Munk Debate on Political Correctness

brilliant minds even with the ochre months operate better under stimulus Canadian history is a Canadian and you can't rock obama has systematically rebuilt the trust of the world in our willingness to work through the Security Council and other great you must not talk to anybody in the world any of our allies whatever you want to call this system a mafia state a feudal empire it's a disaster for ordinary Russians I think that's the kind of hypocritical argument that if I were Chinese that find quite annoying for historically Chinese foreign policy can be described it's been barely in management science and religion are not incompatible religion forces nice people to do unkind things all men obsolete a my conclusion to this question is no I won't let you be you show me doing pretext I quoted them saying show me that every program that you can keep screaming out and it doesn't change the point we do not want sympathy we do not want pity we want opportunities it's an appalling slander to me to the Muslim religion I never said the word Muslim in my fulminating it was a Muslim free fulmination it is that kind of restraint it is that kind of sober-minded sensible intelligent foreign policy that Obama represents so I guess what I'm telling you is he's sort of a closeted Canadians vote for him for God's sake [Applause] ladies and gentlemen welcome my name is Roger Griffith since my privilege that have the opportunity to moderate tonight's debates and to act as your organizer I want to start by welcoming the North American wide television audience tuning in right now across canada on CPAC Canada's Public Affairs Channel c-span across the continental United States and on CBC Radio ideas a warm hello also to our online audience watching this debate over 6,000 streams active at this moment on Facebook live in Bloomberg comm and Munk debates calm it's great to have you as virtual participants in tonight's proceedings and hello to you the over 3,000 people who filled Roy Thompson Hall for yet another monk debate thank you for your support for more and better debate on the big issues of the day this debate marks the start of our tenth season and we begin this season missing someone who was vital to this debate series in every aspect it was his passion for ideas his love for debate that inspired our creation in 2008 and it was his energy his generosity and his drive that was so important in allowing us to really win international acclaim as one of the world's great debating series his philanthropy its legacy wow it's incredible last fall we all remember that hundred million dollar donation to cardiac health here in Toronto transforming the lives of tens of thousands of millions of Canadians to come we are all big fans and supporters of a terrific school for global affairs on the UFT campus represented here tonight by many students who are in its master's program congratulations to you and also in a generous endowment last spring to this series that will allow us to organize many evenings like this for many more years to come now knowing our benefactor as we do the last thing he'd want is for us to mark his absence with a moment of silence that wasn't his style so let's instead celebrate a great Canadian a great life and a great legacy of the late Peter Munk Bravo Peter for the go Peter I I know he would have enjoyed that and I want to just thank Melanie Anthony Cheney for being here tonight to be part of Peters continuing positive impact on public debate in Canada thank you guys for being here tonight now knowing Peter as I did the first thing on his mind at this point in the debate would be right here stop talking get this debate underway get our debaters out here come on got to show on the road so we're gonna do that right now because we have a terrific debate lined up for you this evening so let's introduce first our pro team arguing for tonight's motion be it resolved what you call political correctness I call progress please welcome to the stage he's an award-winning writer scholar broadcaster on NPR and sports networks across America Michael Eric Dyson Michael come on out my Michael's debating partner is also award-winning author she's calmest at the New York Times and someone who is gonna bring a very distinct and powerful perspective tonight Michelle Goldberg Michelle come on out so one great team of debaters deserves another and arguing against our resolution be it resolved what you call political correctness I call progress is the Emmy award-winning actor screenwriter author playwright journalist poet and tonight's debater Stephen Fry Stephens teammates is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto a youtube sensation and the author of the big new international bestseller 12 rules for life ladies and gentlemen Toronto's Jordan Peterson okay we're gonna get our debate underway momentarily but first a quick checklist to go through we've got a hashtag tonight hash at monk debate those of you in the hall and those of you watching online please weigh in let's get your opinions going also for those of you watching online right now we have an running poll ww monk debates comm Ford / votes reflect input react to this debate as it unfolds over the next hour and a half my favorite part aspect of this show that was Peter's brilliance and creation we have our countdown clock what this does is it keeps our debaters on their toes and our debate on time so when you see these clocks on the screen go down to zero I wanted you to join me in a warm round of applause and we'll have a debate that ends when it's supposed to end now let's see we had our resolution tonight on the way in we had this audience of roughly 3,000 people here in downtown Toronto vote on be it resolved what you call political correctness I call progress let's see the agree disagree on that number 36% agree 64% disagree so a room in play now we asked you how many of you were open to changing your vote over the course of debate are you fixed agree disagree or could you potentially be convinced by one or other of these two teams to move your vote over the next hour and a half let's see those numbers now Wow okay a pretty open-minded crowd this debate is very much in play and as per the agreed-upon order of speakers I'm gonna call on Michelle Goldberg first Michelle would you like a sip of water you can have a sip of water before you start calling Michelle Goldberg first for her six minutes of opening remarks Michelle okay thank you for having me as read your nose I initially balked a little bit at the resolution that we're debating because there are a lot of things that fall under the rubric of political correctness that I don't call progress I don't like nope forming or Twitter or trigger warnings you know like a lot of middle-aged liberals there are many aspects of student social justice culture that I find off-putting although I'm not sure that that particular generation gap is anything is anything new on the record about the toxicity of social media call-out culture and I think it's good to debate people whose ideas I don't like which is why I'm here so if there are social justice warriors in the audience I feel like I should apologize to you because I'm probably not you're probably gonna feel like I'm not adequately defending your ideas but the reason I'm on this side of the stage is that political correctness isn't just a term for left-wing excesses on college campuses or people being terrible on Twitter especially is deployed by mr. Peterson I think it can be a way to delegitimize any attempt for women and racial and sexual minorities to overcome discrimination or even to argue that such discrimination is real in the New York Times today mr. Peterson says quote the people who hold that oh that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy they don't want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence that sounds particularly insane to me because I'm an American and our president is Donald Trump but but it's an assumption that I think underlies a worldview in which any challenges to the current hierarchy are written off as political correctness I also think we should be clear that this isn't really a debate about free speech mr. Peterson once referred to what he called quote the evil Trinity of equity diversity and inclusivity and said those three words if you hear people mouth those three words equity diversity and inclusivity you know who you're dealing with and you should step away from that because it is not acceptable he argues that the movie frozen is politically correct propaganda and at one point he floated the idea of creating a database of University course content so students could avoid postmodern critical theory so in the criticism of political correctness I sometimes hear an urge or an attempt to purge our thought of certain analytical categories that mirrors I think the worst caricatures of the social justice left that want to get rid of anything that smacks of colonialism or patriarchy or white supremacy I also don't really think we're debating the value of the Enlightenment at least not in the way that somebody like mr. Frey who I think is a champion of enlightenment values brings it the efforts to expand rights and privileges once granted just to land owning white heterosexual men is the Enlightenment or is very much in keeping with the Enlightenment to quote a dead white man John Stuart Mill the despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement I think that some of our opponents by contrast frame challenges to the despotism of customs as politically correct attacks on a transcendent natural order to quote mr. Peterson again each gender each sex has its own unfairness to deal with but to think of it as a consequence of the social of the social structure it's like come on really what about nature itself but there's an exception to this because he does believe in social interventions to remedy some kinds of unfairness which is why in the New York Times he calls for quote enforcement agha me to remedy the woes of men who don't get equal distribution of sex when it comes to the political correctness debate we've been exactly here before the Allan bloom the author of the closing of the American mind compared the tyranny of feminism in academia to the Khmer Rouge and he was writing at a time when women accounted for 10% of all college tenured faculty it's worth looking back at what was considered annoyingly outrageously politically correct in the 1980's the last time we had this debate you know having to call or not being able to call indigenous people quote Indians or having to use hyphenated terms at least in the United States have terms like African Americans you know adding women or people of color to the Western Civ curriculum not making gay jokes or using [ __ ] as an epithet and I kind of get it right new concepts new words sort of stick in your throat the way we're used to talking and thinking seem natural and normal you know by definition and then the new terms and new concepts that have social utility stick and those that don't fall away so if you go back to the 1970s myths you know ms as an alternative to miss or misses stuck around and women with a why didn't and I think that some day or I hope that some day we'll look back and marvel at the idea that gender-neutral pronouns ever seemed like an existential threat to anyone but I also don't think it's clear that you know that might not happen because if you look around the world right now there are plenty of places that have indeed dialed back cosmopolitanism and reinstated patriarchy in the name of staving off chaos and they have seemed like terrible places to live you know I come to you from the United States which is currently undergoing a monumental attempt to rollback social progress in the name of overcoming political correctness and as someone who lives there I assure you it feels nothing like progress thank you great start to the debate Michelle thank you I'm now going to ask Jordan Peterson to speak for the con team hello so we should first decide what we're talking about we're not talking about my views of political correctness despite what you might have inferred from the last speakers comments this is how it looks to me we essentially need something approximating a low resolution grand narrative to unite us and and we need a narrative to unite us because otherwise we don't have peace what's playing out in the Universities and in broader society right now is a debate between two fundamental low resolution narratives neither of which can be completely accurate because they can't encompass all the details obviously human beings have an individual element and a collective element a group element let's say the question is what story should be paramount and this is how it looks to me in the West we have reasonably functional reasonably free remarkably productive stable hierarchies that are open to consideration of the dispossessed that hierarchies generally create our societies are freer and functioning more effectively than any societies anywhere else in the world and that and then any societies ever have and as far as I'm concerned and I think there's good reason to assume this it's because the fundamental low resolution grand narrative that we've oriented ourselves around in the West is one of the sovereignty of the individual and it's predicated on the idea that all things considered the best way for me to interact with someone else is individual to individual and to react to that person as if they're both part of the process because that's the right way of thinking about it the psychological process by which things we don't understand can yet be explored and by things that aren't properly organized in our society can be yet set right the reason we're valuable as individuals both with regards to our rights and responsibilities is because that's our essential purpose and that's our nobility and that's our function what's happening as far as I'm concerned in the universities in particular and spreading very rapidly out into the broader world including the corporate world much to its to what should be its chagrin is a collectivist narrative and of course there's some utility in a collectivist narrative because we're all part of groups in different ways but the collectivist narrative that I regard as politically correct is a pastiche of a strange pastiche of post-modernism in neo Marxism and it's fundamental claim is that no you're not essentially an individual you're essentially a member of a group and that group might be your ethnicity and it might be your sex and it might be a race and it might be any of the endless numbers of other potential groups that you belong to because you belong to many of them and that you should be essentially categorized along with those who are like you on that dimension in that group that's proposition number one proposition number two is that the proper way to view the world is as a battleground between groups of different power so you define the group's first and then you assume that you you you view the individual from the group context you view the battle between groups from the group context and you view history itself as a consequence of nothing but the power maneuvers between different groups that eliminates any consideration of the individual and at a very fundamental level and also any idea for example of free speech because if you're collectivist at heart in this manner there is no such thing as free speech it isn't that it's debated by those on the radical left and let's say the rest of us so to speak it's that in that formulation there's no such thing as free speech because for an individualist free speech is how you make sense of the world in reorganize Society in a proper manner but for the radical left type collectivist that's associated with this viewpoint of political correctness when you speak all you're doing is playing a power game on behalf of your group and there's nothing else that you can do because that's all there is and not only is that all there is in terms of who you are as an individual now and how society should be viewed it's also the fundamental narrative of history for example it's it's widely assumed in our universities now that the best way to conceptualize Western civilization is as an oppressive male-dominated patriarchy and that's the best way to construe relationships between men and women across the centuries is one of oppression of women by that's like well look no hierarchy is without its tyranny that's a that's an axiomatic truth people have recognized that literally for thousands of years and hierarchies do tend towards tyranny and they tend towards the usurpation by people with power but that only happens when they become corrupt we have mechanisms in our society to stop hierarchies from becoming intolerably corrupt and they actually work pretty well and so and so I would also I would also I would also point this out you know don't be thinking that this is a debate about whether empathy is useful or not or that the people on the con side of the argument are not empathetic I know perfectly well as I'm sure mr. Frey does that hierarchies tend to produce situations where people stack up at the bottom and that the dispossessed in hierarchies need a political voice which is the proper voice of the left by the way of the necessary voice of the left but that is not the same as proclaiming that the right level of analysis for our grand unifying narrative is that all of us are fundamentally to be identified by the groups that we belong to and to construe the entire world as the battleground between different forms of tyranny in consequence of that group affiliation and to the degree that we play out that narrative that won't be progress believe me and we certainly haven't seen that progress in the universities we've seen situations like what happened in Wilfred Laurier University instead we won't see progress what we'll return to is exactly the same kind of tribalism that characterized the left Thank You Jordan Michael Eric Dyson you were six minutes starts now thank you very kindly wonderful opportunity to be here in Canada thank you so much I'm going to stand here at the podium I'm a preacher and I will ask for an offering at the end of my presentation this is the swimsuit competition of the intellectual beauty pageant so let me show you the curves of my thought oh my god was that a politically incorrect statement I just made how did we get to the point where the hijacking of the discourse on political correctness has become a kind of Manichean distinction between us in them the abortive fantasy just presented is remarkable for both its clarity and yet the muddiness of the context from which it has emerged what's interesting to me is that when we look at the radical left I'm saying what he had I want to join them named running up and I'm from a country where a man stands up every day to tweet the moral mendacity of his viciousness into a nation he has turned into a psychic commode y'all get Justin we got Donnell so what's interesting then is that political correctness has transmogrified into a caricature of the left the left came up with the term political correctness shall I remind you we were tired of our excuses and our excesses in our exaggerations we were willing to be so critical in a way that I fear micro frères my compatriots are not don't take yourself too seriously smiles take yourself not seriously at all but what you do with deadly seriousness now it is transmogrified into an attempt to characterize the radical left the radical left is a metaphor as a symbol as an articulation they don't exist their numbers are too small I'm on college campuses I don't see much of them coming when I hear about identity politics it amazes me the collectivist identity politics last time I checked why forgiving a trace that was an invention from a dominant culture that wanted groups to at their behest the invention of race was driven by the demand of a dominant culture to subordinate others patreon hey patriarchy patriarchy was the demand of men to have their exclusive vision presented the beauty of feminism is it's not gonna resolve differences between men and women it just says men don't automatically get the last word of course in my career he never did and so identity politics has been generated as a bit noir of the right and yet the right doesn't understand the degree to which identity has been foisted upon black people and brown people and people of color from the very beginning on women and trans people you think that I want to be part of a group that is constantly imported by people at Starbucks I imagine my own black business walking down the street I have group identity thrust upon me they don't say ah-ha-ha there goes a negro highly intelligent articulate verbose capable of rhetorical fury at the drop of a hat we should not interrogate him as to the bona fides of his legal status no they treat me as part of a group and the problem is that our friends don't want to acknowledge is that the hegemony that dominance of that group has been so vicious that it has denied us the opportunity to exist as individuals individualism is the characteristic moment in modernity mr. Peterson is right the development of the individual however is predicated upon notions of intelligence Immanuel content David Hume and others philosophically karte Descartes comes along introducing knowledge into the to the to the to the fray saying that knowledge is based upon a kind of reference to the golden intelligence the reflective glass that one possesses and yet he got rooted in the very ground of our existence so now it has fleshly basis and what I'm saying to you the knowledge that I bring as a person of color makes a difference in my body cuz I know what people think of me and I know how they respond to me and that ain't no theory am I you might mad at trigger warnings the only trigger warning I want is from a cop are you about to shoot me not funny in America where young black people die repeatedly unarmed without provocation and so for me identity politics is something very serious and what's interesting about safe spaces I hear about the University I teach there look if you in a safe space in your body you don't need a safe space some of that is overblown some of it is ridiculous I understand I believe that the classroom was a robust place for serious learning I believe in the interrogation of knowledge based upon our understanding usually of the edifying proposition of enlightenment at the same time some people ain't as equal as others so we have to understand the conditions under which they have emerged and in which they have been knighted and attacked by their own culture and I ain't seen nobody be a biggest snowflake than white men who complain mommy mommy they won't let us play and have everything we used to happen to the old regime when we were right racist and supremacist and dominant in patriarchs and hated gays and lesbians and transsexuals that yeah you got a share this ain't your world just about his world and let me end by saying this um that story from David Foster Wallace Fisher going down to Fisher going in a older fish comes to the opposite direction he said hello boys how's the water they swim on they turn each other what the hell is water because when you in it you don't know it when your dominance you don't know it nothing Keyser söze he said is more interesting but the devil did then to make people believe he didn't exist thank you Michael Steven you're up we're gonna put six minutes on the clock and please start because if I miss that plane to London I went half here the end of it from the bridegroom's mother now in agreeing to participate in this debate and stand on this side of the argument I'm fully aware that many people who choose incorrectly in my view too to see this issue in terms of left and right devalued and exploded terms as I think they are will believe that I am betraying myself in such causes and values that I've espoused over the years I've been given a huge grief already simply because I'm standing here next to Professor Peterson which is the very reason that I am standing here in the first place I'm standing next to someone with whom I have no differences shall we say in terms of politics and all kinds of other things precisely because I think all this has got to stop this rage resentment hostility hostility intolerance above all this some with us or against us certainty a grand canyon has opened up in our world the fist year the crack grows wider every day neither on each side can hear a word that the other shrieks and nor do they want to while these armies and propagandists in the culture wars clash down below in the enormous space between the two sides the people of the world try to get on with their lives alternately baffled bored and betrayed by the horrible noises and explosions that echo all around I think it's time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop before we destroy ourselves I I've got to nail my colors to the master before I get any further than this it's only polite to give you a sense of where I come from I owe my adult life I have been what you might call a left ear a soft lefty a liberal of the most hand ringing milksop milquetoast variety not a burning man the barricade socialist not even really a progressive worth the name I've been on marches but I've never quite dared wave placards or banners am i a loathed member of that band the an sjw a social justice warrior I don't think highly of social injustice I have to say but I character myself mostly as a social justice warrior my intellectual heroes growing up were Bertrand Russell and G more liberal thinkers people like that writers like iam Forster I believed and I think I still do believe in the sanctity of human relations of the primacy of the heart and friendship and love and common interest these are more personal interior beliefs than they are political exterior convictions more a humanistic version of a religious impulse I suppose I trust in humanity I believe in humanity I think I do despite all that has happened in the 40 years of my adulthood I am soft and I can easily be swept away by harder hearts and harder intellects I'm sometimes surprised to be described as an activist but over time I have energetically involved myself with what you might call causes I grew up knowing that I was gay well in fact from the very first I knew I was gay I remember when I was born looking up and saying that's the last time I'm going out one of those I'm I'm I'm Jewish I'm Jewish so I have a natural I was horror of racism I naturally I want racism misogyny homophobia transphobia xenophobia bullying bigotry intolerance of all human kinds to end that's surely a given amongst all of us the question is how such a golden aim is to be achieved my ultimate objection to political correctness is not that it combines so much of what I have spent a lifetime loathing and opposing preaching us with great respect piety self-righteousness heresy hunting denunciation shaming assertion without evidence accusation Inquisition censoring that's not why I'm incurring the wrath of my fellow liberals by standing on this side of the house my real objection is that I don't think political correctness works I want to achieve I want to get to the golden Hill but I don't think that's the way to get there I believe one of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right than to be effective and political correctness is always obsessed with how right it is without thinking of how effective it it might be I wouldn't trust myself as a classical libertarian but I do relish transgression and I deeply and instinctively distrust conformity and orthodoxy progress is not achieved by preachers and guardians of morality but to paraphrase a organism yatin by madmen Hermits heretics dreamers rebels and skeptics I may be wrong I hope to learn this evening I really do think I may be wrong but I am prepared to entertain the possibility that political correctness will bring us more tolerance and a better world but I'm not sure and I would like this quotation from my hero Bertrand Russell to hover over the evening one of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision let doubt prevail so great set of opening statements to set the scene we're now going to go into a round of rebuttals to allow each of our presenters three minutes to reflect on what they've heard and to make some additional points we're gonna do that in the same order that we had the opening statement so Michelle you're up first we'll put 3 minutes on the clock for you so first I would say that I think that the attempt to draw a dichotomy between individual rights and group rights is a little bit misleading traditionally there have been large groups of people who have not been able to exercise their individual rights and I think that a lot of the claims that are being made on behalf of what we politically cracked types call marginalized groups are claims that people who you know have identities that have not traditionally been at the center of our culture or been at the top of our hierarchies have as much right to exercise their individual talents and realize their individual ambitions right when we say that we want more women in power or more people of colors voices in the Canon or in the curriculum or you know directing movies all of these things are not because at least on my part I'm interested in some sort of very crude equity but because there are a lot of people who have not traditionally been able to realize themselves as individuals that's what the women's movement was that's what the civil rights movement was that's what the gay rights movement was that's in some ways what the trans rights movement was I mean far from a collectivist movement this is kind of liberalism classical liberalism push to its extreme right these are people saying I have the right to define my identity against the one that was collectively assigned to me finally I would say you know a lot of the things that Stephen Fry said you know in particularly his temperament were probably in agreement but this Inquisition this sensoria sness on the one hand I'm sort of I see where he's coming from but I think it's a little bit virtual right I mean no booze who's really censoring you I understand what it feels like to feel censored I understand what it feels like to be on the wrong side of a Twitter mob or get a lot of nasty comments but and that's a bad feeling you know and it's a counterproductive tactic but that's not censorship you know and again it's it's especially strange coming from a country where you know the President of the United States is trying to levy additional postal rates on the owner of the Washington Post you know in revenge for its reporting and people who have kneeled to protest police brutality at football games have seen their careers explode you know or people who have you know women who have challenged mr. Peterson has been hounded by threats and trolls and misogynist invective Jordan we're gonna have three minutes up on the screen there please respond to what you've heard well I guess I would like to set out a challenge and somewhat the same format is mr. Frey did to people on the moderate left I mean I've studied totalitarianism for a very long time both on the left and on the right in various forms and I think we've done a pretty decent job of determining when right-wing beliefs become dangerous I think that they become dangerous when they the people who stand on the right evoke notions of racial superior superiority or ethnic superiority something like that it's fairly easy to draw a box around them and place them to one side and necessary and I think we've done a pretty good job of that what I fail to see happening on the left and this is with regards to the sensible left because such a thing exists is for the same thing to happen with regards to the radical leftists okay so here's an open question if it's not diversity inclusivity and equity as a triumvirate that mark out the to excessive left and with equity defined by the way not as equality of opportunity which is an absolutely laudable goal but as equality of outcome which is how it's defined then exactly how do we demarcate the two extreme left what do we do we say well there's no such thing as the two extreme left well that's certainly something that characterized much of intellectual thinking for the 20th century as our high order intellectuals especially in place like places like France did everything they could to bend over backwards to ignore absolutely everything that was happening in the catastrophic left world in the Soviet Union and in malas China not least we've done a terrible job of determining how to demarcate what's useful from the left from what's pathological and so it's perfectly okay for someone to criticize my attempts to identify something like a boundary we could say diversity inclusivity and equity especially equity which is in fact equality of outcome which is an absolutely abhorrent notion if you know anything about history you know that and I'm perfectly willing to hear some reasonable alternatives but what I hear continually from people on the left first of all as my opponents did to construe every argument that is possibly able to be construed on the axis of group identification and to fail to different to fail to help the rest of us differentiate the reasonable left which stands for the oppressed necessarily from the pathological left that's capable of unbelievable destruction and what I see happening in the university campus is in particular where the leftists absolutely predominate and that's certainly not my imagination that's that's well documented by perfectly reasonable people like Jonathan height is an absolute failure to make precisely that distinction and I see the same thing echoed tonight thank you [Applause] Michael give us your rebuttal I feel freer already I don't know what mythological collective mr. Peterson refers to I'm part of the left they're cantankerous when they have a firing squad is usually in a semi-circle part of the skepticism of rationality was predicated upon the Enlightenment project which says we're no longer gonna be subordinate to skepticism to superstition we're gonna think and we're gonna think well Thomas Jefferson was one of the great arbiters of rationality but he was also a man who was a slave owner how do you reconcile that that's the complication I'm speaking about that's not either-or that's not a collective identity Thomas Jefferson believed in a collective identity that is during the day at night he gets in luther vandross songs went out to the slave quarter and engaged in sexual relations and had many children with Sally Hemings his loins trumped his logic and when he hit talks about post-modernism I don't know who he's talking about I teach post-modernism it's kind of fun Jacques Derrida just to say his name is beautiful Michel Foucault Michel Foucault talked about the insurrection of subjugated analogous people who had been marginalized now beginning to speak the subaltern this Gayatri Spivak talks about it in post-colonial theory the reason these people grew up and grew into existence and had a voice is because they were denied as Miss Goldberg said our group identity was forced upon us we were not seen as individuals Babe Ruth when he broke the home rule a home run record he didn't bat against all best ballplayers he batted against the best white ballplayers when it's been rigged in your favor from the very beginning is hard for you to understand how much you've been rigged you're born on third base that you hit a triple at the Toronto Blue Jays game and here we are deriving our sense of identity from the very culture that we ignore look at the indigenous names and the first nation names Toronto Saskatchewan Winnipeg Tim Hortons but I'll tell you there's an envy of the kind of freedom and liberty that people of color and other minorities bring because we bring the depth of knowledge in our body there's a kind of jealousy event as the greatest living Canadian philosopher Aubrey Drake Graham says jealousy is just love and hate at the same time and so for me I think it's necessary I agree with mr. fry we shouldn't be nasty and combative and yet I don't see nastiness and combativeness from people I see them making a desire to have their individual identities respected when I get shot down for no other reason that I'm black when I get categorized for no other reason than my color I am living in a culture that refuses to see me as a great individual ya know it's it's interesting to hear that their religion doesn't seem to be a problem but yet I think we all instinctively know that there is some kind of problem there isn't censorship of course not in the way that there is in Russia I've been to Russia I have faced off with a deeply homophobic and unpleasant man and there's political correctness in Russia it's just political correctness on the right and that's what I grew up with political correctness which meant that you couldn't say certain things on television couldn't say [ __ ] for example on television because it was incorrect to do so and as always the same reason was that someone would appear and say I'm not shocked of course no I'm not shocked I'm not offended I'm offended on behalf of others young impressionable plastic minds the vulnerable and and that's not good enough it's it's so often people are saying see I don't mind being called a [ __ ] or a [ __ ] or whatever way or mad person because I've got mental health issues I don't mind people insult you mean people say well that's alright for you Steven because you know you're strong well I I don't feel particularly strong and I don't know that I like being called a [ __ ] in a kite particularly but I don't believe that the advances in my culture that have allowed me to marry as I have now been for three years to someone of my gender I don't believe they are a result of political correctness and maybe political correctness is actually just some sort of live trout that the harder we squeeze it the further it goes away and and you will be saying I'm not talking about this greatness you're talking about social justice with which I agree with whether you want to call it identity politics or the history of your people is do my people my people were slaves as well both the British were slaves of Romans and the Jews were slaves of the Egyptians all human beings have been slaves at some point and we all in that sense share that knowledge of how important it is to speak up but Russell Means who was a friend of mine towards the end who founded the American Indian Movement he said oh for God's sake owe me an Indian or a Lakota Sioux or Russell I don't care what you call me it's how we treated that matters and so I'm really addressing a popular idea also at you in Barrow Alaska and the new Piatt said call me an Eskimo it's obviously easier for you because you keep mispronouncing a new Priya you know words do matter the just end with a quick story gay rights caiman battling them because we've slowly and persistently knocked on the door of people in power we didn't shout we didn't scream people like Ian McKellen eventually got to see the Prime Minister and when the Queen signed in the Royal Assent she has to for the bill allowing equality of marriage she said Lord you know I couldn't imagine this in 1953 really is extraordinary isn't it just wonderful and handed it over now it's a nice story and I hope it's true but it's nothing to do with political correctness it's to do with human decency it's that simple so some some great rebuttals there strong opening statements let's move now into the the moderated cross-examination portion of this debate and get both sides engaging on some of the key issues here and I think what we've heard here is a bit of a attention let's draw it out a bit more between the rights of groups to feel included to have in your words Michelle the opportunity for individuality and a belief on the other side that there's something at threat here when these groups are overly privileged through affirmative action or other outcome oriented processes so Michael to start with you why why isn't there just harm that's done to groups by privileges their group identity whether it be a group identity of race or gender and not immediately treating them as individuals in the way that Jordan and Steven would like to see you see them first well a couple of things first of all there was no arbitrary and random distinction that people of color and other minority groups made when I talked about the invention of race the invention of gender the invention of group think that was not done at the by those groups that have been so named as mrs. Goldberg said so first of all you've got to acknowledge the historical evolution of that reality and the concept of group identity did not begin with them it began with a group that didn't have to announce its identity when you are in control you don't have to announce who you are so that many white brothers and sisters don't see themselves as one among many other ethnicities or groups what they see themselves as I'm just American I'm Canadian can't you be like us can't you transcend those narrow group identifications and yet those group identifications have been imprinted upon them by the very people who now because they're their group power has been challenged let's make no mistake about it there's a challenge III agree with mr. Frey in a kind of Netherland of how sweet it would be to have a kingly and queenly metaphor about how it got resolved that ain't the real deal homie and in the real world and in the real world their stuff at stake what's at stake our bodies what's at stake or people's life what's at stake people are still being lynched killed what's at stake people because of their sexuality and their racial identity are still being harmed so I'm suggesting to you it's not that we are against being treated as individuals that's what we're crying for please don't see me as a member of a group that you think is a thug a [ __ ] a nihilist a pathological person see me as an individual who embodies the realities were but I'll end by saying this what Michelle said is extremely important the people who have individual rights did not have to fight for them in the same manner that people of color and others have had to when mr. fried talked about enslavement he named them read Orlando Patterson's comparative history of race and slavery over 28 civilizations the Greeks did not have the same kind of slavery that American said it was chattel slavery in Greece you could buy back your freedom you could teach the children of the people who enslaved you and because of your display of prodigious intellect you could secure your freedom that was not the case you were punished and killed for literacy in America so my point simply is this is that I am all for the celebration of broader identities and I think that often those who are minorities and others are not celebrated for the degree that we are in by saying this in America we have the Confederate flag I don't know if y'all are familiar with that we have a confederate flag we have white guys mostly in the south but others as well flag knows Confederate flags that are part of the South that refused to cede its legitimate conquests at the hands of the north there has been a politics of resentment every you talk about politics of identity wearing that flag not the American flag they are not American they are celebrating a secession a move away from America and a man named Colin Kaepernick who was a football player saying I want to bring beauty to that flag has been denied opportunity so we have to really set the terms of debate in order before we proceed good point Jordan let's have you jump in on this idea of what you see is the pernicious danger of groupthink when it comes to ethnicity when it comes to gender why do you think that that's one of the primal sins in your view of quote political correctness well I think it's one of the primal sins of identity politics players on the left and the right just to be clear about that personally since this has got personal at times I'm no fan of the identitarian right I think that anybody who plays a game a conceptual game where group identity comes first and foremost risks and exacerbation of tribalism it doesn't matter whether it's on the left to the right with regards to the idea of group rights well there's a fundamental and this is something we've fallen into terribly in Canada not least because we had to contend with the threat of Quebec separatism but the idea of group rights is extraordinarily problematic because the the the obverse of the coin of individual rights as individual responsibilities then you can hold an individual responsible and an individual can be responsible and so that's partly why individuals have rights but groups how do you hold a group responsible I mean the whole idea is not it's not a good idea to hold a group responsible if first of all it flies in the face of the idea of the sort of justice systems that we've laid out in the West that are essentially predicated first on the assumption of individual innocence but also on the possibility of individual guilt not group guilt we saw what happened in the 20th century many many times when the idea of group guilt was it was it it was enabled to get a foothold let's say in the polity and in the justice system it was absolutely catastrophic and so ok fine group rights well what are you gonna how are you gonna contend with the alternative to that the opposite of that or that where's the group responsibility how are you gonna keep how are you gonna hold your groups responsible well we don't have to talk about that because we're too concerned with rectifying hypothetical rectifying historical injustice is hypothetical and otherwise and that's certainly not to say that there weren't any shortage of absolutely catastrophic historical injustice that's not the point the point is how you view the situation at the most fundamental level and group rights are an absolute catastrophe in my opinion but let's Michelle come in on that point this is something you've written about the idea that you know in identity politics the identity the group is is absolutely a valid part of the discourse and individuals could and should be seen and participating groups as they enter into the Civic space I I'm not sure that we necessarily have to analogize from individual you know the opposite of individual rights is individual responsibility I'm not sure that that analogy necessarily holds for the groups I mean in in the United States and one of the things that I think is complicated about this discussion is that we're talking about three very different cultural contexts three different histories three different kind of legal regimes but in the United States a great a huge part of our politics has been groups struggling for rights for their individual members right I mean so women in the United States you know seeking the right to reproductive control of their body you know african-americans in the United States seeking redress from police brutality or discrimination or simply the kind of tendency in America of white people to call the police whenever they see an african-american in a place where they don't think that they're supposed to be and you simply I don't see how you can contend with any of those social problems if you see society as just an ocean of atomized individuals you know and I just again I I don't think there's anything pernicious about people banding together on the basis of their common identity to seek redress for discrimination and exclusion I mean I think that that is everything that's best about our democracy that is the definition of progress and so again I just I keep stumbling with the idea that this is somehow tyrannical or that way lies Stalinism and you know a lot of things people who are opposed to political correctness talk about the concept of category creep or is it nope yeah category creep which is a concept that was originated by I believe in Australian academic and it's basically kind of a failure to draw distinctions right so that you kind of can't see the difference between say a KKK Grand Wizard and a conservative like say ben shapiro or you know that you kind of see everybody to your right as you know fascist sexist to tala terry and intolerable and i think that that is a real thing that happens in part because you know undergraduates often think in broad and slightly overwrought categories I know I did when I was when I was a kid yeah maybe still do but but I hear a lot of category creep in again the argument against political correctness or against seeking group redress the idea that kind of that way lies dehumanization or you know that you're kind of one minute you're asking come in on this part of your opening remarks you're a category creep Steven didn't respond to that it's nice I'm still very lost about why we aren't talking about political correctness we're talking about politics and that's fine and I share you know I share exactly what you think about it I'm not an enemy of identity politics per se I could obviously see where it goes wrong and where it's annoying let's be empirical about this how well is it working for you in America at the moment not well at all really isn't I you can ask me in a moment the reason the reason the Trump and brexit in Britain and all kinds of nativists all over Europe is succeeding is not the triumph of the right it's the catastrophic failure of the left it's our fault we absolutely my point is not that I've turned to the rice or anything like that all that I'm nice and fluffy and want everybody to be decent I'm saying [ __ ] political correctness resist fight if you have a point of view fight it in the proper manner using democracy as it should be not channels of education not language you know it's so silly there's a chess rule you know in chess the best move to playing chess is not the best chess move it's the move your opponent least wants you to play at the moment you're being recruiting sergeants for the right but buying an upsetting and instead of fighting either fighting or persuading but political correctness is a middle course that simply doesn't work well first of all points you said the empirical no empirical as far as I know the word means that which can be verified or falsify through the census exactly so if we look at it in an objective way the reality is that people don't have equal access to the means to articulate in a very moment you're talking I'm talking about the empirical results of this political attitude I understand that but my point is simply this I'm suggesting to you that people use the weapons at hand now it was a Brahimi Joshua Heschel of the rabbi who said everybody's not guilty but everybody's responsible right that's a distinction there everybody clearly is not guilty but what's interesting look at the flipside if you have benefited from 300 years of holding people in servitude thinking that you did it all on your own why can't these people work harder let me see for 300 years you ain't had no job so the reality is for 300 years you hold people in the bands you hold them in subordination you refuse to give them rights then all of a sudden you free them and say you're now individuals not having the skills not have skills reach up to about America first of all I'm some of the American society first of all I'm some of the Northern Hemisphere I'm some on every society where enslavement has existed but I'm speaking specifically of the repudiation of individual rights among people of color in America who were denied the opportunity to be individuals so I see I obviously an ID lien I think Michelle go does to agree with the emphasis on individuals what we're saying to you is that we have not been permitted to be individuals we have not been permitted to exercise our individual autonomy and authority and the refusal to do so to recognize me as an individual means when you roll up on me and I'm a 12 year old boy in a park and you shoot first in ways you do the black kids that you don't do the white kids you are not treating that person as an individual if we're living in a society where women are subject to aberrant forms of horrid patriarchal sexist and misogynist behavior you're not acknowledging the centrality of the individuality of women you are treating them according to a group dynamic and if we if we get beyond the ability of people on the right to understand the degree to which they have operated from the basis of benefit from group identity without having said I am by saying this the great American philosopher Beyonce knows saying that it has been saying that racism is so American that if you challenge racism you look like you're challenging America we are challenging inequality we are challenging the refusal to see me as an individual when we overcome that have at it we're all money goes from my white privilege okay so let's assume now that's yeah well that's what you would say so so let's say here let's get precisely okay was that in a very individual of you let's get precise about this okay good precise what degree is my present present level of attainment or achievement a consequence of my white privilege and I don't mean sort've I mean do you mean 5% do you mean 15% do you mean 25% do you mean 75% and what do you propose I do about it how about it tax how about a tax that's like specialized for me so that I can account for my damn privilege you saw what I great about it now let's get precise about one other thing okay we'll get precise about one other thing there's ice yeah precise yes and so if if we can agree and we haven't that the left can go too far which it clearly can't then how would my worthy opponents precisely define when the left that they stand for has gone too far you didn't like equity equality of outcome I think that's a great marker but if you have a better suggestion and won't sidestep the question so let's figure out how I can dispense with my white privilege and so that you can tell me when the left is gone too far since they clearly can and that's what this debate is about about political correctness it's about the left going too far and I think it's gone too far in many ways and I'd like to figure out exactly how and when so the reasonable left could make its descendants again and we could quit all this nonsense do you mind if I answer see what I will answer me but I just want to answer Stephen Fry first because you talked about you know this is how we got Trump and this is the failure of the left and so I am you know I'm a journalist I went to a ton of Trump rallies during the campaign in different parts of the country and you're right everywhere I went I heard complaints about political correctness you know far more than I heard complaints about say NAFTA but when you asked people what they meant by political correctness you know they called a woman they worked with girl and she got mad at them and you know they could you know you couldn't in public wonder aloud whether the President of the United States was really a Muslim you know they didn't like that they couldn't make gay jokes anymore and so on the one hand you're right and I've written about this I think that when you try to suppress you know that when people have these prejudices and you try to suppress them it can create a kind of dangerous counter reaction but I also think that you know what they were reacting to again to go to go back to the title this debate what they called political correctness you know the fact that they had to have this or bein black president who they felt talked down to that which is really what they meant I don't see a way around that because that is like I said that's progress so to go to the clip to the question of when the Left goes too far I mean to me it's pretty easy violence and censorship right I'm against violence and I'm against censorship be it but I also looking around the world right now when the idea that there is this I understand again there is like a problem of kind of left-wing annoyance right there's a lot of things that kind of people random people on the internet in particular are able to swarm individuals and turn kind of stray remarks into social media campaigns and this is often you know completed with political correctness and it's a bad phenomenon I wish there was a way to put an end to it I don't think there there is no way to put an end to it simply by having kind reasonable liberals or reasonable socialists denounce it because it's just a kind of awful phenomenon of modern life and if you want to have a debate about whether social media is terrible for democracy I will be on the gay side but right now where I really disagree well a couple of there's a couple places great but the idea that the radical left poses a greater threat than the radical right when you see fad like actual fascism ascendant all over the world strikes me as something that you can literally only believe if you spend your life on college campuses so like I want to come to you on those Gregg Michele on Jordans point about how does he in a sense get an equal voice in this debate back if it is implied that his participation brings with it this baggage of white privilege that doesn't allow him to see clearly the issues that are before us but that is to be complicit in the very problem itself terminologically your beginning at a point there's already productive and controversial you're saying how can he get his equality back who are you talking about Jordan Peterson trending number one on Twitter Jordan Peterson internationals in an international bestseller I want him to tweet something out about me in my book Jordan Peterson right this is what I'm saying to you why the rage bruh you're doing well but you're a mean mad right man and you're gonna get us right and I have never seen so much line and snowflake ink there's enough wine in here to start a vineyard and what I'm saying to you empirically and precisely when you ask the question about white privilege the fact that you ask it in the way you did dismissive pseudo-scientific non-empirical and without justification a the truth is that white privilege doesn't act according to quantifiable segments it's about the degree to which we are willing as a society to grapple with the ideals of freedom justice and equality upon which is base number two was interesting to me you're talking about not having a collective identity what do you call a nation are you Canadian are you Canadian by yourself are you an individual are you part of a group when America formed its union it did so in opposition to another group so the reality is is that those who are part of group identities and politics denied the legitimacy and validity of those groups and the fact that they have been created thusly and then have resentment against others all I'm asking for is the opportunity that this the the quotation you talk about the difference between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity that's a state and retried argument hackneyed phrase derived from the halcyon days of the debate over affirmative action are you looking for outcomes that can be determined equally or are you looking for opportunity if you free a person after a whole long time of oppression and say now you are free to survive if you have no skills if you have no quantifiable means of existence what you have done is liberated them into oppression and all I'm suggesting to you Lyndon Baines Johnson one of our great presidents said if you start a man in a race a hundred years behind it is awfully difficult to catch up so I don't think Jordan Peterson is suffering from anything except an exaggerated sense of entitlement and resentment and his own privilege is invisible to him and it's manifest with lethal intensity and ferocity right here on stage responded away well what I derived from that series of rebuttals let's say is twofold the first is that saying that the radical left goes too far when they engage in violence is not a sufficient response by any stretch of the imagination because there are sets of ideas in radical leftist thinking that led to the catastrophes of the 20th century and that was at the level of idea not at the level of violent action it's a very straightforward thing to say you're against violence it's like being against poverty it's like you know general generic Lee speaking decent people are against poverty and violence doesn't address the issue in the least and with regards to my privilege or lack thereof I mean I'm not making the case that I haven't had advantages in my life and disadvantages in my life like most people you don't know anything about my background or where he came from it doesn't matter to you because fundamentally I'm a mean white man that's a hell of a thing to say in a debate [Applause] very very breeze I want to move on to men and women the mean man white comment was not predicated upon my historical excavation of your past its based upon the evident vitriol with which you speak in the denial of a sense of equanimity among combatants in an argument so I'm saying again you're a mean man white man and the viciousness is evidence ok which that change the decks here let's talk about another big factor of the so-called politically correct movement right now which is the me2 movement and the extent to which we've seen this resurgence this awakening around would have been a horrible series of systemic abuses and and justices towards women some people though Michelle would say that we're in a cultural panic now that the pendulum has swung too far and that there is a dangerous overreaction going on where people's rights reputations due process has been thrown to the wind how do you respond to that well first people started saying that within like two weeks of the first Harvey Weinstein's story is breaking right the minute Harvey Weinstein stand and people action men act started actually losing their jobs over this right which was something quite new that men with histories of really serious predatory behavior were suddenly losing their jobs you know everybody had known about it for a long time and there had been a sort of implicit impunity and suddenly that was taken away and it created this cultural earthquake and as soon as it did it created a lot of anxiety like what if this goes too far you know I mean the me2 movement was only a couple of months old when my newspaper started running columns from people saying why can't I criticize me to which they were doing in my newspaper so on the one hand guest of course is due process important obviously I think that when you look at who has actually lost their jobs who's actually lost their livelihoods I mean look around it's people it's not people in general on a you know McCarthy estroux Murr it's people who took their dicks out at work it's people who you know there it's people who there was you know ten tens of millions of dollars of settlements and they lost their job for four months and now they're staging comebacks you know Bill O'Reilly is about to get a TV show on a new network so the idea that again this idea that kind of like men everywhere feel like they can't talk anymore and everybody's walking on eggshells and I don't know maybe that's true in in your offices it's it's not true where where I live you know and the me2 movement has been particularly active in in media you know there was this this thing I don't know how many of you guys read about the shitty media Mentalist a woman wrote about she started this sort of open source document where women could lift men and media that everybody knew about but nobody had ever done anything about and it very quickly went public and there was something sort of disturbing in it right you don't like these anonymous accusations floating around most feminists I know including myself or kind of you know freaked out by it and thought it was unfair to have people's reputations held up like this but if you look at what happened to the men on the list nothing you know they still have their jobs I know men on that list I work with men on that list the people who actually people have only by and as far as I can think in media the people who have lost their jobs and lost their careers it's been four extremely serious misbehavior documented by multiple women who had corroborating witnesses and so again I understand this anxiety that relations between men and women are changing of course that causes a lot of cultural anxiety but I don't know that it's rooted in anything real to get his view on this are we intercultural panic is the response Michelle says commensurate with the moment very confused by this of course I you know I recognize the best reality Weinstein and the monstrosity of his behavior and it was shocking to me I actually worked from script doctoring because it's called and I never had the bathroom toe but for pretty obvious reasons but it's you know grotesque and I can't imagine how vile it must be for such a powerful man and he was I used to play a game at the Cannes Film Festival where these years of power we're walking from one hotel at them at the end there all the way up to the Palais des festival you would get 10 points every time you heard the word Harvey and you'd usually a 10-minute walk you'd have a 300 points because it was a yeah Harvey's got the script Harvey's got it yeah I've got a meeting with Harvey of the majestic in the afternoon he was immensely powerful and I think that's obvious that someone in that position abusing and threatening and hindering the livelihood of women is is grotesque and in the extreme but I have to tell you there is genuine feeling amongst many people I know that that we can't speak our minds we can't actually speak to the true nuance the true depth of sexual romantic feeling between men and women it's not a subject I'm absolutely expert on but it counts between men and men as well though I know when it's men and men you might say well that's different because they're women have had a different experience in history and I don't want to enter that particular field but I would say that there is real fear in my business which is where this all started show business acting and so on yeah people are rather afraid to speak about a piece of their you know publicity that's come out or a statement that's been made you just go yeah absolutely and wait for the people to leave the room before you can speak honestly with your friends and that's I've never experienced that in my entire 60 years on this planet this this feeling that and I'm not characterizing feminists as as in East German but it's like that the Stars you're listening you better be careful they're listening and that's a genuine feeling I'm saying that my handle my heart I'm not saying it to make a point other than the fact that it's true and it's worrying but the sexual misadventures and how experiences whirring - so the to worry they're not solved let's bring out Jordan in on this because you've written and commented about a lot well I think I'm going to point out two things again the first is that my question about when the right when the left goes too far still hasn't been answered and then the second thing I'm going to point out is that you know it's conceivable that I am a mean man you know I mean maybe I'm meaner than some people and not as mean as others I think that's probably more the case but I would say the fact that race got dragged into that particular comment is a better exemplar of what the hell I think is wrong with the politically correct left and anything else that could have possibly happened [Applause] imagine the hurt the anxiety the insult that you might genuinely fill according to what I felt was an appropriate comment of description at the moment of its expression but imagine now those hurt feelings and when okay you feel great you feel great about it's really different I'm not a victim I'm not hurt your Paul okay wouldn't be a victim so what's interesting is that whatever non-traditional feelings of empathy you endure at this particular point the point is imagine then the horrors that so many other others have had to put up with for so long when they are refused to acknowledge their humanity now I take your point seriously so you're let me let me finish let me finish so let me spend to me let me finish so not to think you're not my Inquisition er okay what I'm saying to you is that when you said you were upset that I added the element of race they're right when I said mean mad white man well what's interesting is that you may have felt that you were being ascribed the group identity to which you do not subscribe you may have felt that you were being unfairly judged according to your particular race you may have felt that your individual identity was being besmirched by my rather careless characterization of you all of which qualifies for a legitimate you know response to me but also the point we've been trying to make about the refusal to see our individual existence as women as people of color as first Asian people in the light my point simply has been the reason I talked about race and that particular characterization because there's a particular way in which I have come to a city I don't know if there are a lot of black people out here not sure but I constantly come to places and spaces that are not my natural habit and other than intellectual engagement and the love and the fury of rhetorical engagement yes but I often go into hostile spaces where people will not vote in favor from my particular viewpoint because I'm interested as an individual of breaking down barriers so that people can understand just how complicated it is so what I'm saying to you is that I would invite you in terms of the surrender of your privilege to give you a specific specific response come with me to a black Baptist Church come with me to a historically black college come to me to and to an indigenous or First Nations community where we're able to engage in some of the it lovely conversation but also to listen and hear and when I added race to that I was talking about the historical events inability to acknowledge others pains equally to the one that they are presently enduring so human beings well I've seen the sorts of things that you're talking about I happened to be an honorary member of an indigenous family so don't tell me about what I should go see with regards to oppression um you don't know anything about me you asked me why I gave you a smile yeah you gave me a generic response is that Eric rains pace or suppose Jordan Peterson that would like for you to come with me Michael Eric Dyson to a black Baptist Church you've been happy to do that okay all right I'm gonna hook you up I'm gonna hook you up and make sure that happen one more quick round then we're gonna go to closing statements and assume for I want to get your response to why you know a generation from now looking back on this debate we're not going to see this quote so-called politically correct movement in the same way let's say that we now understand the positive contributions of the civil rights movement that that was a movement that advanced a series of ideas about human dignity people who previously didn't have that dignity we're now having another debate another social Veda about different groups and communities that are we're trying to convey a sense of new dignity to them why why won't this be in a sense looked back upon as something positive a generation from now I think people will look back on this debate and and wonder why political correctness wasn't discussed like I said a bit slippery I mean I interesting to hear talk about raising about gender and about because he and it's something that I've thought about a lot and I can learn a great deal about but that's not why I came to this debate I was interested in what I've always been interested in the suppression of language and thought the closing down the rationalist idea that seems beguiling that if you limit people's language it may somehow teach them a different way of thinking something that would have delighted the inventors of George Orwell's new speak for example and it seems to me it's just implausible it doesn't it doesn't work and that's what I mean by empirical it doesn't stand an empirical test it isn't experientially validated as we see from the political landscape now and I worry that we may in the future so I I'm so disappointed that the subject has just revolved around academia which was predictable because that's the sort of crucible in which these elements are mixed but even more disappointed that really I haven't heard from Michelle or from Professor Dyson as to what they think political correctness is because what they've talked about is basically saying progress in in our view is progress well I agree that's you know yeah so it is - and good on progress but how is it because saying political that what we call political correctness you call progress that's what you're supposed to be arguing I want to know what you mean by political correctness well okay you know the reason a few months ago right you you contacted me asked if I wanted to do a debate about identity politics and then you presented me with this resolution and I said well there's a lot of things that people call political correctness that I'm not going to defend but then I realized who I was debating and and and saw that there was a lot of things that you Jordan Peterson call political correctness that I call progress and and to some extent you to Stephen Fry you know when you talk about it being outrageous to tear that we're not outrageous I won't forward to your mouth but that we shouldn't be tearing down statues of kind of notorious racists that we should just instead be throwing eggs at them you know so those sorts of things if you call them political correctness I call them progress now this feeling of being silenced which I understand although it seems very vague right you kind of are not quite putting your finger on who is silencing you except for a vague fear that if you say something untoward you're going to be the subject of I'm not sure what I'm saying is that it's it's a feeling it's a feeling that is this sort of intangible result of all right now we've all seen the sort of show trial thing where the person that apologizes I have so much to learn about sexual politics I am really sorry signed a lawyer crossed out the name of the person it's it's real mistake of our left is that we underestimate the right the right isn't as stupid as we'd like them to be if only they were if only they weren't so cunning so slight so smart so aware of our shortcomings and and I just fear that political correctness is a weapon that they value that the more the more we tell the world how people should be treated how language should be treated what words are acceptable what attitudes are acceptable what HR meeting is going to tell you in a long pullet pointed list about how you look at people all of this is is meat and drink to bad people to malefactors to bad actors myself as one of those bad actors in that sense I mean bad actors in the other set so there are like I said there are a lot of ways in which I agree with you although I kind of I would like to hear I need to turn it back on you I would like to hear you say you know what are the words that have fallen into disrepute that we think that you think we should be resurrecting right um you to me this is this area of like hotly contested social change right now where a lot of people use it's very often phrases jargon istic slogans heteronormative cisgendered those kind of things that they're just an insult you know imagine you're a young student arriving University and someone's bombarding it with this preposterous hermeneutical nonsense from from from misread textbooks and misread Foucault and they say done and so on because yeah yeah I you know I was at Cambridge England doing it we had a French phase and that's Valley with that it's an interesting game and it is it's a place to I think I should just really say that the ghost hovering over for me is it's a letter Oscar Wilde rose and he said to Bozize love you said the fact you didn't get a degree is is nothing but you never acquired what is sometimes called the Oxford manner and I'll say for that the university manner he said Oscar said I take that to mean the ability to play gracefully with ideas I think that's disappearing from our culture I think [Music] it's hard to be the self-deprecating Englishman no idea but no no I got a pretty good idea here today but what's interesting I don't recall in all of you all of us have studied history I don't recall these debates about political correctness happening when people who were in power in absolute power unquestioned power political careers political correctness becomes an issue and what I mean by that is people who used to have power who still have power but think they don't who get challenged on just a little bit of what they have and don't want to share toys in the sandlot of life so all of a sudden it becomes a kind of exaggerated grievance now the things you named the bullet points and the cisgender and the heteronormativity and the hetero patriarchy and the capitalist resurgence and the insurrection of subjugated knowledge is to give Foucault some more love with the der ideon deconstruction all that stuff the French phase are still going on with the French frys in America what's interesting is that I didn't hear many complaints of political correctness at the height of the dominance of one group or another but when Martin Luther King jr. who argued for group identity as a black person to provide an opportunity for individual black people to come to the fore they began to make that claim oh that any color political correctness you're siding with those who are against free speech you're siding with those who don't want me as a white person to be recognized in my humanity and what I mean by political correctness is the kind of politics of resultant modes that are articulated by various holders of power at certain levels at various levels that one of the beautiful things about Foucault that I take as opposed to Max Weber is that Foucault said power breaks out everywhere I would think a person who's critical of political correctness like you would appreciate this as opposed to Max Weber who said power is over there in a hierarchical structure where subordination is the demand Foucault said no power breaks out even among people who are in disempowered so you can hurt somebody in your own community what or politically incorrect than a black Baptist preacher identifying with the first century Palestinian Jew and is still loving atheists what's more politically incorrect in a black intellectual going on Bill Maher and defending his ability to continue to have this show despite using the n-word I sir believe in a politically incorrect version when I go as a black Baptist preacher to chastise my fellow believers about their homophobia that goes over like a brick cloud when I come into it arenas like this I understand that my back is up against the wall but I think come sit over here let's say I want to sit on your lap actually I've been looking at this so what was it what's interesting is that when we look at the way in which we have societies in a free Canadian Society of the free American society when I look at what is seen as political correctness it to me has been a mass of jumble that has been carved together out of the politics of resentment that powers once held no longer are held freedoms once exercised absolutely must now be shared so I have an agreements with both of my gentleman to my right who believe that political correctness has been a scourge but not necessarily the way you think so I think it's been a scourge because those who have been the deployers of power and the beneficiaries of privilege have failed to recognize their particular way and at the end of the day I think that those of us who are free citizens of this country and of America should figure out ways to respect the humanity of the other to respect the individual existence of the other but also respect the fact that there have been barriers placed upon particular groups that have prevented them from flourishing that's all I mean well said I gotta get before we got a closing statement some final words on this topic to Michelle and then you Jordan part of the frustration here is that I think that both of you have radically different ideas of what we're talking about when we talk about political correctness it seems to me that you're talking about politically correctness you mean this kind of feeling of anxiety that a lot of people feel because we all live now in this terrible crowd-sourced panopticon when you worry that any stray phrase that you use will be any stray phrase you utter might be used to defame you right and I think that a lot of people feel that anxiety I I disagree that that is something that is being solely kind of perpetrated against you know institution kind of Oscar Wilde and figures by I sense Orion you know some stories left-wing horde because it's coming from all directions right this phenomenon which sucks is all over the place I mean I get it when I write something critical of the way that the IDF behaved in Gaza you know if it's coming at everyone and I think that there is there's a way in which when it comes at a certain sort of figure and there's a certain set of complaints and you feel unjustly criticized and you feel silenced which again I think is really different than being silenced you call it political correctness and I would like the culture also to be more you know freewheeling I think one solution you know you're not going to kind of get the left to I don't know they can't kind of put an end to this because it is much more of a mob social media phenomenon than it is kind of some dicta coming up from on high and so one really the only way to break through it is to say what you are what you say that you're afraid to say right I mean that's the only way to sort of pop this bubble or kind of end this and this anxiety or at least defuse it a little bit whereas again what I hear mr. Peterson talking about as political correctness is something much more broad and much more kind of funded much much more fundamental to social change and you're talking about you know you want me to define or one of us to talk about when the Left goes too far and if I'm you know I certainly don't want to be a woman putting words in your mouth but if if I hear you correctly what you're saying is that you want me to kind of renounce Marxist categories or to I want you to define what the left goes too far you can do it any way you want I like I said I think that the left goes too far into when it is violent or censorious when it tries to shut people down or no platform them or when it acts violently I I'm not sure what you expect some behind that something deeper how how I'd like you to contend with the set of left-wing ideas that produced all the left-wing pathologies of the twentieth century and to define how you think standard left-wing thinking which has a value value I can place where goes too far since it obviously has the right gone too far of course the right hospital tell us how well how about Auschwitz I mean what else more recently what is gone wrong with the right I'm I don't like identity politics players at all I don't care whether they're on the left of the right I've been lecturing about right-wing extremism for 30 years I'm no fan of the right despite the fact that the left would like to paint me that way because it's more convenient for I go too far recently well where it's threatening to go too far and identitarian Europe that's for sure it's gone too far in Charlottesville it went too far in Norway like how low the list do you want and why am i required to produce that to show you that I don't like so your assumption your assumption is somehow that I must be on the side of the right it's like look the right hasn't occupied the humanities and the social sciences it's as simple as that for me if they had I'd be objecting to them say that again the right has not occupied the social sciences and the humanities and the left clearly has the statistical evidence for that is overwhelming sir what about IQ testing in terms of genetic inheritance I'm sorry here to talk about political correctness and we've done a damage all deem ourselves with our closing statements I'm gonna put three minutes on the clock we're gonna go in the reverse order of the opening so Stephen Europe first we hide behind the lexan in that case well I've been fascinated by this conversation there's been an enormous clash of cultures in in the conversation we've had you know classic if I can call it Huck stirring snake-oil pulpit talk which is it's a it's a mode of discourse it's a rhetorical style that I find endlessly refreshing and vivifying but I'm I'm not sure that we actually focused on on the point in question and my objection has always been towards orthodoxies I'm I'm a heterodox and and a contrarian and I can't help myself and I think there's been an underestimation of the fact that language does affect people it does make the young in particular as they're starting out on their educational or their work careers it makes them it makes them very anxious it makes them very angry very upset very alienated to feel that they don't know anymore how to operate in the world how to engage in relationships how to think honestly so they they treat more and more to their own mini groups and and I think that's dangerous and unhappy for society I think it's reflected in in the paucity of cinema and literature and art and the culture generally is that there's fear that's pervading it and while people can talk to academia and say you should come see our lessons our lectures are open and free and ideas are exchanged I'm sure that's true I'm sure it's true but I don't think we should underestimate how much this feeling is prevalent in the culture of this strange paradox that the Liberals are a liberal in their demand for liberality they are exclusive in their demand for inclusivity they are homogenous in their demand for heterogeneity they are somehow undiversified diversity you can be diverse but not diverse in your opinions and in your language and in your behavior and that's a terrible pity I say that I'm sorry that it got a bit heated in in places because I was hoping it wouldn't I was hoping would be a shining example of how people have all different kinds of political outlooks can speak with humor and wit and a lightness of touch as GK Chesterton said angels can fly because they take themselves lightly and I think it's very important for us who are privileged to all four of us privileged to be here to be asked to be here to take ourselves a little bit more likely not to be too earnest too pompous too serious and not to be too certain it's it's a time I think for really engaging emotionally fulfilling passionate and positive doubt that's what I would Michael I'm going to put three minutes on the clock for you please your closing I'm used to not exclusively white men who see black intelligence articulated at a certain level feeling a kind of condescension if I came up here mister I was saying of the day but but a kind of verbal facility automatically assumed to be a kind of hucksterism and snake oil salesmen I've seen that I get it I get hate letters every day from white brothers and sisters who are mad I'm teaching their children you're just trying to co-opt our children you're trying to corrupt them yes I'm trying to corrupt them so they will be uncorrupted by the corrupt ability that they've inherited from a society that refuses to see all people as human beings the death threats I have received constantly for simply trying to speak my mind it's not about a politically correct society that is open-minded and that has some consternation about my ability to speak I'm getting real live you want empirical death threats that talk about killing me setting up to hurt me and harm me simply because I choose to speak my mind I agree with my confreres and my compatriots that we should argue against the vicious limitation and recursions against speech I believe that everybody has the right to be able to articulate themselves and the enormous privilege we have to come to a spot in a space like this means that we have that privilege and we should be responsible for it no matter where we go from here me and brother Peterson will go to a black Baptist Church i'ma hold him to that he said it on national TV we'll all go to a black Baptist Church and have an enlightening conversation about the need for us to engage in not only reciprocal and mutual edification but criticism even hard and tough criticism but in a way that speaks to the needs and interests of those who don't usually get on TV whose voices are not usually amplified whose ideas are not usually taken seriously and when they get to the upper echelons of the ability of a society to express themselves they are equally subject so vicious recrimination and hurtful resistance there's old story about the pig and the pig and the chicken going down the street and said let's have breakfast the chicken just has to give up an egg the pig has to give up his ass in order to make breakfast we have often been the pigs giving up our asses to make breakfast let's start sharing them asses with everybody else [Applause] so I'm not here to claim that there's no such thing as oppression unfairness brutality discrimination unfair use of power all of those anyone with any sense knows that hierarchical structures tilt towards tyranny and that we have to be constantly wakeful to ensure that all they are isn't power and tyranny it's interesting just here Foucault referred to it's unfortunate but it's interesting you know because Foucault like his French intellectual conference essentially believed that the only basis upon which hierarchies were established is power and that's part of this pernicious politically correct doctrine that I've been speaking about when a hierarchy becomes corrupt and the only way to ascend it is to exercise power that's essentially the definition of a tyranny but that doesn't mean that the imperfect hierarchies that we have constructed in our relatively free countries which at least tilts someone towards competence and ability as evidenced by the staggering achievements of civilization that we've managed to produce it doesn't mean that the appropriate way of diagnosing them is to assume without reservation unit eventually that they're all about power and as a consequence everyone who occupies any position within them is a tyrant or a tyrant in the making and that is certainly the fundamental claim of someone like Foucault and it's part and parcel of this what would you call it this ideological catastrophe that's political correctness I'm not here to argue against progress I'm not here to argue against equality of opportunity anyone with any sense understands that even if you're selfish you're best served by allowing yourself access to the multiplicities talents of everyone and to discriminate against them for arbitrary reasons unrelated to their competences it's abhorrent that has nothing to do with the issue at hand it's it isn't that good things haven't happened in the past and should continue to happen that's not the point the point is the point like a patriot fry made which well we can agree on the catastrophe and we can agree on the historic inequity but there's no way I'm going to agree that political correctness is the way to address any of that and there's plenty of evidence to the contrary some of which I would say was displayed quite clearly tonight so I think one of the irresolvable issues that we're all coming up against is the role of feelings right Stephen Fry has kind of asked us to recognize and empathize with this feeling of being silenced of being threatened and I do and I get it you know I feel it sometimes too and my columns I hate it when I write something that then you know gets a kind of irate Twitter mob after me but if they I stood up here and said you know recognize how threatened so many women feel when for example that's the kindness you know one of the best-selling and most prominent intellectuals in the world right now says in an interview that maybe the me to movement has shown that this whole experiment of men and women working together is just not working or you know maybe if women don't want to be don't want the workplace to be sexualized they shouldn't be allowed to wear makeup right sir either well google it google it yeah well so so right it's anything like you know I feel threatened right then I'm being kind of politically correct and hysterical so much of the debate about political correctness or so much of the condemnation of political correctness it's about people saying you know respect my feelings or accommodate my feelings and to some extent we can't accommodate everyone's feelings but there's one group that really does think it's feelings should be accommodated and that is what we keep coming up against is that you know there's a group of people and to some extent I'm part of it that feels uniquely that our feelings of being silenced marginalized censored that those feelings need to take primacy that we can kind of you know sneer when these other groups asked for us to take seriously their feelings of being threatened or their feelings of being marginalized then we caught we call that we called those demands political correctness and I would finally say that I think there is a fair amount of research that people become more closed-minded more tribal when they feel threatened when they feel that their group identity is at stake and so as much as you know you want to blame the left for the rise of the right I think that when you kind of get the rise of the right the rise of people who are questioning the fundamental ideals of pluralistic liberal democracy the more those views are mainstreamed the more people I think are going to shut down in response because people are really scared well first of all I think on behalf of all the debaters I think we want to thank the audience you were engaged we're mostly civil and not so civil in ways I think that we enjoy it so I think on behalf of the debaters everybody thank you audience this was a challenging topic you did a great job a big thank you to our debaters you know it's one thing all of these four give regular speeches but it's a very different thing to come on in front and to stage in front of a live audience a large television audience and have your ideas contested in real time and again to all four of you thank you for accepting our invitation to come here [Music] so a few final notes first thank you to the OREA foundation the Munk family for once again convening us here at Roy Thompson Hall we're going to do it all again this coming autumn all of you have a ballot here in the hall you can vote on your way out we'll have those results for you just probably after 9:15 and let's just quickly review where your opinions stood at the beginning of tonight's contest on the motion be it resolved what I call political correctness what you call political correctness I call progress 36 percent agrees 64 percent disagree and again we saw a large percentage of you willing to change your mind 87 percent so let's see how tonight's cut and thrust affected your voting here you've got your ballots and again to those of you who are watching online we are going to have all these results for you on our social media feeds around 9:15 so enjoy the long weekend happy Victorian to everyone thanks for coming out to the Monk today's [Music] and Stephen Fry right now to get their reactions to tonight's debate some hotly contested moments here so it would be curious to see what happens with the audience vote over the course of the next few minutes and also for those of you watching online we have that our running pull that poll again was w w month debates calm ford slash boat so go there check out see how each of these debaters did in terms of their opening statements that are rebuttals the moderated section and the closing statements if we see any changes there so again we're gonna go right now to Stephen Fry Jordan Peterson get their thoughts on how the evening played out gentlemen thank you audience watching right now just to get your reactions to the debate and maybe just start with you Jordan there were some heated moments here did that did that surprise you that exchanges that you had with Michael Eric Dyson well I wouldn't say it surprised me well I suppose it probably did it just team didn't seem like a very good tactical move you know and I stand by what I said I don't see any reason at all that my racial identity needed to be dragged into the discussion the independent of my personality proclivity I would say what I just said to mr. Frye here is that it was a pleasure sharing the stage with him I've rarely heard anyone ever deliver their convictions with such a remarkable sense of passion and whipped and forbearance and erudition it was it was really something yeah it's Steven a challenging debate because in a sense we're trying to mesh two different views here two different worldviews one very focused more on identity politics group identity you in a sense having an argument really more about the larger culture itself and the tenor and tone of the conversation I was being a little kind of scattergun really and that but Scott the gun and to specific that I just taken very literally the popular idea of political correctness is being a kind of control of language shutting down certain phrases or an introduction of others and and and the the kind of day-to-day as I say human resource departments of corporations and that that sort of thing and so I was slightly disappointed that it just became a debate about race and about gender and so on but that was I guess natural and I still you know the fact is I I I'm still a lefty but a soft one I just don't have to say I flapping squashy in every sense and and I realized that's not a political point of view it is a personal right and the the gap between the personal and the political which is a space you obviously very interested in as a psychologist is one that is rarely explored people are either so personal that it has no application in the outside world and the organization of human affairs or they're so political and so much to do with structure and distinction between hierarchies and networks and so on that they forget the individual and that's the space in which the impassioned liberal lives and it's not easy to do it because you often do sound rather way thank you for coming just finally before I free you to both to a well-earned drink anything left unsaid Jordan any any point that you wanted to make that you didn't feel you had the time or the opportunity no great same question to you see I know I think I got across I mean there's so much you can talk in that field and I I just wanted to leave it at the point that I do want like everybody it's it's it's a no-brainer we want the world to be fairer just a sweeter kinda but it's how you get there and I felt it wasn't really addressed okay well gentlemen thank you both very much from our online audience a big thank you also I know - Jordan Peterson and Stephen Fry for participating in yeah a debate with some stakes on the table for sure Thank You Jennifer we'll see you never separate again online viewers we've now have Michael Eric Dyson coming into the camera range here with Michelle Goldberg to get their reactions to the debate so guys thank you for being part of this you know it's a it's a complicated subject it's got a lot of different moving pieces and elements I think we addressed some of the constituent parts maybe start with you Michelle was there something on stage that you wanted to say that maybe we didn't have the time or you didn't have the opportunity you know now's your chance you know I guess I if the only thing I can think of is that maybe I wish that we could have drilled down a little bit more into the gender piece of this and again to you know what we're really arguing about particularly with mr. Peterson and the kind of range of progress of the range of feminist progress that he considers political correctness I think part of the frustration is that him and Stephen Fry are talking about and defending I think a fairly discrete set of ideas with some overlap you know and one of the difficult things about political correctness is it's a slippery term that's deployed to talk about a whole range of phenomenon yeah and close down conversation and open up conversation yeah how did you feel Michael there are some points there some you know points of sharp exchange we appreciate that at the Munk debates I mean this is not a place for for you know shrinking wallflowers but any unsaid thoughts any anything that you want to put a point on now I think you have to hold people intellectually accountable and to deny some of the things to Michelle that he said and to present himself mr. Peterson in a certain way without seeing some of the abhorrent things he said about women and other minorities I think demands an engaged response to him and I think that the idea itself as Michelle stated repeatedly and and mr. fried talked about his frustration he said we talked about everything but political correctness well the reality is political correctness resides I mean rests upon some serious political work in this culture in know Canada and in America that needs to be done and what I tried to in terms of giving a brief genealogy we didn't have political correctness as long as white straight men were in charge there was no argument about let's get this right but when people who exercise power no longer exercise absolute power still predominant power then there's an argument and I think Michelle's point about gender about the workplace about race about sexuality and the like I just think that it was unnecessarily vigorous and sometimes sharply worded a debate between so Michelle final word to you well if you are curious about the quote that I mentioned about you know maybe this experiment with women and men working together maybe it's not working I mean please do google it it's an interview with vice again I you know me and Stephen me and Stephen Fry probably could have sat on the same side of another debate but again that I feel like the phrase political correctness has expanded to cover a whole range of challenges to I thought it was really interesting how much people were talking about their feelings because when when women talk about their feelings right that is politically correct excess and right when when men talk about this feeling that they can't empirically define we should all I guess I don't know change change in deference to that okay guys great thoughts let's go get a drink in the reception okay thanks again hey online viewers thank you for being part of this monk debate as I mentioned these debates are semiannual we'll have another one this fall we've got a whole archive of past debates on our website on a whole range of topics going back over a decade now and you can access those free by simply becoming a member at WW monk debates com go to the basic membership it's free and we have a rock-solid privacy policy there we respect your privacy so finally check us out on Facebook a thank you for the 26,000 new follows in the last ten days we appreciate it this debate will be archived on our website for the next while again for free so share it with friends and family I'm Griffiths from downtown Toronto Canada at the Munk debate on political correctness see you again in the autumn take care good night

Channel: TheMunkDebates

Views: 694,038

Keywords:

Id: MNjYSns0op0

Length: 122min 32sec (7352 seconds)

Published: Thu May 24 2018