I say it's unnatural that idea of science and empiricism began only recently and has spread only slowly the idea of free speech and free inquiry that we we owe to Mill interlocked and ultimately to John Milton is one that has been largely confined to the language in which you're listening to these words you read you what John Milton said or what he wrote in 1644 again this sounds unremarkable now but was utterly mind-blowing at the time he said though all the winds of doctrine will let loose to play upon the earth so truth be in the field we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to doubt her strength let her and falsehood grapple whoever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter be the grumpy old Puritan poet was saying something absolutely extraordinary and unprecedented he was saying the truth is not something that's that permanently there that we just need to kind of feel our way towards by the authority of princes or prelate sore Pope's but rather let have a free market of ideas let the good ideas and the bad ones bounce off each other and out of the den out of the cacophony the truth will emerge that is as neat a summary of the scientific method as you could ask and it is absolutely at odds with everything that our kids are now being encouraged to believe where we've reverted to the idea of truth being defined by circumstance let me leave you with a disquieting thought all of these ideas all of these ideas have we traced back to Milton our ideas that you need to teach nobody is born understanding the value of experimentation we we have minds that were designed for the savannahs of Pleistocene Africa we weren't built for this world of skyscrapers and we operate according to older heuristics older rules of thumb and shortcuts and one of those is in fact may be the ultimate heuristic my tribe could your tribe ad it is innate in the exact sense you've seen our genome to judge an idea primarily by whether we like the person saying it rather than by the intrinsic merits of the idea 300 years of Western civilization have brought us to the point where we can teach ourselves instead to assess it objectively but look at what's happening now in higher education instead of being counter cyclical instead of teaching people to overcome their biases we're teaching our kids in a way that is procyclical we're teaching them that what they say is defined by who they are and by their place in an imagined hierarchy of privilege and oppression we are in other words teaching people to undo the mode of thinking that makes possible pluralism democracy and an open society and let me now vindicate all the people who say that Western advocates of Western civilization of being triumphalist do you know what is a better system it's a better system that has raised our species to a pinnacle of wealth and happiness that was previously unimaginable I am glad that this country was colonized by people who had an idea of individual freedom and parliamentary rule and limited government and an open society consider what some of the alternatives were at the time there are few places that have played a happier role in the affairs of mankind than Australia three times in the last century systems that elevated the individual over the collective contended against systems that did the reverse two world wars and the cold war three times systems that elevated the rules above the rulers contended against systems that did the opposite how many countries were on the right side in all three conflicts it's not a very long list but Britain Australia and the other great english-speaking democracies on it this shouldn't need saying but the mentality of the people who want to reject the study of Western civilization in the university in this city is the same as the mentality of the people who is saying that we should tear down the statues of James Cook and of governor Macquarie and what are they really saying when they want to pull down those statues what is it that we remember cook in Macquarie for what they're really saying is the world would have been a better place if Anglophone Australia had not come into existence at all where else would you rather have lived where else would you rather have been poor where else would you rather have been disadvantaged where else would you rather have been in a minority where else have freedom and human happiness been so securely guarded as in our societies when he was explaining why Australia entered the Second World War Robert Menzies came out with a lovely description of what we was what we were fighting for he said we're fighting for good humour fair play and the right of every individual to seek self-fulfillment in his own way pretty good summary of the values that underpinned Western civilization in general and I have to say english-speaking civilization input you know maybe when we call it Western civilization we're being polite in order to be inclusive imagine that the Second World War had ended differently imagine that the Cold War had ended differently I suspect that these values would have been in a far weaker place on our planet those values were distilled here and reached a unique potency a nice line that Tocqueville used writing about you the settlement of North America where he said the American is the Englishman left to himself well I think that line applies with extra force to this continent people came here if you like with the toolkit of parliamentary democracy and personal freedom and private property but found that they were given free rein in a new world to devise their own structures and they've done so in a way that has created a wealthier and freer society than any other in the region and if you doubt that ask yourselves why the in queue is so much longer than the out queue if Western civilization in general and Australian civilization in particular are these evil oppressive and racist concepts why is it that people are prepared to risk so much to have the chance to begin from the bottom of the heap yeah it's a remarkable record and it's a record and it's one that you should be serious about inculcating in the next generation not only in universities but in every school the duty of organizations like this is to remind Australians that they are not just a random set of individuals born to a different random set of individuals that wherever their parents or grandparents were born they are now inheritors of a unique patrimony that you have the duty to keep intact the freedoms that you were privileged enough to inherit from your parents and pass them on securely to the next generation never be afraid to speak to and for the soul of great country of which by good fortune and God's grace you are privileged to be part hard act to follow indeed Oh Dan thank you so much and on behalf of all my Center for independent studies colleagues and our board we are absolutely delighted and honored that you have come all the way here to be here tonight I also want to take this opportunity briefly to thank the Menzies Research Center at the executive director Nick kada and the Chairman Paul SP for helping make tonight happen i i'm actually the same age is dan we're born a few days apart in 1971 and i am a huge den fan and fan I've been reading dan I've been listening reading his articles in the London Spectator and the London Telegraph for the best part of two decades and so I'm a huge fan of Dan's so much so that when I was a guest at one of those European Union Visitors programs in Brussels I actually told them that I really want to meet this European parliamentarians name down Henan and the french-speaking diplomats said Monceau switch so you can meet anyone you want in Strasbourg or Brussels but monster Hannon is not one of us to which I replied we'll come on I'm one of you either so Dan thank you so much that's great now listen Nakata and I will subject our guest to some scrutiny we're sick of fans here Dan even though we probably agree with virtually everything you said you mentioned John Stuart Mill one of our heroes at sea is is the the great british 19th century liberal and John Stuart Mill was famous for many great quotes including he who knows only his own argument knows little of that so bearing that in mind only when you know the strengths of your opponent's arguments do you realize your own witnesses so with that in mind let me ask you something here you talk about identity politics and you catch it in terms of individual freedom free speech but for many others they will see your position as the erosion of hard-fought anti-discrimination laws protecting women and gays the disabled Indigenous Australians among others hadn't respond to those concerns I think John put it very well in the introduction right the liberal ideal was always certain in in John Stuart Mill's time and up until very recently was that we should all be treated the same and at some point in the last 30 years the broad mass of the left instead of campaigning for everyone to be treated the same started campaigning for ever to be treated differently for people to be given either social or education or or indeed legal privileges to be treated differently under the law on the basis of belonging to some imagined victim group and I think where they're coming from when you say you understand the other side's argument is they're not really interested in equality let alone freedom for individuals they they see the world as a pyramid of power and everything is defined by where you are in that hierarchy so I quite recently I was in in the in California in in a small town where they'd recreated or restored a kind of Spanish mission and all of the wall text was written in terms of kind of implied racial and cultural subjugation and the fascinating thing was the first part was all about the the poor indigenous people being oppressed by these evil wicked spaniards and then suddenly when the english-speaking people arrived on the scene the Spanish went from being the oppressors to being the victims I mean it you know they would have presumably been the same people but from one day to the next their position was defined by something else now that seems to me the most objectionable and illiberal idea okay but in the local contemporary context we in Australia have had a big debate over the last few years about whether the government should change or amend the Racial Discrimination Act which presently outlaws some speech that may offend insult humiliate or intimidate let me ask you a question that many of my ABC colleagues is my other job believe it or not at the ABCs Radio National they will also often ask and it's a good one how do you best protect a person who has because of their color of their skin has been refused a job a room in a hotel or a service in a pub well the first point is I think we're all agreed that incitement which is an old common law offense will remain an offence and it is important to distinguish between an opinion and a call to violence and and this is something which on a common-sense level everyone understands right if you say there are too many archana lenders in Nonya that is an opinion it's only when you say right let's go and throw a few of them into winding arrow river that you have crossed the line into incitement now is let's stand back for a second and not see everything through the prism of imagined hierarchy and just ask the question in general when is it alright to refuse service to someone you know is it ever alright is it okay in some so I mean I have thought a fairly mainstream position on this would be that if it's a utility it's not alright so you couldn't turn away a customer if you are a train or a you know electricity grid but if you are a shopkeeper and you don't want to serve your ex-husband if you are a hotel you and you don't want children you know if you're a rest returned you you don't want pets or whatever shouldn't that the basic liberal presumption be that you are entitled to do what you want with your own property and it is a peculiar pathology of our age that all of you as I was saying that we're thinking about racial discrimination rather than just asking the question from first principles is it okay on the basis of free contract and free association to do what you want with your own property because if you're saying which i think is is now the 34 position yes it is okay but what about if it's the racial okay well then you know what you're back to treating people differently wholly on the basis of ethnicity because you're saying it's okay to turn someone away from your hotel because you don't like or you know because you've heard bad thing but it's not okay the moment that that is because he's gay or whatever well then then you're saying he should be placed in a separate legal category and I'm sorry to be kind of mewl --is-- about this point but once you do that you're tearing up the whole basis of an open system okay how do you distinguish between your pushback against identity politics which is you know I think most people in this room would fully agree but how do you distinguish that from what we've seen in many parts of Europe this rise of a reactionary frankly bigoted groups on the far right who try to shut down debate from their perspective this nativism that has been driven in part by the rise of identity policy how do we distinguish that I mean jeaious mill would have said you you defeat a bad idea with a better idea right and I can't think of many better ideas than Western liberalism you you have these authoritarian reactions when there is a problem with something and that problem may be an economic downturn or it may be an identity politics issue but let me let me gently suggest that if you spend 30 years making everything about racial or sexual law or other forms of innate identity it's pretty difficult for you then to turn around and say well we don't want white people doing this you would be much better off not to allowed anyone to do it and just to have gone down the road of saying we're all the same small thing but I was reading an article it's like this morning or yesterday in the Australian about the a guy who would very much meet that description the new president of Brazil also know who is a just got elected last well in all Thorat aryan right-wing populists right and and there was an article in The Australian about why did he get elected and and without any self-awareness and this was a news piece not in a opinion column the journalist said he has this long record of being racist and sexist in fact he said only yesterday we should treat everyone the same we're all Brazilians and we shouldn't look at skin colour and in it that to me was that the left in one sentence that they've morphed from from what would have always been the radical or liberal ideal that treat everyone the same so now think that it is racist to say that you mention the side Nikki guy yep you correctly identified I think this this pathology that we see in our community and and you know I think it's telling what you say that this is very recent right it's just come accelerated very recently but I think well we're some lot of us are still grappling with this is why why now why at this point is it is it the growth in higher education is it this as David good heart talks about somewhere anywhere you know people who just don't on no longer able to identify themselves by physical community or a country or is it the rise of social media I think it's partly the rise of social media but what is very striking I mentioned Jonathan height that was written this book about the the phenomenon and I I saw him recently in New York and and interviewed him about his his thesis and I said he is it is it a global phenomenon and he said no it's an Anglo sphere phenomena he unselfconsciously used that word Tony Abbot always used to say my advisers keep telling me I'm not allowed to use that word but he said it's an Anglo sphere phenomena and it began in in the US and then it spread to Canada Australia in the UK and I said that's really interesting why and he said well partly because the Anglo sphere is a cultural continuum and ideas spread in the same language he said you know the fact that this started in America is enough to make the French not do it you know but if it also because and I thought this was really absurd all higher education Institute's or at least all elite ones in in english-speaking democracies ultimately modelled on Oxford and Cambridge and is these elite institutions that are the most subject to this this illness he said you don't get it at Technical College's and you don't get it at non-residential places because you cannot sustain this bizarre set of attitudes if you're still living at home and have to put up with the amused reaction of your parents or if your we're King and have to explain it to your colleagues you have to be lifted out of society and subjected to it so I think a lot to be honest a lot of the short term arts I mean I was very very interested and and have actually personally made some changes in a in how I'm you know how much time I'm turning my two-year-old out of doors and letting him forage you know but but but in the short term until until enough of us start start bringing up free-range children and and and they become the new University cohort the one thing that I think if he's right that this is a product of isolated students in living on campus a lot of the responsibility lies with the presidents of the universities they they need to make clear that there are some things that are unacceptable and they will have you excluded and if they've been taking that line earlier over the last three years I don't think we'd have got to the place where you have meetings being smashed up and speakers being threatened and sticking with identity politics still you made at the point in your remarks that these activists who are tearing down statues whether it be roads or Captain Cook they fail to put you know events in their proper historical context it's a point that John Howard the former prime minister made all eloquently at sea is only a few months ago but what about the Charlottesville drama in the summer of last year when President Trump appeared to make some sort of a moral equivalence between the left-wing protesters and some of those KKK people who wanted to defend the statues the left wingers would say well those statues were inappropriate because they were built that these are statues of Confederate generals that were built after the Civil War well into the late 1890s as a way of intimidating African Americans would you make an exception for those kind of statues I mean of course people are free to tear down statues you know when when Saddam fell in Iraq people were you know his his vast and trunkless legs of stone were left standing in every desert right people people can pull down statues for lots of reasons that they think of all the the Lennon's that are now piled up in warehouses around Eastern Europe so if the Paul have fallen out of fashion or if there's been demographic change in a town or if people now realize that a statue was built for threatening or intimidating reasons I you know I've never been particularly a fan of Confederate statue I wasn't a fan of the Confederate cause and I'm not a fan of I've never you know they're not a fan of their battle flag nor fight but but was Donald Trump on firm ground drawing an equivalence between the anti-fur and the far right yes I think he was I think he was if you look at the way at the motives and the behavior of the anti-fur movement the things that we find objectionable about fascists are generally also attributes that we can identify in anti-fur why do we why do we know I mean I can't speak for every single one of you in this room we all have our own reasons I reckon they if you were to draw up a list of why we didn't like the Nazis on almost every list would be they hated democracy they categorize people by group rather than as individuals they didn't want free speech they exalted in violence they didn't fundamentally believe in the institutions of a parliamentary society every one of those things applies to the people who are calling themselves anti-fascists they've become an exact mirror of the thing that they say that they're against down to their black shirts down to their Bern Israel placards down to the the street protests that they organized so here is a Remora yes that absolutely is if it was only a few fruitcakes at university I think it would be a whole lot less concerning but it seems to me it's seeped out into the major corporations I mean I was in a major accountancy firm in this city the other day where they have all these protective rules and in the staff canteen there's a little room where you can go and play with Lego that's what they do to unwind did you apply for job in this wonderful place it was great well I immediately its investigator gave Lego installed in house lights but but you know I mean once against that level once once we get on with this corporate social responsibility social license sort of yargh we've lost it Emily yes and we should never we particularly you guys who run free market think tanks should never miss an opportunity to remind people of that that we are pro market we're not pro business and pro market will often mean being I mean sometimes it would be the same as being pro business but often it will mean being anti corporate and particularly against the interests of of the big companies that have learned how to game the system so never miss an opportunity to remind business people that if they want to give money that is fantastic but it should be their money rather than money that they steal from shareholders in order to make themselves feel good about something by giving somebody else's money away right the the proper duty of a company board is to maximize profitability and then encourage everyone to be as generous as they can with their own money so it actually means something then next Wednesday lunch hour time we have the u.s. midterm elections what's your sense of Donald Trump's presidency two years in the White House I mean I'm not I I this will set me on the opposite side of a lot of people in this room but I'm not a trump supporter I think he has character flaws that degrade the office and I'm distressed by how many American conservatives have gone through somersaults in order to deny what's in front of their eyes if you could have gone back in a time machine two years and said to two Republicans two years from now you're gonna be saying that it was okay to pay off a pornstar and then lie about it provided that there was no technical violation of campaign finance law they double thought you were mad and yet look at by little and little how they've come to that point it is the most extraordinary thing you know fiscal conservatives who are now cheering a guy who has doubled the deficit and will put the debt up soon to over 20 trillion dollars right where is the Tea Party now now the recession Neda at least Obama had the I mean has a fairly crappy Keynesian excuse but it's he had the excuse he was a pump priming during a downturn what excuses Trump got to be spraying all this money around during a growth and and and indebting the country further where are the the religious conservatives when it were with his not only his fornication but his whole asset is inability to get through the day without fitting where the foreign-policy hawks when he sucks up to Vladimir Putin and we're above all are the character conservatives where are the Strauss e'en decent conservatives who believed in Western civilization who believes that courtesy and civility and restraint mattered in politics and who are now cheering the most boorish foul-mouthed appalling lack of self control simply because they didn't like the other party would you know what the other party isn't the alternative no yes but our conservative friends in America Dan will say those who support Trump will say look at what he does not what he said yes and they'll look at the tax cut policy deregulation that has helped Larry point seven percent unemployment the lowest unemployment rate since 1969 the average annual economic growth is about three point five percent sure it was one point six percent under Obama he's made some good conservatives how would you respond to the I mean of course you know that the extraordinary thing is how few are the people who are prepared to show any even-handedness about this so if you take what would strike me as a fairly unconventional statement like it's great that Donald Trump Donald Trump has cut taxes although it's a pity that he repeatedly lied about releasing his own tax return or it's fantastically he bagged brexit but it's such a pity that he thinks it's okay to insult the family of a deceased American servicemen my point is not that those particular I mean I happen to think those are true statements but whether you think they're true or not you never hear them because everything is now so polarized that you're either with him or and and what I find first of all I say the people who say you know it's only words and look at his actions you know I think when when the commander-in-chief is calling on officials to pursue partisan investigations that isn't just words you know when the commander-in-chief is inciting people to thump his opponents that isn't just words that those are when you say those things in office they they in my book count as actions and to come back as American conservatives to it and so what about Hillary I mean frankly I'm not sure that was ever a particularly good counter-argument because if somebody is unfit for office then somebody else is on fitness for office is irrelevant right but even if you think that that was a valid argument how is it a valid argument now I mean unless I've totally misunderstood how the US Constitution works Hillary is not the alternative now the alternative now is Mike Pence who by any definition from a conservative perspective is better he's a human being and and he's and and he's a proper conservative he isn't somebody who came late and malevolently to the Republican Party understand it as a very polite and decent guy who doesn't you know you don't send inappropriate tweet so you know you've got a lovely family and you know but you you might object to his style but surely as a brexit ear you're taking some pleasure in the way he's giving the progressive establishment of bloody nose but I'm I'm I mean you're loved picked up Nick from what I said that the tribalism is a very easy thing to slip into it is our default setting it's our Stone Age mind taking over and this kind of you know bathing in the tears of your enemy thing is we've had to educate ourselves not to do that now we all spot when the other side is playing this game we all spot when they are overlooking grotesque moral failings because it happens to be someone from their tribe if we are not capable of holding ourselves to a higher standard then I think we are bad conservatives as well as being bad philosophers you know it ought to be possible to say yes I agree with the fact that Donald Trump is deregulated cut taxes you know taken a strong position on North Korea whatever but that doesn't mean that I overlooked his faults and if you once you sell that pass once you say that it's it's okay you know to have somebody who behaves this way in and fibs and and confuses his private interests with public office and all the rest of it on what grounds are you going to complain about someone that you disagree with doing the same thing I mean what what I say to my American conservative friends regularly now what would a future Democrat president do that you would now be in a good position to criticize having remained silent when Trump did the same yeah I think it's an interesting point because throughout the 80s and the 90s in the 2000s our views were pretty much the orthodoxy in senator IgE politics you know Dan Nick and I the CIS we broadly supported free markets free trade small government Trump has repudiated a lot of that hasn't he oh yes but to be fair to Trump politically speaking hasn't he resonated with a lot of people who have been displaced by not just globalization of a technological well we'll find out next week but no I don't think he has um I remember that Trump got fewer votes than Mitt Romney he got fewer votes than John McCain and come to that he got fewer votes than Hillary Clinton III don't believe that Trump is a big electoral asset to the Republican Party and that the clearest proof of that is to compare his totals at the you know when he when he was up for election two years ago with the totals of the congressional and gubernatorial candidates who were standing in the same states on the same day and with a couple of exceptions they almost all out pulled him so I I've never really bought this idea that you know yes he may have reached some people who were previously not being reached but he's turned off at least as many and I think many more plus this idea of the losers from globalization I'm afraid I just don't really buy the idea Trump is how's a classic double think on this himself he says it's terrible our jobs are all going overseas and so on and then in the next suite he says unemployment as it hasn't been lower since the 1950s well one or the other mr. right and actually it's the second one that's true yes some cheap jobs have been outsourced and many more many more high skilled high paid jobs have been created in their place as America has moved up the production chain by outsourcing the kind of cheapest end of its domestic production and that is a win-win situation it's good for the other countries it's good for the US I mean it's this wouldn't have needed saying until very recently the free trade works to the benefit of of both participants when people say and you get this a lot and as well there's a sort of fashionable view among economists now that rise in global living standards has been uneven the working classes in the West have been left behind they haven't seen any improvement in their quality of life for 20 years oh come on I mean a cut you know Tom's the same age as me to it within a couple of days as he just told me right we can remember what life was like in 1998 I mean yes of course the entry of hundreds of millions of new workers from ex communist countries into the global workforce has reduced the value of labour relative to capital but look at the improvements in living standards for everybody I mean in 1998 we had no cheap flights in the UK easyJet was operating one route we had no incredible we had no Starbucks there was a surprise Assessor called Seattle coffee we had the right we had we had four four channels on TV and an occasional Blockbuster Video obviously the wiki there was no you know Wi-Fi though I mean I would love to send those economists in a time machine about 20 years and then get them to go tack to spend one week living in 1998 and then come back and tell us that nothing has got better you know that there has been an immense improvement in living standards including in wealthy countries a wage stagnation for those lower middle-class working-class folks in America who didn't vote Democrat for the first time and they lost they voted for Trump no sure because there is always a market for nativism and protectionism in any electorate there will be here there is in Britain but the the idea that if their wages have stagnated the idea that their living standards have stagnated is just not sustainable the trouble is that the wages are easy for economists to measure whereas something like a better cup of coffee you can't measure right but without any doubt coffee in the u.s. tastes better than it did 20 years ago in fact almost everything has got you know the TV programs are better the you know the the transport is better the education is better the people are incredibly glum by nature and and nostalgic and you will always be able to win votes as Trump does by saying life used to be better because our minds are kind of I mean I even in in Eastern Europe in former communist countries you have people saying that and and I say to conservative politicians from those how can anyone think that life was better in euros else kiss Poland and of course the answer is they don't really miss euros else key right they don't miss the police state and the poverty and the shortages they miss being seventeen again and who doesn't you know they they remember the the intensity of their first adolescent I remember the bright primary colors that we live in and of course that but you know so nostalgia is always a a potent electoral force but if you measure it rationally and if you if you quantify how people if there is just no question it's just a quick one though just to invert that Harold Macmillan we've never had it so good that didn't really help him Malcolm Turnbull remembering the lead-up to the 2016 elections and has never been a better time to be in Australian so that doesn't help politically no even though it was unquestionably true absolutely you know there has the the the the Australia has been growing faster than since the gold rush I mean you know and by the way I'd make this point generally to all of you because I know a conservative gatherings but a world over people that gloomy about their own country and how socialist the government is now and nothing works and so on I promise you my friends most of the world would swap their problems for yours right Australia has had you know 27 years of growth at the the this is this is a country that people would would gladly come to and live in but of course it's it's so easy to focus on the few things that are going wrong and and to get angry about them because that's how we're programmed you know we we evolved in dangerous place to seem savannahs where pessimism was a a good rule of thumb and a handy survival tool but that's not the world we're living in now I know you you are a good fan a great fan of Tony Abbott's and which has become somewhat unfashionable in this country I come myself in that in that spirit in a small bill according club look I wonder one of the things we were with John Roskam you state the IPA and the IPA I have made a big deal I've rating see crucially important as Thomas raised this evening freedom of speech and Tony Abbott was seem to have failed on that in not breaking the rules but I wonder whether he actually achieved a lot more with a much more important freedom and that is freedom of exchange freedom of trade I mean he made big steps forward in that would you agree that that in the end freedom of trade and freedom of a free economy yes if you have that you haven't got anything if you had to pick one or the other there is no question that Tony Abbott made the more important call so of course I I don't want any restrictions on free speech so you just heard that but if you look at Tony Abbott's legacy the free trade agreements with China with Japan with South Korea and as important the the completion of the economic reforms here the the ending of subsidies the ending of trade union driven special bleeding and special privilege in other words the elevation of the the far more numerous consumers over the politically connected producers that was an extraordinary achievement and if you had to choose between someone who delivered that and someone who delivered free speech I wouldn't hesitate for a moment Briggs it former Prime Minister Tony Blair and former conservative Prime Minister John Major are among others calling for a second referendum on Briggs it is that really conceivable I suppose it has to be conceivable that it is an extraordinary situation if you think about it because what they're all saying is we need another referendum when by definition they are people who don't accept the result of referendums otherwise they wouldn't be there in this absolutely amazing position of saying well yeah but this time we really promised to accept the result we know we said that before this time we're really well I mean unless it goes leave again you but then then we really would after that you know I mean what how far are we gonna take this make it best of five what we could do is make it like the test to make it a regular you know engagement I could get a book out of it each time I mean so the you know there is it is difficult to see that working because voters are fat but isn't there a great concern that Britain might pull out of Brussels without a deal with Brussels you've got the Financial Times among others saying that we've got announcements from Airbus Jaguar Land Rover Philips among other companies they say they'll scale back investments in Britain absent a deal replicating the current trade relationship with Brussels that's why there's an appetite for a new referendum right there's not really an appetite for new referendum I mean if the opinion polls are to be believed it is a quite minority it's called a yes which makes you wonder what the last one but yeah there is a there is a there is a move for a second row I think it is unlikely to succeed what I'm much more worried about is that BRICS it will happen but then so many constraints will be placed on it that we would have been better off either staying or leaving completely than ending up with the worst of all worlds where we lose our veto but still have to accept EU constraints and the one that worries me most is staying in the customs union in other words within the EU x' tariff walls it's important to understand that the EU is not a free-trade area in the way that NAFTA or a say on a free trade area it's a customs union which is something else completely it means that only Brussels gets to do trade policy on behalf of all 28 member states so if we left and and therefore lost any voice over all that trade policy should be but we're still bound by it so that the EU would carry on saying you know you're not allowed to buy a delicious Australian beef because it contains too many growth hormones and so to give you an actually example that would be a worse position than we are in now and you know I I'm not a I've never been that hard line since the results came in it was a fifty to forty eight mm result so I said look you know we're all gonna have to compromise on this that that's a narrow mandate you leave but you leave in a moderate way in a gradual way you try and and listen to what the 48% wanted you try and address as many of their concerns as possible and try and come out with a system an eventual outcome where yeah we're we're outside the you we're sovereign again we're making our own laws but we retain some of the institutional framework we had before and we carry on with an exceptionally close relationship that seems to me a fair interpretation of a very narrow result but what we can end up with is not staying close to or in parts of the single market while leaving the political institutions that would have been a fair compromise we can wind up really in the worst of all situations where you've left the single market but stayed in the customs union and that I mean no country in the world would count on us doing that giving Brussels 100% of their control of their trade with zero percent input I mean it's a completely intolerable situation yes how would you respond to the argument that if indeed Jeremy Corbyn the socialist leader of the Labour Party wins office which is entirely conceivable and Britain leaves the European Union korban and the Socialists in his cabinet would then be free to put in place the kind of socialism that Brussels even Brussels shuns aren't these the unintended consequences of what you've been championing I mean court Corbin I think probably voted leave privately although he claims not to have done but look at his expression as he came out of the polling station he opposed the Common Market in the mid eighties only exactly those credits on exactly the grounds that you just said Tom he he thinks it would prevent the achievement of socialism in one country and so yes it is theoretically possible you know breaks it on its own doesn't add a farthing to our national wealth brexit simply removes constraints it allows us to make different choices and how we make those choices will determine whether we succeed and and whether we become a kind of Singapore or whether we become a Venezuela under under Corbin or somewhere in between the two did you know what I would rather live in a democratic country where I will sometimes lose the vote then live in a country where people are not allowed to choose because they're not trusted to make the right decisions and I believe with Keith Joseph who is Margaret Thatcher's guru he used to say if you give people more responsibility they behave more responsibly and I hope the one consequence of brexit of being on our own of having to make our own decisions in a way that you or any other country would take for granted the ability to hire and fire our lawmakers will make us that much more responsible and will make us understand that we have to look to ourselves in order to prosper in the world ladies and gentlemen Nick Kayla and Dane Henin [Applause]

Channel: Centre for Independent Studies

Views: 17,914

Keywords: Centre for Independent Studies, CIS, The CIS, The Centre for Independent Studies, Dan Hannan, Identity Politics, Brexit, Europe, America, Trump, Pence, Australia, Leadership, Western Civilization, Freedom of Speech, Free Markets, cancel culture, woke

Id: NJVw6h-fx2Q

Length: 73min 48sec (4428 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 16 2018