You are doing a speech of the
Oxford Union later this month, and already the motions to
de-platform you have started coming in, I understand,
multiple Teddy Hall, the most recent.
Passed a motion against me last night. So they're lining up to protest
still, even now in 2023. Oxford is just, that's the way
it was always gonna go. This isn't a large number of students
doing this. It's a small number of students with a strong social
media presence who have seized upon this as their hero's
journey while they're at Oxford before they go on to management
consultancy or law. Most of them are they/thems, which just means
they have interesting hair. They've been desperate for some
villain to appear, absolutely desperate for some villain to
appear to legitimise all the claims of victimhood that are
coming out of them. So, you're giving them purpose. Here I am to give my rather
moderate, vanilla views, which they can present as hateful and
disgusting. What I think is not said enough
or not explored enough, is that this gender controversy that
people keep writing about and talking about isn't just a niche
policy concern, that has important implications- although
it is that- it also somehow gets that quite a fundamental way of
viewing the world that we seem to be coming to as a society. Is
that fair? Do you think that we can use this issue to sort of
understand quite important things about the way we are headed? I think we can understand the
idea that your identity is more important than anything else
about you, as a kind of distortion of a philosophical
impulse that humans probably have always had. And certainly,
since the enlightenment, the idea of the individual becoming
more and more important, feeds into this pattern. There's also,
this is well worn territory for UnHerd readers, but the idea of
freedom being the highest good in the liberal world has
produced, through Chinese whispers, a very distorted view
that you have to free yourself from everything- or at least you
could if you wanted to, and if you want to, then why not? So
including your body, including all social norms that you find
restrictive, and so on. So I think you can definitely locate
gender identity ideology in a trajectory coming from liberal
currents that started in the 17th century and probably
earlier, but also, on a broader sense, it really is about the
relationship between the mind and the world. It's just a
really weird way of looking at the relationship between the
mind and the world, that you, the mind has primacy pretty
much. It's almost solipsistic because the dominant idea seems
to be that you can force other people to see you the way you
want them to see you and in a way, you're not free because you
are dependent on other people, the way they see you, but you
are free in that you can morally shame them until they capitulate
and say, 'yes, you are a woman' or whatever. So there is some
sort of massive will to power going on here to try and control
the universe, to control nature, control other people. It's
obviously bonkers but it's not totally anachronistic, I think. Do you think of you're position
and outlook, in some ways as a defensive of reality? It feels
like on the gender issue, certainly but on some of these
other topics you've been talking about, you're sort of insisting
that there is a some sort of reality? Yes I'm convinced that there is
some sort of reality. A lot of the gender madness comes from a
bad philosophical position that everything is constructed
through language. And it makes no sense internally and it makes
no sense as a satisfying explanation of what is, but it's
looked very, very attractive to academics- not philosophers, to
be fair to philosophers. Most philosophers would not, that I
know... If they were to be social constructivist, they
would have to be very sophisticated ones that really
tried hard to address all the objections that seem obvious to
it. Whereas gender studies social constructivists are just,
they're not philosophers, but they've taken this idea that you
can construct language through words, and what a surprise, they
have all the words! And they sit writing words all day. So it
turns out that they are the masters of the universe. It's
not a surprise that they've ended up with a metaphysical
position, which ends up keeping them in nice jobs, in nice departments. So which bits of reality, should
we make a defence for? The bits that hit us in the
face, the bits that trip us up. I just think that... I'm a kind
of empiricist. I think, obviously, there's an
evolutionary story to be told about humans, which are animals.
We are animals. We keep forgetting that we're animals
but we located in the natural world and we developed and we
develop these big brains, that were pretty plastic, but they
were able to form concepts in response to bits of the world
that were already there before we arrived. Now, there's some
obvious cultural divergence over those concepts, but there's an
awful lot of overlap in those concepts, too. And then there
are some concepts that are clearly not fit for purpose, and
the people that have them tend to die out. And then there's the
concepts that people have that enable them to negotiate the
world in a relatively effective way. So those are the ones that
are probably more likely to correspond to something that
actually is in the world. And that's a kind of realist
position but it's a naive realism, I don't think... I've worked in the university
system for a long time. and the university student generally is,
you know, full of people who talk a good game about how
wonderful they are and absolute shits. I think most people would
admit that. And the more they say how wonderful they are, the
more likely it is that they are, in fact, personally speaking,
and to their students, and to their colleagues, deficient in
some way. I didn't think it would get that bad, put it that
way. I was still a bit surprised. Is it the adults, the co-faculty
people at university who you think should have done more to
protect you and then you're more forgiving towards the students
who were just young and naive and stupid? I'm forgiving most of the time
towards the students. It's always hard to keep that in mind
when this Oxford thing's coming up and I'm not feeling
particularly forgiving towards them at the moment but once it's
in my past, I will revert to my magnanimous attitude towards
them, because we were all young ones and we all did ridiculous
things. And most of them don't know what I think. They really
don't know what I think. They haven't read my book. They've
just read that I'm an awful person and, 'we don't like awful
people so we're gonna go along and tell her that she's awful.' Do you think it's particularly
now though? I'm just wondering whether we can tie it back to
this slightly ungrounded philosophical outlook that
people have. They're unhappy. I think that's
the thing, it's hard to stay very cross with them- with some
exceptions- but it's hard to stay angry with a bunch of very
anxious, neurotic, self-absorbed, teenagers and
young twenty-somethings who I think are deeply unhappy. Those
ones in particular, they're gonna say they're not. This is
the sort of thing really annoys them. They're gonna like march
around saying, 'no, we're very joyful look, look at our joy!'
There's this new thing where they have to exhibit joy at
every protest, so they have to dance really angrily, but
joyfully. And there're conga lines that are joyful but it
doesn't look very joyful to me. It really doesn't look very
joyful to me and I don't think they are, I think they're
really, really anxious. And that is no doubt a result of the
knock-on, downstream effects of technology and the university
system, which is not really fostering, or despite all the
talk that goes into it is not really fostering communities. I
was always struck by the fact that a lot of my students didn't
really know that many other students and I'd say, 'where are
your friends?' And they'd say, 'Oh, I didn't really make any'.
So they're not having these amazing experiences that an
older generation might have had, formative experiences. Not all
of them, some of them are clearly but not all of them. So
they're lonely, and they're looking for friends, and they're
looking for purpose and meaning. And that's all fine. I can
forgive them that, it's the lecturers that I really get
annoyed with. The best we can do is to stop
trying to make grand scale interventions, which we don't
know, the downstream effects of... We could just take
people's phones away, as well, in certain contexts. There's
little things we could do. Universities could push back in
little ways. They don't have to do anything big. They could just
say no laptops in this classroom, we're going to look
each other in the eye. They could just stand up for free
speech, properly stand up for free speech, and push back
against really bullying, tyrannical, narcissistic voices,
because there aren't that many of them and if everybody stood
up to them, they'd shut up. That's not a new fact about
human nature. So I'd be prepared to throw my weight behind small
initiatives, but I always get a bit Hamlet-like about big ones,
because we just don't know if we'll end up with something
worse than where we started.
