Niall Ferguson - Woke Totalitarianism

[Music] thank you so do you mind giving us well first of all thank you for doing this I really appreciate it do you mind giving us a brief background of who you are and what kind of work you do my name is Neil Ferguson I am the Milbank family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution I also have a fellowship at Harvard I'm a historian I was born in Glasgow in Scotland in 1964. and I've written a lot of history books I often say that we should educate ourselves in history in order to not repeat the mistakes of the past are there other reasons we should educate ourselves about our history especially in the United States the reason that I became a historian was to understand The Human Condition better you are only going to get a small sample of human experience in your own life it will not last longer than about 80 years it will not be something that happens everywhere and it will be confined to a particular period in time you can't possibly understand the full richness and complexity of The Human Experience by relying on what happens to you ultimately the majority of human beings who ever lived are dead I only about a seven percent of human beings who ever lived are alive right now and so unless you're prepared to study the human past you are essentially cutting yourself off from the vast majority of Human Experience now it's it's good to imagine that you can learn from history how to avoid past mistakes but as Alan Taylor once quipped men only learn from history how to make new mistakes it's not as easy as it sounds and it might be a more modest but realistic Endeavor to say to yourself my goal is to understand as much as possible about the human condition in all its shapes sizes and forms the better to understand my own predicament I may still make mistakes but at least I'll know I'll recognize the mistake when I make it right that was great so as I as we were talking about earlier I have James and Helen um and I took from their book cynical theories to help people understand the roots of this you know what we're calling woke ideology I'm curious if you have anything to add about the origins of what what we call woke ideology there is an argument that what we call work ideology is some outgrowth of of Marxism late stage Marxism or cultural Marxism I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced by that because if it is descended from Marx it's almost unrecognizable because there's just no materialism there there's no connection to Marx's central idea of of class conflict and his preoccupation with with economic and social change so I think there are some other forces at work here perhaps workism appeals to the same kind of people who fell from oxygen in say the 1930s but I think its content is quite different because workism isn't really a political ideology it's a religion it's a kind of cult and you can tell it's a cult because it essentially disengages from rational arguments creates a series of behaviors that are strange and identifiably cultish and then seeks to convert people or metaphorically to burn them at the stake this was all not quite the way that Marxism Works historically so I don't think we can easily dismiss this as cultural Marxism right no that's that's an interesting interesting perspective I'd love to know your thoughts on this current you know far left movements and how it compares to previous movements and revolutions like for instance the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia or the cultural revolution in China how does it compare to these there are two things to understand about revolutionary movements from a historian's point of view first you need uh intellectuals without responsibility that is to say people who have really no downside if they write things that are quite divorced from reality and dangerous in their implications topfield made this point about the philosoph before the French Revolution it was true of the Russian nihilists who were in many ways the antecedents of the Bolsheviks the second thing you need is people mostly young and suggestible people ready to buy into the ideas of the irresponsible intellectuals because they have nothing to lose from doing so so that is the typical combination that produces a revolutionary movement now if you compare today's work students the ones who like to denounce professors on line there are superficial resemblances to the way that students behave during the cultural revolution in China except that the cultural revolution was really instigated by Mao Zedong it was directed from above what is striking to me about wokism about today's revolutionaries is that they seem to behave as if they're in a totalitarian regime without being in one and this is the great Paradox of of today's cultural revolution there is no big brother figure telling them to tear down the old authorities and humiliate their professors so they're behaving as if they're in a totalitarian regime right in the middle of a free Society yeah that's that's fascinating yeah so there's a kind of organic organic uh collectivism in it um which I think maybe is part of the reason people compare it to some form of Communism or you know Marxism it seems I'm wondering if you think we're headed down the path to one of these kinds of revolutions that we just mentioned that ultimately lead to brutal tribalism and even sometimes genocide or is it hyperbolic to think that well it's not inevitable that every cult produces a reign of terror there have been plenty of strange Cults that didn't get much past first base as I mentioned earlier I think wokism is more of a religion than a political ideology and at times I'm much more vividly reminded of 16th and 17th century radical Protestant sects than I am of the Bolsheviks and if that's the case then this may ultimately devour itself rather in the way that the more extreme religious sects like say the anabaptists devour themselves without really being able to achieve anything comparable in scale with the French Terror or the the Red Terror of the early Russian Revolution or the cultural revolution in in China so we mustn't assume that every would-be totalitarian gets to be uh Stalin or or Mao I sense that part of the problem with the work project is that it is inherently divisive intersectionality ultimately pits different minority groups against one another because there is a kind of hierarchy of victimhood and that means that if you make the mistake that Elon Omar made and tweet that Palestinian lives matter you'll be slapped down by an African-American who will have spotted that as an African you haven't fully understood the significance of black lives matter as a slogan and a movement so I think there's a fisperous quality a tendency towards disintegration inherent in today's woke movement and I hold out hope that it will it will in fact self-destruct it's famously been said that revolutions attend to devour their own children this one actually has a tendency to devour its own parents and so many of the left-leaning intellectuals who kind of have some responsibility for the rise of workers and are now finding themselves the targets of the red guards so there's a chance this all in effects self-destructs it doesn't necessarily lead to a Reign of Terror sure no I think that's a great response in Civilization you wrote about the decline of Western Civilization I'm wondering do you think this ideology is helping speed that along or how do you how do you relate the two when I wrote the history of Western Civilization it was already an unfashionable thing to do because Western Civilization itself had been attacked by the woke before even woke was a term it was a favorite Target of leftists in the late 20th century so it was already a provocation to write a history of Western civilization and I concluded that the principal threats to whatever is left of Western Civilization really lay within it rather than outside it I don't think it's the the Chinese Communists who are going to do for us I think it's much more likely that we dismantle a free Society of our own accord ultimately Western Civilization is a set of ideas and institutions their Central organizing principle is individual liberty but individual liberty is not naturally occurring it was very very difficult to build a free Society a really free society in which you could say what you liked and not risk some punishment and we only really had got there in the later 20th century in the time when I was growing up and it's been fascinating in the course of of my adult life to see the achievements of previous generations being thrown away by by the Next Generation because the next generation was born into Freedom took it for granted and of course started to notice that there are problems with freedom it's not a it's not a free lunch because there are there are responsibilities that come with freedom there are costs that come with free speech and and it turned out that the generation after me uh wasn't ready for that and couldn't handle it because they didn't really understand what unfreedom was like right no that's a great point this you know quote unquote social justice movement seems to be looking for ever smaller and smaller infractions and wrongdoings that could hardly be considered worth one's time I think I think this is a kind of decadence and I'm wondering if you think that that kind of academic society as a sign of its deterioration a term like social justice makes me wonder what other kind of Justice one might have in mind anti-social Justice it's a suspect term and if you've read your George Orwell or Victor klemper who also wrote very well in the 20th century about the abuse of language by totalitarians your antennae should tingle when a phrase like social justice comes along similarly you should react with suspicion when somebody talks about anti-racism because it's a trap it's very hard to be against anti-racism without implicitly being in favor of of racism these phrases are part and parcel of how totalitarian ideologies operate because they are often the disease of which they purport to be the Cure in truth most of the things that people pursue and the methods that they use when they talk about social justice end in miscarriages of justice and abandonments of due process a characteristic feature of the modern American campus is that those who claim to be pursuing social justice connive at injustices and are indifferent to due process this was a problem that had its origins in in Title IX and the way in which university administrators decided to apply it but I think more broadly it's true to say that the social justice Warriors as they're sometimes known are notable for their indifference to the rule of law and their Readiness to perpetrate Injustice what do you think are the main similarities and differences between the current woke movement and the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s aimed to dismantle a variety of rules that amounted to the systematic discrimination against African Americans in work in recreation in politics in life generally various state level rules and laws indeed constitutions established that African Americans were second-class citizens who did not have access to the opportunities enjoyed by white Americans the Civil Rights Movement which was led by charismatic African Americans not least Martin Luther King Jr was also supported by a significant number of of white liberals who agreed with the proposition that the founding idea of the American Republic was an equality of all men and by implication women before the law and under the Constitution and that the great challenge of American History was to achieve that when at the outset it had not been true because of slavery and it remained untrue long after the Civil War because of segregation to give you an example I'm married to a black woman when I was born such a marriage was illegal and even unconstitutional in multiple States in the American South and it wasn't until I was three years old that the Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws it's bizarre to be in a mixed race marriage with two mixed-race children an encounter a a new segregationism arising on the political left I even saw a piece in a British newspaper questioning whether it was appropriate to regard people of mixed race is beautiful wow what was their line of argument the argument was that it was a sign of white supremacy to prefer mixed race physionomies to Pure African physionomies that argument was published in the Guardian newspaper a matter of months ago in an extraordinary way radical leftists today seem to wish to restore segregation they campaign for no whites on campus days that was the story at Evergreen they want to have people of color only dormitories so one of the great paradoxes of the modern left is that they appear to wish to turn the clock back to before the Civil Rights Movement albeit to discriminate against white Americans and give racial privilege to people of color including not only African Americans that is one of the darkest ironies of modern American history that there can be articles in American newspapers asking as one headline in the New York Times recently did should I let my black kids play with white kids so we arrived at a strange reductive at absurdum in which the left is now campaigning for the kind of discrimination along the lines of skin color that the Civil Rights Movement fought and fought hard to get rid of [Music] hi everyone thanks for watching I hope you're enjoying my channel don't forget to subscribe and if you'd like to see more of my work you can head on over to locals which is an awesome Free Speech platform that won't take down or flag any videos which YouTube is known to do it's a great platform because people want to be there and they'll engage in meaningful dialogue with you and it's awesome plus if you sign up for a paid account you can get access to content that is exclusive to locals you'll find a link for that in the description below also if you ever see me lying down in interviews or in any of the videos it's because I lived with debilitating back pain for years so I just wanted to explain that so you understand what's going on and sometimes my little dog Nora might make an appearance don't be shy don't be shy all right thanks everybody

Channel: The Signal

Views: 92,039

Keywords: liberal, crt, critical race theory, woke, history, totalitarianism, woke racism, niall ferguson, doom

Id: ufl-TIp4KuQ

Length: 18min 15sec (1095 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 09 2022