The New Pride | Peter Boghossian & Andrew Doyle

that's why we have to beat this idea of Liberty experience as being any kind of Benchmark for how we formulate any kind of policy or indeed if we you know the idea of multiple truths that's my truth that's all different ways of knowing have you heard that phrase different ways of knowing and you know we just have to get away from that narcissistic idea that your individual perception of the world is how the world is I'm here with Andrew Doyle we started off with is the trans movement anti-gay we talked about that and we got into a whole bunch of trouble with some great ideas I really hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did I loved it and I love Andrew Doyle [Music] the trans movement anti-gay in its current manifestation yes so not trans people are anti-gay uh but the um predominant cheerleaders of trans activism in its most extreme form are most definitely anti-gay because the movement at present and it wasn't always this way only over the past five six years is now completely underpinned by the notion of gender identity ideology the concept of gender identity is a difficult one because no one ever defines it least of all the activists themselves the best we can come to is a kind of feeling a kind of sense of who you are and a sense of an authentic self Helen Joyce in her book trans when ideology meets reality describes it as something akin to a sexed soul which actually is very close to what certain trans activists have described it as so this is a but no because it's not really pinned down definitionally uh what we get you know the most useful way of thinking about it is is that sense of self within which is gendered uh and whenever you try to get people to Define it they will say things like I am a woman because I feel like a woman which leads to a subsequent question but what is a woman and then it's whoever defines themselves as a woman so we're in the realm of identity politics um but gender identity ideology effectively is about uh ensuring that gender as in the concepts of masculinity and femininity and typical stereotypical behaviors of what it means to be male and female that those things are prioritized over biological sex and you even have of course activists again on the extreme side who now pushed for the idea that not only is gender socially constructed as in boys wear blue and girls wear pink well there's nothing innate about that is there um so there are certain modes of behavior that men and women have that are certainly socially constructed there are others that are rooted in biology but there's a great deal that is to do with social constructs but some activists will now say that even biological sex itself is a social construct there's no really authentic way they've been saying that for many decades by the way uh you know you've had uh voices in Academia saying that for a long long time even when I was at University so there's nothing new about that it's not true and it's never been true but it's now taken hold in society as though it is so two things one the throwaway one of the fake papers that Jim and I wrote yeah we titled it pre-apistemic transgenderism since gender is a social construct and sex is a social construct this is so the argument goes yeah no one ever truly knows their gender until after they've transitioned right if we just remove the genitals from everybody and or if we just allow them to to um I can't remember what age it was you know at 12 they would transition yes then they would know if that was a good thing or not yeah pre-epostemic transgenderism that's interesting you're almost in the realm of Tyrese you know Tyrese yes the uh the uh yeah lion Seer who changed sex according to uh um into the story of Oedipus and anti Antigone and he changed sex that's about all I know about it but yeah I think he saw two snakes copulating and he hit them and for some reason he magically changed sex at that point became a woman uh then he changed back so he's the only person in in so he's a pre-epostemic trade so he knows he knows what it's like to have sex as a woman has sex as a man that's that's what's quite interesting about him so how how so how is so what is anti-gay first right so that's that's the you asked whether it was anti-gain I didn't really explain that so the reason why it's anti-gay is because gay rights were secured through the recognition that there were always in any given society and culture I mean a minority of individuals who are innately attracted to members of their own sex right uh the debate about how that develops within individuals that's a bigger debate and it's nothing to do with this the fact is that there are a minority of people who are instinctively innately attracted to members of their own sex and that that gay rights were secured by getting people to understand that now you have groups like Stonewall who's the UK's foremost LGBT charity redefining the word homosexual to mean same gender attracted right that's not what it means it's not homogendered it's homosexual it's people being attracted so a gay man isn't attracted to someone who identifies as a man they're attracted to men similarly lesbians are attracted so I just need to disambiguate they're attracted to and I'm trying to think about I there's just no other way to say this without being vulgar okay so I'll put it on myself a heterosexual is attracted to a NATO woman or a person with a vagina right a gay person is attracted to a man that is in a natal a biological someone born biologically male with a penis quite but you see extreme trans activists will twist that and say well why are you obsessed with genitals and they will then say that genital preferences are transphobic but of course you're not solely attracted to genitals that is of course a part of the whole part of everything that you are attracted to um the idea that you're attracted to uh how someone perceives themselves doesn't make any sense whatsoever in terms of sexual attraction so if you then and it gets worse than that because Stone will not only redefine the term but then you have the CEO of Stonewall Nancy Kelly comparing lesbians who don't want to date people with penises uh comparing them to sexual racists saying that if you're right she says if you if you are writing off whole group of people a whole demographic out of your dating pool you want to examine your Prejudice and you want to examine where that bigotry came from right but a lesbian writing off men from a dating Pool isn't bigotry it's homosexuality so so it's very very serious when effectively the whole precept of of homosexual rights uh has been drawn away taken away uh and you've even got trans activists now who talk about how lesbians who don't want to sleep with someone who is who identifies as a woman but has a penis that they are suffering from some kind of trauma that's the phrase they use they say this is an example of trauma uh and of course that's I mean the who perceived homosexuality to be a mental disorder as late as 1990. yeah um that's what they used to say to gay people you're suffering from some kind of trauma uh you're suffering some from some kind of mental illness you're a gay boy so all you need to do is find the right girl or vice versa and that's exactly what trans activists are saying now that there was a website called woke homophobia which collected thousands and thousands and thousands of screenshots of trans activists attacking gay people the website has since been deleted which is a shame that no one archived it because people don't believe this but there are it's not just one or two people on Twitter there are thousands of these people using the kind of language that I haven't seen since the 80s about gay people um talking about about how AIDS was a good thing gay people should die uh you so many of them no I did a tweet the other day which was a it was a monologue that I did on my show about the pride Flagship it's called Free Speech Nation on on GB news okay keep going okay and I put out a thing about how pride no longer represents gay people I got attacked from both the right and the left or at least people who identify as right and left I should qualify I got attacked by outright right-wing reactionary homophobes calling me a sodomite uh you know because you're gay because I'm saying that it is degraded you know degeneracy is the word they like to use uh they also use like to spell uh the word return with a V instead of a u to invoke in Roman numerals this idea of this Grand Roman tradition believe me if they went back to Rome they might not like so yeah yeah I'm just going to say that um but anyway um so those idiots you know you just block and move on and then similarly I was being attacked by gender ideologues to identify as being on the left their responses were slightly worse because I had two of them saying I should kill myself calling me a CIS gay CIS gays like this should kill themselves and another one called me a and that was coming from someone who says they're left wing now that I've never heard that kind of language well not since I was a small child that that it's sort of been out of our society for about 15 years that kind of stuff but now that kind of virulent homophobia is coming from trans activists well okay so you have to okay so why are they calling you what why are they why because they fundamentally believe that um to be gay is transphobic they don't say it that way but what they are saying is that if you are writing off if I as a male and writing off uh women who identify as men okay then I am transphobic if you're writing off again there's I just don't know any other way to say it I don't mean to be vulgar but you you do not want to kiss someone with a vagina but I'm not thinking in terms of genitals at that point you know but I don't want but they're thinking that you're thinking is not about that the sexuality is about uh it's it's about holistic experience of humanity when you are attracted to someone uh part of the reason why I'm attracted to individuals is that they are male that's sort of integral part of it um and so yeah that is it's not possible actually because I'm not one of those people that has an element of bisexuality to me uh whereas a lot of people do uh sexuality unlike biological sex is a spectrum I don't have that so it's necessary but not sufficient it's not possible for me to be sexually attracted to a woman let me put it that way and that's the that's the case for a lot of gay people well that's also the case for me it's not possible for me to read secular track to a man right but what but would you be attracted to a a trans man a TR so I always translate the word trans as fake right so like someone born with a vagina so no no I said oh sorry yeah let's get this right so it would be I'm in your case so someone with a penis no I can only tell you the answer is no you don't need to even cut anything okay so that and is that you see the trans activists would say well that's an example of your bigotry or your trauma um but it's not a conscious thing is it you haven't sort of said I uh I I I don't find that person attracted because of that you just innately don't find that person attractive right correct right now you can find someone to track as in you can appreciate Beauty uh I assume you know there are some individuals trans individuals who they say pass right there could be a trans individual who to all intensive purposes looks completely female I would not want to sleep with them no but you might see someone and aesthetically say that's an attractive woman not knowing it's it's a man okay that could conceivably happen but there is a huge leap between that and then having sexual congress with such an Indian Congress I love that sexual Congress it's a very very British slightly moralistic actually yeah I come to think of it so okay so you've experienced this firsthand well yeah not much I mean just on Twitter and Twitter doesn't really count but yeah no no but it's out there and people so so okay so I just I'm trying to work through this now so I don't understand as a I don't really even like the word CIS because that just gives them exactly what they're looking for and that makes it as if it's arbitrary the body and the judge I just don't even like the term but well actually it's worth pointing out that the word sis only makes sense if you're a believer in gender identity so right it doesn't even make sense for a trans activist to call you sis because the word cisgender means somebody whose gender identity isn't is in alignment to their biological sex right but if you don't have a gender identity then the word CIS doesn't mean anything of people don't have a gender identity we don't believe in that such a thing uh it'd be like you saying to an atheist talking about their soul but but similarly a trans activist will say you do have a gender identity whether you can choose to acknowledge it or not in the same way that a high priest will say you do have a soul whether you choose to acknowledge it or not and that's why this is it's important to understand this as a religious belief system because that is precisely what it is and and in a sense it seems that it seems obvious Andrew Sullivan others have written but this you've written about this and spoken about this very eloquently it is an attempt at the Erasure of homosexuality but I don't think it's consciously so I think what we've got to remember is that everyone is working with different definitions that's a huge thing here if you genuinely believe that being male and being female is a matter of some kind of esoteric individual feeling and it is not related whatsoever to your DNA chromosomes biology anything at all if you genuinely believe that then within that those parameters then yes uh to be attracted to someone who identifies as male if your male is gay because then sexuality has been reframed and redefined along those terms but that's not how most people Define those terms and what's happening is the trans activists are insisting that their redefinitions are embraced wholeheartedly throughout Society that's what they're saying they're saying yeah so for instance let's take the NHS National Health Service in the UK which is a brilliant brilliant thing because it means that anyone who is ill can go and get treatment and they don't have to pay and that's very foreign to me as an American it would be you call it socialized medicine right but it's actually keep going it's very good because it means that if you're poor and you get ill you don't die yeah I'm just for the record huge fan of the best available care until you're 18 the best available education tier 18. I'm a huge fan of the state and now I'm going to get 50 million freaking complaints but please keep going you know that's fine I think I think I think it is a good thing and social net but anyway keep going so at the NHS they have a policy they in in 2010 the then Health secretary Andrew lansley said that we are going to accommodate people on the wards according to their sex as in Single Sex accommodation because it's important for people to have privacy and dignity and and all sorts of reasons right yeah uh in private there are memos going around which I've read saying that we're actually going to accommodate people by gender identity but we're going to say sex because the public won't understand it remember this was 13 years ago when people didn't really understand these terms or anything right so what it means is that the NHS at present has an official policy whereby if I were to say that I feel like a woman or if I would say I am non-binary and I demand to be on the woman's Ward they would have to accommodate me according accordingly that's the NHS rules now of course the problem with that is I'm not anatomically biologically in any way female but I now have superseded the idea of gender identity in official NHS policy has superseded biological sex now you would have thought that a body a group that is uh that treats people physically that is a medical the medical profession they of all people should prioritize biological reality truth over over biological reality that's yeah right yeah but they don't they have a they even have a policy called Annex B which means that if a patient complains you know if a woman says there's someone with a penis on my ward sleeping next to me and if they complain the official response from NHS staff has got to be you are mistaken there is no man on this Ward which is of course what we call gaslighting um when there was a sexual assault last year on a ward in the hospital in London the police turned up to investigate and they were told by the staff that couldn't have happened because there is there were no men on that Ward even though the staff knew there was a biological male on the ward but their policy meant they had to lie to the police and therefore uh stymie an investigation into rape you wrote about that in your book the new period yeah I mentioned it because it's a very good example of how the stakes are really high here you see people who just say well all this stuff about gender identity and stuff just ignore it and it'll go away there was a very facile article by Matthew Paris in the times last week saying precisely that but you know when rape victims can't have their crime investigated that is actually pretty serious and to just sort of wish all this away is not gonna it's not gonna help the problem is that in all aspects of public policy even the government even this conservative government uh they've just taken on board this idea that your inner sense your sexed soul your gender identity that needs to take priority over the way we organize society and the way we organized Society is of course through a recognition of biological sex it's there in changing facilities uh it's their own Hospital Wards it's there in prisons it's certainly they're in domestic violence Refuge centers although now men biological men can demand entrance to these facilities because for some reason that idea of a gender identity has just been this belief system has just been taken on it as a new National religion now that's that's a so that's a huge problem obviously for women's rights the reason why I say it's anti-gay yeah firstly because it undermines what it means to be homosexual okay which is what which is to say is to be same-sex attractive okay you even have activists saying that the phrase same-sex attracted is a dog whistle a fascist dog whistle right You Gotta Throw fascist in there of course inevitably um that's the first reason the second reason which I think is really really important is that this ideology having infiltrated the NHS and the medical establishment more broadly certainly in America and Canada for sure yeah is now responsible for the sterilization and medicalization of gay youth that to me is the most obvious example of homophobia if you just say if you were to say to anyone 20 years ago most extreme version I would say it would be no one would have believed it no one would if you would have said the state would have been paying to have gay kids castrated or or re-assigned so that they fit into a heterosexual Paradigm what they do by the way in Iran and Pakistan where the state funds that why because they kill homosexuals because if you're gay in those States they'll you get the death penalty but the state is now funding sex and has been for a long time funding sex change operations now Pakistan was quite late to this but it was quite funny when Pakistan when the Pakistani government said they were going to start funding sex change operations the pink news did a video saying hooray Pakistan is embracing trans rights no it was funding sex changes because it kills gay people and they don't and they don't want gays so as you can see there is fundamentally something anti-gay about this movement now we should separate all of this from trans people trans people have nothing to do with this it's trans activists most of whom are straight or or what if they're not even trans they're they're what they call Trans allies uh most trans people just want to get on with their lives and they want to pass as the opposite sex and they don't want to be observed as being the sex that they were born with but they don't they know that they're not this I mean Blair White made the point that you know if you without the idea of biological sex there's no such thing as being trans to deny biological sex is actually one of the most transphobic things you can do because what you're saying is trans people don't exist right but anyway we can leave that aside what I'm saying is given the medicalization of gay people remember in hanaban's book a time to think which is a study of the Tavistock gender pediatric clinic in London which is funded by the NHS and run by the NHS she found that between 80 and 90 of adolescents who were referred to the Tavistock were same-sex attracted in other words gay in other words in high rates of autism over 50 yeah which means that the majority of times that you put these kids onto puberty blockers which in almost every case leads to cross-sex hormones and then potentially irreversible reversible surgery and sterilization that what you're doing effectively is you are fixing gay people heterosexualizing gay people uh or you are medicalizing autistic people um it's very very serious now there are some people a very very small minority who do suffer from gen gender dysphoria uh there are people who have always felt throughout their life that that they feel this way for whatever reason now I'm not qualified to talk about what how you deal with that but what I do know is that given that most feelings of gender non-conformity in youth tend to be reconciled through puberty the vast majority by stopping puberty by putting a block on puberty you're you're putting a block on the Cure you're putting a block on the very thing that will resolve this issue that's not to say that in every single case uh the gender dysphoria disappears and you know it may be the case that there are adults who need to transition either in terms of how they present or in terms of surgical modification in order to live a happy life and I think adults should be able to do what they have the how they want with their bodies and so I support anyone's right to do that that's the liberal approach children absolutely not 100 there's no way that a child can consent to this kind of thing and we are and that that distinction really has to be reinforced the reason why it isn't is because trans activists have convinced so many people in the political sphere and the commentaria that there is such a thing as a gendered soul but Biden is one of them right Biden's one of them and that and that children who say they are the opposite sex actually authentically are and that they have that insight into their soul that nobody else has and I come back to this point why therefore put this religious belief system and make it public policy we don't do it with any other religious belief system so why do it with this I mean there are so many places that we can go with this but one thing that that I've been thinking about is is it possible let's let's accept by Fiat that this is the case let's just as you're just gonna go with it so they're right people have gendered souls you know if someone people are born in the wrong body I mean in that same coherent because they say they say that there is a a fixed gendered soul that we all have which is our gender identity yeah which is also by the way sometimes completely fluid and changeable there's nothing consistent about this this philosophy well okay well then let's say there is well but where I was going to go with this and maybe this question doesn't even make sense but can someone be wrong about their gendered soul right because it's like the no true Scotsman thing but but clearly they can because of the proliferation of what we call D transition exactly yes but then they but that's no true forgot to me they'd say well they weren't trans well exactly but the whole but but in order for that to be operative you either have to make the argument that that they were well you have to admit that that you can be wrong about it well you have to admit that the idea of gender self-identification as a precept for as a premise for the making of laws and the accommodation of prisoners Etc is flawed and everyone has to agree on that because if trans activists are saying well the detransitions weren't really trans then they're admitting correct that gender self ID is not a thing that we can trust right that it can always be open to exploitation if you take the example of Prisons right yeah uh you know there is of the males who identify as female in prisons they are disproportionately more likely to be sex offenders right by a huge amount okay that being the case if trans activists are saying we always have to trust gender self-id then they are effectively saying that trans people have a greater predisposition to be sexual offenders no I'm not saying that but that's the upshot of what they are in play so there's either one or two conclusions there either trans people are more likely to be predatory which I don't believe or predators are more likely to exploit a system of self-identification which I do believe Okay so this is a weird thing to say to you what I'm going to say every single thing you said is correct and accurate but it only makes sense if you buy into a system of Reason facts and evidence quite I have not met a single individual who operates in this milieu who is I mean forget even reasonable but who's even willing to entertain facts evidence and argument right well but there's a good reason for that isn't it well because the whole thing is insane okay it's completely incoherent it collapses if it's scrutinized um now I don't think it says but then you could say that about any religious belief system couldn't you no I don't think well okay I think you could well okay let's just take a look at like Jesus walking on water right right so or that's a good one the walking on water now you're policing me in an uncomfortable position of having to defend something that I clearly did not believe but I'm in a good try it anyway there's nothing inconsistent I mean you might be inconsistent with the laws of physics or reality but you can then make the argument that space-time opened up for a particular incident but this ideology gender ideology it's not it's so incoherent it's another degree of incoherent because even its practitioners can't Define their own terms yeah so here's my I mean I wanna I just want to keep diving down this rabbit hole but something's in the back of my mind and something that I've been thinking about for a long time I just marvel Andrew I just marvel at how many people have fallen for something so stupid this is so stupid I don't Marvel at that because please please help me well because history is replete with examples of large groups of people believing things that cannot possibly be true we are susceptible as as creatures to hysteria okay and we don't even have to be stupid all right I'm gonna push back on that please would you agree with me that certain phenomena are less possible than other phenomena for example now is one example remember the weather balloons that were Landing balloons everyone said they were aliens or I was talking yeah yeah and now recently it's always talk about aliens yes and and how uh the government has been hiding right especially which is completely insane to me I mean just like crazy crazy however there are degrees of things that are crazy that's not I you know Michael Sherman gives that a one percent less than one percent I don't even give that a point you know I'll stand here for 10 minutes and say zero one okay chance of being true but a pregnant male is zero yes that's just zero yes so when you say that there have been things throughout history I mean look communism has a certain kind of seductive capacity and maybe it needed to be empirically tested and we couldn't a priori no if the basic tenets of of marxian Communism at least worked we can bracket that but at least there was something there it wasn't just an earth thoughts you know way of findings men cannot be pregnant again it's just a it's just not the same as saying a guy should walk on water but wait a minute wait a minute the majority of people haven't fallen for the idea that men can get pregnant virtually no one thinks that not even among trans activists the trans activists who say that men can get pregnant are simply working within their own definitions of what it means right right for them to be male simply means to identify as male so in those terms yes it is possible for a man to get pregnant okay so therefore this isn't quite the same as a denial of of reality in that case in that instance what I'm talking about is Notions of probability so you go back to the idea of a gendered soul right right I mean look all of this stuff we could we could analyze rationally so for instance if you were to open a clinic for kids who are struggling with their gender new feelings of gender or whatever right and you saw the statistics that have been that are absolutely clear that the vast majority of kids who don't conform to gender stereotypes turn out to be gay okay that's the data's in on that we know that to be the case so if you have predominantly gender non-conforming youth coming along to your clinic saying they think they might be in the wrong body and by the way most of them are saying they're same-sex attracted the logical thing would be okay so these are gay kids and we still live in a society where you know if you're gender non-conforming you might get a bit of stick so we're dealing with those issues really the the fix there is to fix Society so that we no longer care employees play with dolls and girls play football and have short hair we fix society which we thought we'd done right the solution is not to surgently alter the bodies of those children to fit in with those outdated societal expectations right now that to me is clearly logical clearly reasonable and yet when Kathleen stock makes that point she has thousands of people standing outside the venue screaming that she's a bigger than a fascist right so we are in topsy-turvyland here but what you're seeing there from those protesters I think firstly is the complete well complete surrender of any kind of attempt to rationalize to to to think about the issues sensibly and to just to reduce everything to this miniature idea of good versus evil and they're positioned that argument on the evil side and they are on the side of the Angels but that's a quality that I do see throughout history okay you know so for instance during Nazi Germany you know it's a terrible comparison to make all the time but you go back to it don't you good people in that country were informing on Jewish neighbors uh people you know people their friends their you know people who they liked and and knowing that they would be killed by doing so and those weren't there wasn't suddenly just these evil people you know they just it they got caught up in this hysteria this hysterical way of thinking you could say the same for we've had a recent example in um I mean even in Rwanda do you believe that suddenly that this significant proportion of the population suddenly became serial killers that you know that they weren't caught up in something Beyond themselves or or um the example of of the Satanic ritual abuse scandal in America where you had Social Services taking children away from their families because they all genuinely believed that children were being uh placed into Satanic ritual abuse Cults something for which there was no evidence and and which was clearly Fantastical in this country we had uh one or two fantasists claiming that there was a Secret Ring of politicians including the prime minister of the time uh murdering and raping children in these elaborate rituals we had pizza gate Pizza gate we've had more yeah right yeah what I'm saying is again and again and you're saying that there is no degree of difference in terms like if I had a crazy meter the the crazy the crazy meter would be this gender ideology what I'm saying is it doesn't strike me as atypical in in terms of human behavior the propensity to believe the unbelievable it's it's not only that but to buy into it almost immediately I mean another good book to read is a book called The Secret of Brynner Stone um which is a book damn it I can't remember the name of the author I haven't read it it's about the care home sex abuse scandal in Wales in the 1980s and what's fascinating was nominated for the Orwell prize it was a bit of serious piece of work people have forgotten about it but it's all about how people ended up in prison for sexual abuse uh because of her fantasies there was one fantasist and she'd sort of come up with these narratives and She interviewed all these people who had been housed in kept in in care and then these these ideas came uh into that they they started perpetuating these narratives and people ended up in prison there are still people in prison today who are doubtless innocent as a result of the fantasist and the way in which other people starting buying into the fantasies is very very interesting um but it's not abnormal is what I'm saying okay so let me let me ask you a question because I've been struggling with this if you don't want to it you're more than welcome to push back and if you think that the comparison I'm gonna make is just totally unrelated tell me okay I just cannot for the life of me figure out why so many people think we're visited by aliens like I just no no but I'm like really serious like I just cannot you don't know like people are friends people like I know are texting me to okay but I'm making a connection I'm making a connection fine so so we got that and then we got this you know Crazy Town chopping off everybody's genitals when they're 14 when you can't even get a tattoo I mean it's so insane like what why is it I don't think that I'm particularly smarter than any of the people believing this stuff well maybe the gender stuff that I am but that's there are smart people who believe it yeah well that's a lot of mediocre Minds a little awful but but my my question is why are some people immune to this nonsense or is it they're not immune or is it well tool set no firstly I think what it is is that the majority of people it's not that they're immune to it uh they don't understand it so firstly take the gender ideology take the Tavistock take the idea of pride flag and the pride movement and about how we need to be inclusive peop most people are just nice most people in the world are just boringly boringly nice and they just want everyone to have a fair shot of things genuinely Wicked people are really rare you know so why would you life is full of stuff to deal with and chores and and and and and and hardships why are you going to go out of your way to read all these books you know all these sort of books about the culture war and gender ideology and stuff when actually what you've got is is the police and the government just saying look be nice be kind be compassionate and I'll I'll add to that and they see peer-reviewed literature and academics supporting this right exactly and as the Improvement tour of knowledge and science excuse me science and he's got the time he's got the time to go into all of this stuff it actually takes quite a lot to delve in to realize that the majority of people like like when you pride pride in London will get over a million people right when when they do the pride parade I guarantee virtually all of those people will be really decent people who think that they're there to support inclusivity and being nice to people and what they won't see is that progress pride flag that is flying above their heads on every corner on t-shirts face paints is a symbol an anti-gay a symbol of an anti-gay anti-woman movement they won't see it because in order to understand that you have to look into the ideology you have to see what it's its ramifications are its Origins are Etc who's got time for it let's just have a street party where we say let's be nice to everyone I love wins that's a really positive thing okay the tragedy of all of this is that this movement has hoodwink either by Design or not but it is Hoodwinked a lot of decent people into supporting really really reactionary ideas that's the tragedy of it I think reactionary is the most charitable world it is charitable yeah yeah yeah I mean let's say well certainly regressive it's a regressive idea it's regressive to believe uh that a boy who behaves in a typically feminine way is there for a girl can't possibly be a boy it is regressive when the Globe Theater in London puts on a production of Joan of Arc and they make a non-binary because she was strong independent powerful implicitly in that of course is the idea that a woman can't be those things she couldn't have been a woman if she was strong independent and tough she can't be a woman so let's make a non-binary you know it's it's regressive it's it's you know the the Globe Theater even had an academic and of course it's an academic write an article on Elizabeth the first for their website saying that Elizabeth the first was non-binary because Elizabeth the first did that famous speech of you know I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman but I have the mind and stomach of a man uh and they say well that means she was probably uncomfortable with her gender identity and was probably non-binary and actually use they them pronouns for Queen Elizabeth the first that's insane that's coming from an academic there's that I mean that's the other thing there's a weird thing at the moment of transiting historical figures yeah typical for instance uh Jesus is up there too Jesus probably why don't they trans Muhammad well we all know the answer to that well they won't do that they won't do that because there's risk there um but but you know the lesbian through the first brick at Stonewall stormy de Lavery uh they'll say well that was a man that was a trans man you know no it was it was a Butch lesbian so uh look and it happens all the time it's always to do with stereotypes you know Radcliffe Hall woman with short hair the cigarillo masculine and quality lesbian basically Butch lesbian probably probably trans that's Transat individual James Miranda Barry the doctor there's trans that individual you know uh rather than a woman pretending to be a man to make it in a male profession which is what the reality was so all of these examples of and that's why I mean it's religious it's almost like who is it who goes back in time and converts the dead is it the Mormons that do that I think they keep oh yes yes right that's what the the trans movement is doing at the moment it's going back and converting people after the fact and saying um we're now claiming them as trans or non-binary non-binary of course being in itself quite a reactionary idea because if you identify as non-binary what you're saying is there are ways to be a man and ways to be a woman and I fit into neither of those things but by saying that you are confirming and reifying and giving a Credence to the notion that there are certain ways of being a man and certain ways of being a woman so even the identification non-binary is a reactionary conservative thing to do because it is based on a concert deeply conservative view of what of gender roles and that's why feminists are right where feminists went wrong I think for many years was that their insistence that gender and sex wasn't completely socially constructed and there were no differences between men and women and you you'll see the radical feminists now are back pedaling on that because they realize what the end point of that is uh and they will now say things like for the most part gender roles are socially constructed and that's probably true a butlerian notion yeah that gender is performative yeah so okay so I'm processing this and one of the things you said that I've been thinking about was nobody has the time for this they don't nobody has the time I mean I'm just thinking about all the things that I don't have time for which is basically everything you know I don't have time to figure out anthropogenic global warming I don't have time to help the some extinct species gorillas or whatever I I just don't have time for any of this stuff and that's why we have to trust experts we have to be able to but we can't at the moment correct because the experts are now High priests right they've bought into like that that I mean that to me is the I mean we've spoken about this before haven't we feature about the legitimation crisis and why it is so serious when you know I don't know anything about science global warming climate change so I need to know that the experts in that field are telling me the truth that's really important because I am Outsourcing my judgment to them correct and and you have everyone has to be able to do this I don't care who you are whatever kind of polymath You Are there are areas in life where we have to do that you know when I go to the doctor I'm doing it because I don't know what's going to cure the rash on my elbow or whatever I am Outsourcing that to the expert and trusting the expert will give me the correct medication to deal with that or whatever it might be but if you live in a world where as we now do we're academics the people who produce knowledge are not telling you the truth and are willing to lie to themselves and to their peers about fundamental aspects of reality and we're in a hell of a lot of trouble I I think the fact that um prestigious medical journals are saying that sex is a spectrum quite routinely now is a real problem the fact that the New Zealand government wanted to teach indigenous ways of knowing science right they wanted to tell kids Dawkins and Jerry Corner up about that well they should be yeah and everybody's The Usual Suspects are losing their minds but I've also come to the point we simply cannot listen to these people these people are throwing the entire Society into a systemic sore yeah but then where does that lead but then you're back to the problem of ignoring them means they win it doesn't mean they go away you know so you well you do need some people like the little sucker fish and tank to clean up the garbage like you need some people like Jerry Cohen who's out there bulldogging but didn't he get like fired for that for registering an objection no no sorry he's the guy who writes why evolution is true yeah um on that website they were talking about an academic who was fired for raising for writing a uh yeah Jerry's a professor emeritus he's a friend of mine at University of Chicago right now so he doesn't but you know that's the other thing now we have to wait till people retire and become Emeritus before they can say things that are true well that's the problem so when so for instance that's a good example so when the New Zealand government says that in schools say alongside the theory of evolution you also teach them that raindrops there are people who believe that raindrops are the tears of the goddess of the Forest right now they clearly shouldn't be in the same lesson one of them you could teach about indigenous ideas and belief systems but that's in a religious studies lesson and there's nothing wrong with teaching about that um but teaching is an alternative way of thinking about you know the the the reality of evolution that doesn't make sense you wouldn't do it in a history class you wouldn't have a lesson about the Holocaust and say oh but there are some people who believe it didn't actually happen let's let's teach David Irving's views alongside the established view let's do that right you wouldn't do it because within the rigor of historical discipline no one takes those views seriously because they've been utterly discredited and rightly so by other historians who know what they're doing and know what they're talking about why then in a science class can't we say well the belief system that rain is the teardrops of a goddess that has no scientific basis and therefore doesn't belong here why can't we do that uh my I thought it was rhetorical for a second but I'll answer that because it would offend the sensibilities of some people and they would claim that there would be their voice was being demeaned in their their culture yes it actually was rhetorical but then I essentially realized I was interested in what year yeah yeah well I I think that years ago I wanted to put a curriculum into high schools that was a talk people about science and pseudoscience yeah and I trained a group of students and they went into the high schools to give their pitch and two of the schools they went into one of the things that they said was nonsense is Homeopathy yeah and the school administrator said we just simply could never allow this it would offend some parent behind the outputs is to to tell them it's nonsense but that's confirmed we know it's well it is but the idea is well what would you rather would you rather have some Contagion on you think that you're curing it through Homeopathy and then infect other people I mean so there's been a cultural demeaning of the truth and we've forwarded the sensitivities of others particularly we're forwarded the sensitivities of marginalized people and my fear this is a tad far field but my fear is that that's percolated into the legal system and economic oh it absolutely has but you know you're exactly right that prioritizing people's feelings should never be even a factor when it comes to academic discipline the idea you know it might be uncomfortable for gay people to understand that their sexual orientation is a kind of misfire you know it's it's not what we have evolved to do we have evolved to procreate and the procreative impulse has misfired in gay people and they are attracted to members of their own sex right then let me that's the reality of it but that shouldn't upset us but it well then if it does it doesn't mean we shouldn't teach it if for instance let's take the example of homosexuality yeah if we accept that homosexuality is a kind of misfire from the procreative impulse of humanity yeah that's doesn't that doesn't mean that gay people are lesser right at all but if you then enact if you then interpret it to mean that right they're deviant they're perverted and therefore it's an act policy to make sure they're second-class citizens that's the problem I got yeah so so I guess my my question and this is more of a fear than a question is not everybody has the moral compass of you or Helen Pluckers not everybody has a respect for Liberal traditions so and and that's Complicated by the fact that we have um people who not only Harbor a kind of moral and epistemological relativism but they they Champion whatever their particular moral or interpretive framework happens to be I'm thinking of in a religious sense and yeah Reed and I are going to do uh some Street epistemology in Muslim neighborhoods which should prove to be quite interesting and and I'm I'm concerned that the people who are ill-liberal will will get a hold of some of these ideas and use that either to treat people differently on the basis of a perceived stereotype of a group yeah or they will use that to enact public policies that will in this case actually will be systemic it'll be a kind of systemic discrimination you're talking about is tyranny that's exactly what I'm talking about well humans have a tendency yeah to produce tyrants yeah and tyrants have a tendency to seek power and to acquire it by nefarious means and the history books are full of it so you're right to be cautious of that so what we haven't had is a we haven't had a truly liberal Society that really does embrace wholeheartedly the principles of social liberalism I don't think a core belief of mine is that truth has to be the north star of academic institutions it does and the society and our friendships relationships interactions when we talk to people when we yes try to navigate the world and I've been thinking about I've been thinking about objections people could raise the problem is you have seen with the work you've done with Cleese I'm trying to the American pronunciation is you couldn't find somebody to come on your show no to talk to him to represent the world position not just please but my show that I have on Sundays I always invite people who we would call woke right to to who who adhere to that people who are gender ID logs they always say no they say we're not going to discuss it no debate right so so I'm raising this point because something these are things that I've been thinking of but I can't get people to have that conversation with me so I have to kind of place myself in their heads to think about what they would say and the fact that they won't though is indicative that this this is precisely why they can't win because they are refusing to debate because that's what tyrants do because they because at the heart of their belief is an authoritarian belief in other words my way is correct if everyone else has to bend to my will a tyrant won't come and debate the laws that they've decreed they just decree them yeah I guess so I guess what's I guess what's disturbing to me is it's not it's not merely the callous demeaning of Truth it's the Turning Away from truth yes it's the I don't want to say denial that's too strong um it's not that that they're arguing against an objective world but that the only way that you can know those worlds that world is through Power relations and differentials in power and people who have less power know the world yeah yeah it's an utterly it's an utterly terrifying thing to me because it's not true well it's not true and anyone who would believe it it robs you of epistemic agency it robs you of the ability to come to truth based upon your immutable characters that's why we have to beat this idea of lived experience as being any kind of Benchmark for how we formulate any kind of policy or indeed if we you know the idea of multiple truths yeah that's my truth that's all different ways of knowing have you heard that phrase yeah of course ways of knowing and you know we just have to get away from that narcissistic idea that your individual perception of the world is how the world is it is a narcissistic idea it's hugely narcissistic but it's also instinctive I get it I think we all have to we are all socialized out of that tendency a child only sees the world as the child sees the world you know if someone the way we experience any kind of scenario our initial interpretation the most comfortable thing is to hold fast to that initial interpretation if you think in terms of you know it's very easy for me if I were to be if someone were to assault me yeah shout at me or whatever for me to interpret that to me for me to impose a reason or a motive onto that and also when you impose motives onto your detractors it makes sense of the world for you it makes it have you noticed this more and more when it comes to opinion columns that I read either on the right or the left it's now really normal for the commentator to say and the reason why the Tories do this is they secretly think this or the reason why labor does this is because they they secretly don't want to do this and mind reading yeah so let me let me pee back after that so my friend Matt thought and I did a series about NPR it's National Public Radio the analog is the BBC but it's far far more worked if you think the BBC has worked NPR is another level of derangement yeah and one of the things like to prep for that I listen to dude I don't think I don't even know how many hours I listen to and one of the things that I learned from that is if they want to find you know what is the right belief about this yeah they'll either do one one or two things they'll find someone on the right who's not particularly smart and interview them about something else which has nothing to do with it and just put it in the clip to make it look like it yeah and or and or and this is what they do do universally is they'll find somebody on the woke left and they'll say to them what does what do why do people want to do this and they'll and then the woke left person will give and it's totally disconnected from why someone on the right would actually want to do that because what they've done is they've believed their own caricature of their opponents right and and that's why you get they always use the phrase dog whistle right right what it really means is that person hasn't said the thing I wanted them to say so I'm going to pretend that they secretly meant it right right so the idea that for instance uh uh that we the phrase same-sex attracted is a dog whistle a transphobic dog whistle is nonsense you know whenever I see the phrase dog whistle I just ignore it because it's someone who is trying to impose what they would like that person to believe and that comes from a a sense of hyper individualism in Safari's my perception is the only perception that matters the problem with that is then it it actually because of the spread of the ideology it becomes entrenched in actual public policy if you go to the government website the crown prosecution Service website or the Police website it will talk about hate crime as being defined by the perception of the victim in other words uh if you perceive that someone attacked you or did something because of prejudice right same thing as the bias response team in American universities but you don't know what's going on on that person's mind there's no it's all very well to have suspicions right and to and to express those suspicions but you can't categorically say I know that this person's actions was motivated by a prejudice against a particular potential characteristic because you have no insight and that's why when it comes to the law you just have to apply the law if someone this is why I pose the idea of hate crime full stop if someone beats me up I want them arrested and prosecuted for the physical attack not for what was secretly going in on in their head while they did it I don't care if they did it because I was gay the fact that they did it is the thing you need to punish uh and I think it's a slippery slope by the way for the government to start trying to mind read and punish people on the basis of thought crime yeah in the United States now we have kind of amount I don't know if you've heard of the Ferguson effect like a mass Ferguson effect many police officers aren't going into high crime neighborhoods many of those happen to be black because they don't want to be accused of racism and yeah oh my God if there's a shooting or what have you and it just seems so obvious to me that we need to enforce the law equally yeah independent of people's I mean that's that's what we've we've African-Americans fought for for years but your brain on Equity does not say that and because it prioritizes the notion of offense correct so it means that intention no longer matters and they do say that again and again they say it doesn't matter what your intention is impact yeah it's about impact not intention right but actually intention is everything you can't be accidentally racist in my view I know they fundamentally disagree without the activists I don't think you can be because racism is about hatred or prejudice against someone of of A different race so I don't think you can accidentally do that I think you can say things that are culturally insensitive without realizing it yeah but but if unless those were motivated by hatred I don't consider it racist I've never understood why why isn't it a good reason to say you know uh you've never you met my son but you never met my daughter yeah so my daughter's adopted from China why isn't what's wrong with saying I adopted someone from China who's my daughter doesn't that prove I'm not racist what's that funny thing isn't it like when when people say uh they scoff at the idea of people who say well I can't be racist I've got black friends that's like the best actually if you do have black friends it's really unlikely that you're a racist yeah it's I mean because it unless you're really putting in the effort to conceal your right maybe you'll be a terrible racist yeah you'll be one of the worst yeah so so it's a weird thing to scoff at that idea but I think getting to this to this idea of offense I think this is absolutely key and I also think it's wine to go back what we were saying earlier about why how has the lgbtqia plus movement become hijacked by an anti-gay premise how has that happened well it's because of this idea it's because of people who are taking offense get to dictate the terms the way things go so when someone decides that something is bigoted transphobic even fascist then everything changes at their whim everyone capitulates to that because we've prioritized the individual perception I think one way past all of this stuff would be to reinstate the notion we'll reinstate uh humility if everyone just understood it from the from the start if everyone just worked on the assumption that they are they are wrong about lots of things we're all wrong about a lot of about lots of things we can all be wrong and we should all be open to changing our minds if we all started from that premise you would automatically be treating your opponents in a more charitable way because you would be thinking well maybe I could learn from what you've got to say yeah I'm gonna I agree 100 percent and I'm going to take it back one step okay in order to get into that position in the first place you you would need to be in an environment that's heterogeneous like intellectually well you would need to hear the other side of the argument at all yeah yeah of course yes yes and if you never hear it yes yes and you become increasingly convinced that you'll extend the belief in the proposition beyond the warrant of the evidence exactly that you know that's why Echo Chambers are so disastrous right that's why activists on University campus trying to force certain opinions out right or first before certain professors out if they don't adhere to this it's the very worst thing you can do absolutely because anyone who's within a society where they are only exposed to one belief system will naturally have that belief system I mean at the end they'll start othering people I don't know if you've read buddy my Tim Urban's book what's our problem I haven't I really like him on Twitter though so I know who you're talking about that book was phenomenal he talked about the opposite of an echo chamber being an idea lab right and you've created a lab and and I would hope that you I know that you and I have this relationship like if I said something that was off base you would tell me yeah hopefully not publicly you just text me and say hey you know what's going on or I hate this off base and I'd say yes or no and we'd have that and not only that so two things one Not only would that not cause me to question our friendship that would actually enhance our friendships because I would think that you had my well-being in mind but the ideas itself wouldn't be a matter of identitarian concern for me because I'm not my idea yeah and so I I wanna I wanna have fewer false beliefs and I want to have more true beliefs the problem is that you're a philosopher and so you are you you welcome that kind of thing right the vast majority of people and look you'll know better than me but there have been studies into this haven't there that when people disagree with others most people take it as a personal front Okay so look so let me throw this I don't think it has anything to do with the fact that I'm a philosopher um and I know the vast majority of philosophers I know and I can think of notable exceptions I met Rebecca tuval a while it was just a lovely human being but the vast majority of philosophers I know they are I I don't know they've they've been in that Echo chamber they've been in that that ecosystem of never hearing any other ideas I don't think that I think that this is a disposition but I'm not going to sit here and like you know it's not some kind of a self-aggrandizing pat myself on the back back thing you say it's a condition though but isn't it isn't it the norm according to these studies isn't it the norm that it's actually quite difficult to think it's quite difficult to change your mind it's uncomfortable yeah and I'm not concerned with any of those things okay I'm concerned with the disposition that makes one want to makes someone want to change one's mind well I see what you mean because that's unusual yeah it's a disposition and so it's not like oh I have all this mountain of evidence and now I'm gonna just flip what I believe no no but you have to have a you have to have a way of thinking about but that's it the way of thinking is is one that as I say starts from the the the understanding that we're wrong that we don't know everything right so I mean everything so how do you do go on the Tim Urban idea how do you even go about putting yourself in an idea lab in the first place as opposed to an echo chamber an ecosystem well if you're already convinced that what you that you have the truth yes the whole madrasa right religious that's why it has to be gender you know criticism of turf that's the whole gender ideology thing that's why it has to be in youth that's why it has to be teaching children about how to think teaching children about critical thinking it has to be because because if look you know like with that Kathleen stock debate at the Oxford Union that girl who came in and glued herself to the floor with a t-shirt about dead trans kids it's based on no evidence whatsoever she is in an echo chamber she's only surrounded by people who listen you know at one of the top universities in the world what you would expect is for that individual to come in and say I've got some preconceptions about what this person thinks but I haven't heard her speak I'd be really interested to if you're an Oxford student yeah it'd be great to hear what this person says and then to consider whether I could be wrong about anything but also to challenge this individual that would be that should be the norm ah but the fact that that isn't the norm right what we need to do is we need to create systems and institutions that do that for us but because we have these intrinsic biases go ahead no but that's why when you see for instance I've seen all these videos going viral this week of Pride events in schools little kids being taught to wave this progress like this anti-gay flag um with with with people coming in and indoctrinating the children into this belief system right because because as we've said earlier it doesn't withhold it doesn't withstand any kind of scrutiny the only way that they can sustain themselves is through the indoctrination of children and that's why they are very much different it's just like religion right just like nobody needs to be indoctrinated about how to turn on a light that's why you you go to a repetition thing like every Sunday because you have to reaffirm the belief and that's why you've seen this proliferation of these woke children's books because if you get them young the hope is or the belief is uh that you'll have them forever you know there's a judgment expression about that is it what Jesuit expression about yes there is what is it again if you get the child by yeah give me a trail at seven I'll have them for a life yeah shop and how it says something similar the but the thing about this is we should take the same view but rather than because liberalism isn't an ideology it's a it's basically saying do whatever you want uh as long as you're not hurting anyone else right if we if we take the view that what we have to do is inculcate among children the fact that this notion of intellectual humility uh questioning the idea that um don't trust your experience of the world your experience of the world is just you and and and and seek out other experiences true diversity in other words if we can inculcate that in childhood you won't get to the position where students at a top university will be treating any descent from their views as a manifestation of evil or diabolism see this is terrifying to me because we've created institutions that are exactly are exactly the opposite and I get you know and you'll know like when you're growing up all the best teachers were the ones that surprised you with new ways of looking at the world um and it's it's for me this is the way education is the key thing for me that's the way to solve everything is that you don't go into a school saying this is the right this is the right way this is the wrong way right around you go into a school and you cultivate critical thinking not in like a a Class A critical thinking class but you embed it in every level of every subject all the time so yeah I don't think that's possible but I want to say something helpful in fact I'm positive that that's not why not because the way that teacher credentialing and certification is done I think that the people in those classrooms are incredibly flawed I think that they've gone through frankly an indoctrination process based on Paula for areas the Brazilian Educators pedagogy of the oppressed yes because so you're saying because the the way the credentialing the way that teachers are trained yeah is to bring them in line with an ideology yeah but that's the problem with therefore the system is broken from The Source right so so it's only but it's only broken if you don't buy into the the people perpetuating the ideology are very happy the system they are but that's what we've got to break down well well I know so well I've to so so my answer to this whole thing is just let it let it burn my answer to this is just building I can't do that with kids so okay you can do that let me throw something out to you this is a little weird far feel let me throw it out so Balaji has said you know the the I don't even know how to describe him he's either one of the most incredible Visionary humans who's ever lived or the deranged Maniac um he said that in a very short period of time we're going to see AI tutors yes you probably will yeah and those AI tutors are gonna obviate the need for maybe not the social interaction But the teacher in front of the classroom so that we'll have to depend we can count on the AI to put those dispositions and values in the kids but the problem with even those AIS I don't know if you've I think it's a terrible idea I think it's a terrible idea too I don't know if you screwed around chat GPT but that's the most welcome I mean I haven't touched it I'm not it's the most woke thing exactly I've been told all about that about how if you ask it to make a joke about Donald Trump it'll do it you guys can make a joke about Kamala Harris it'll say we can't because right that's not Equitable right um it's the worst possible thing because AI from what I understand has sort of abibed all of the work ideology within it 100 also you can't have a robot teaching yeah right so my my concerns I don't think that this can be done I think I think well well how are you going to get over the existing system how are you gonna you have ideologues you have jobs for Life yeah you have I mean how are you going to get out over the system time we you know we we will have nothing we'll have irreparably well maybe not a replica but we'll have damaged the cognitive abilities and we've inculcated a sense of Frailty in a generation but this is what I mean about don't ignore the problem address the problem I'm so sick of these people saying ignore the culture war and it'll go away no that's total nonsense right so you have to you have to actually stand up and address it it's so it's so important it's not going to happen overnight but you know I don't realize what what people if I said let me tell you right now what happened if I said you know what um education has lost its true seeking Mission and it's it's it's um now made a shift towards alleviating oppression I'd have hundreds of people saying one of two things I'm a Nazi or I'm a conspiracy theory so but they are just embodying the very problem that this floor decorational system produces 100 correct so so that's that's why the solution is let the system burn no because create a new thing right and if anybody wants to try to save the system well you that's if that's how you want to spend your time go for it this might be to do with your innate impatience though Peter you know because I mean if you know we live in a country where a number of years ago uh you would be thrashed as a school pupil if you didn't believe in the word of Jesus Christ or the Bible the authentic word of the Bible right we no longer live in big trouble right you would be you'll be in huge trouble so what I'm saying is just because we can't envisage at the moment because we're in the middle of the eye of this storm that doesn't mean it won't happen eventually the liberal approach within education was making gains it wasn't perfect but it was work it was getting somewhere then it was derailed by wokism okay and so then we can find so surely if it could be so easily derailed we can find a way to get to get it back on track okay so this is what I've been thinking about and I've been thinking of actually writing a book about this uh but I just I just don't know so even if you came up with a prophylactic against Walt Disney yeah like even if you came up with okay we're going to make a teacher training program and you know it's however you want to phrase the mission or what have you you'd have some other deranged ideology go in there and take its place right that would be that would be what you have to guard against well I wonder if there's not somebody somebody said something to me a while ago I'm trying not to talk about Jiu Jitsu but I have to talk about Jiu-Jitsu this guy they call him the Jets Vulcan Jiu Jitsu Falcon okay and he said to me he thinks there's a unified field theory of Jiu Jitsu something that unifies the positions in Jiu Jitsu okay and I thought about that and I I wondered if there was a unified field theory of rationality right like you know like bracketing that I think there may be and I think one of the one of the um uh the belief revision would be core in that but I wonder if there's a kind of unified field Theory or unified pedagogical educational theory of a metaprophylactic against the mass delusion like Building A system that is impervious to the whatever myopic views one would have that they would think was true in the moment like literally constructing a system I think you need a system well what would it well good good teachers know how to know what the prophylactic is good teachers know instinctively if they're in a classroom situation that sometimes they play Devil's Advocate that sometimes they throw out different ideas about different things than when a people say something they say well actually what have you considered it from this perspective that's what a good teacher does a bad teacher goes in there and and proselytizes you know I mean I've had teachers like that anyways okay but okay so you can foster okay so let me say so I okay let me just say we're on the same page and and maybe I was far far too idealistic and I gotta come down from my sky position let me says how do you do that though with the teacher training programs in the institution as a whole like you can point to an individual and I've certainly had teachers in my life who have been extraordinary in that sense they've challenged yeah I can answer that please I think what you do is you get rid of teacher training I think that's the first thing you do I think you pay teachers twice as much as they're currently paid and you make it a competitive job I think you get uh some of the smartest people you make teaching one of the most prestigious things that you can do and you encourage more and more of the top people to go into it you give them more time during the day you halve their timetable and double their money they have actual time to prepare to think to create be creative in the classroom because as a teacher in any school and I know I've done it you're constantly behind you're constantly blagging it you're turning up unless you have an attitude sorry what word did you use blagging blagging as in um what's an American equivalent your your bluffing your way through okay because you haven't had time to Mark everyone's work you haven't had time to prepare all the lessons so you're turning up and sort of saying okay and you're just going along with it right yeah now if if teachers had twice as much time free time within the timetable to prepare Mark and everything they could be really creative with their lessons if they had more money and they were comfortable in their lives all of this would help and if you could attract genuine people who are genuinely intellectually curious into the teaching profession who understand the need to play Devil's Advocate to get people to think about things okay so you learn on the job look I did teacher training it was useless it did Tim did you mean anything I learned by teaching okay so so you think trying to design a system for example of teacher training that takes into account things that we don't even know about yet is the wrong way to think about the problem the right way to think about the problem is just not have it there in the first place you don't need it if you're genuinely good teachers don't need to be trained to be teachers you learn while you're doing it yeah and and I think I honestly think that every element of my teacher training that I did was a waste of time yeah yeah and it's just about getting better people into the profession now you you know it's not going to be perfect but the whole point of school is kids have lots of different teachers and they get different things from different teachers and you create this really interesting vibrant human Community the other thing you can do is emphasize literature hugely so teaching kids early on in life art history that's something that they don't Camille talks about this how art history needs to be embedded it really does uh get them to look at Great art and consider it get them to read literature and come up with ideas get them to read write wide ranges of Danny Dennett talks about that with uh wanting people to know different Faith positions well because the way that we learn that our individual perspectives are flawed is by exposure to other people's perspectives that doesn't work in a world where the publishing industry has sensitivity readers you curtail what possible perspectives you can see right yeah it has particularly with young literature yeah I clicked on the profile of the person who did that and of course pronouns and the whole well it's endemic within the publishing industry it's a particular disaster for literature aimed at children going back and rewriting Roald Dahl yeah that's disaster yeah absolutely disaster so children reading widely is probably the best defense against wokism and I mean fiction reading Classics is the best defense against it it's not going to work if they're reading a sanitized version of Huckleberry Finn or a sanitized version of Gulliver's Travel getting them to read these books tape okay give a good example I read a book when I was nine eight nine years old by Terry Pratchett a book called truckers do you know this book yeah the truckers is aimed at kids it's a kid's book it is about a race of small gnomes they're called little miniature creatures who live under the floorboards of a department store they don't know they don't know that there's anything outside of this department store they think this department store is the whole world and that there is a God in the department store um and they have their their religious scripture and they they believe that this is all there is and the story is about some other gnomes who come from the outside world and they go into this department store and it destroys obliterates his belief system by reading that as a child I instantly understood institutionalized religion because it's a satire and institutionalized religion I got it now I wouldn't have got it if someone had sat down to me and it tried to explain but but having read that as a child any intelligent child who reads that book will understand why Echo Chambers are wrong I got that from Plato's Republic right but you wouldn't be reading that when you're eight yeah exactly you get that from the cave analogy you get that from but but for children what I'm saying is there are really good books Roald Dahl is another example really interesting author who do you think that even applies for people kids who aren't that smart like 90 IQs yeah A Book Like A Book Like truckers A Book Like The Witches you know uh these these books are really powerful because they are within a language that a child can understand but they they they're the best way don't just set the book and get them to read the book get the sit and talk about the books what does this mean what's he trying to say what the best that's why I do think the Arts and literature should be our priority yeah to do that we in our K-12 system in the US we we would need to teach children to read and that's a big ask well that's a yeah that's a given right the literacy levels have to be high um but also it teaches you about moral ambiguity um this is why it's the worst thing you can do to a child to say is to sanitize a book so there's no there's no different ways of thinking in the book and there's no um uh no villains anymore in the book you know people don't read you know children are smarter than you think children understand things children understand that even by reading so it's even by reading a book like Huckleberry Finn which uses language that we no longer use the discussions in the classroom a child can understand and begin to learn how things have changed how perceptions have changed how attitudes towards ethnic minority people has changed for the better they don't read that and think oh well that's the way I should speak now and I should be racist it's really you know Huckleberry Finn is a satire Against Racism it's it's it uses satire it shows how the the society the God-fearing up upright Christian adults are still enslaving their fellow creatures but a child sees through it there's something really really powerful about that reading that as a boy was really important for me those are the I think it can't be underestimated I mean I suppose I would say this because I come from a literary background in terms of my degree and everything but I do think it's the most important thing even above teaching kids about how the world works science mathematics physics is it while those are really important in order to break away from this anti-human movement reinstating the power and importance of literature and storytelling and poetry I think those things are probably the most important the woke cannot don't know what to do with the Arts other than to sanitize them and prune them and Boulder eyes them they don't know what they don't know how to handle it they don't understand artistic representation they're ill-equipped to assess it that's why all they can do is trim it and cut it that's all they do so they can't they can't watch an episode of Faulty Towers and say so why is that character using racial slurs is it is it to mock that attitude Manuel or the major yeah no let's just cut let's just cut the character out let's cut the scene out yeah they can't they can't read so true you know To Kill a Mockingbird and understand what it's about they just see the racial epithets and say let's take them out but if you take them out you you undermine what the what the whole book the whole book right the the woke are the worst that that's why won't critics or you notice when you get a Critic of a film of a movie and they're coming from a work perspective it's it's garbage they don't they're not because they're not critics in any serious sense of the word they're propagandists and all they're doing is watching a film or reading a book or watching a play to see how closely it adheres to the Orthodoxy exactly so that therefore I don't even think they are critics you know a Critic should be able to see the representation of an abhorrent world view and still understand its artistic Merit and they can't do it so I think so so I go back to this thing of the only way that that can work is if you if you get it yeah if you're getting young if you it is through the educational system I think it's the only way it's going to be it's the only way it's going to be done you've given me a lot of reason to have hope I have been thinking about these things from the institutional point of view because you want to just you think we should just destroy the law yeah but I've also been thinking about this and and I I just wrote the afterward to to a book that really affected me a lot um the gift of violence by Matt Dalton and one of the things that he writes about pretty extensively in that book is the importance of an adult male in the home um and I've just been thinking about how we have entire communities who don't have adult males in the home this is an interesting story that Matt tells about at a zoo I hope I get the story right at a zoo um rhinoceroses hippopotami were being like I really hope I'm getting this story right we're being mutilated and they tried to figure out they just couldn't figure out why I mean that's that's those are huge creatures what was mutilating them and they found out that the elephants were mutilating them and when they drop the creatures off I think there's the hippopotamia use a hippopotamus huge creatures they'd only dropped the females and the babies off they didn't drop the men off right and I again humans are not you know hippopotamia or rhinoceros like I got that like I I I I understand that the conversation when when I was listening to you it reminded me of something my dad said to me years ago I was telling him that I thought it's really important to teach kids in school basic epistemology like super basic epistemology like this is what justifies a belief this is what and my father said to me I'll never forget this he said what are you talking about like we can't even we can't I mean the failure levels we can't even teach people to read and write how are we going to teach them who the hell knows what the word epistemology means how are we gonna and and so you know I've been thinking about we have so many problems the family structure the adult male in the home and that's a criminogenic predictor for criminogenic violence and I listen to in every single thing you said you say not only makes intuitive sense to me but I bet you would be borne out by data like that's just oh yeah so but my concern is then and it does it does fill me with hope but my concerns like logistically I don't like I don't know how we do that like I wouldn't even I mean you just throw out a huge recipe for this to get us out of this catastrophe right since the way you do it is is to stand up against the philistinism that we're seeing so when penguin was it pregnant Puffin released sanitized versions of Roald Dahl there was a pushback people start saying actually this is bad they did the same with PG Woodhouse recently yeah yeah they've done it with Ian Fleming Agatha Christie I think more you know Shakespeare's next right I mean don't think that won't happen you know if you take I'm in and The Merchant of Venice that is an anti-semitic portrayal because it was written in the Elizabethan era right so when once they start doing that one every time they try and do that there should be a pushback people should be explaining why that is wrong because if they don't and we've we've sort of let them get away with it for ages so every time there was like a warning put on Gone With the Wind on a streaming service or a a new version of a film a bit of recut to be more Progressive and people just let it happen and actually making a noise about it making us think about it and and and and reminding people about the Primacy of artistic representation you know every time you see a just stop oil person glue themselves to Van Gogh or something there should be something visceral and ugly about that there should be widespread condemnation of that because the greatest art in humanity is the greatest that we will ever it is it is the Pinnacle of what it means to be human and to see that desecrated in that way when when those people burnt the copies of the Satanic Verses on the streets of Bradford in 1989 we shouldn't have been having debates about whether the author deserved it we should have been having now look what happened right right and we see what happens when when you don't stand up when you do what Matthew Paris advised in the times and ignore it it doesn't go away it becomes a prevailing Norm it's you know with Salman Rushdie everyone should have been unanimous saying you don't get to threaten the life of a British citizen because you don't like a book he wrote uh everyone but there wasn't that there were debates there was equivocation there was all of that and we're paying the price for it today and it just goes to show so I think you know encouraging those conversations you know you mentioned about how it's important to have a father and a family but a lot of families won't have a father in and that's a reality and some are the best families of single parent families or gay couples or whatever and sometimes that's that's fine the exact thing is adult male and home yeah so you can have you can say and argue that that should be an ideal but what where a reactionary right-wing politician would get it wrong is would say because of that data therefore we families that don't fit that parallel therefore lesser family right and that's wrong because that's not that's not the case but by all means you can make that point about that ideal but if if we as a society okay it's about it's about culture if we as a society respect culture and the art we will cultivate a scenario where families will want to have books on their shelves in the house one of the best things you can do for kids because they explore the bookshelves when the parents aren't there and they they they they they develop their minds independently independently even of school if you go to somewhere like it's about the way that you construct a city or construct a living space if you if you if you go to the center of Florence and you're wandering around Florence and you see works of art on the street and they are lorded and and appreciated that must have some sort of Developmental Advantage for young people rather than walking around a concrete block where there's nothing of beauty to look at so it is about a civilization a generalized civilizational attitude which is about the Primacy of Art once you start degrading and you know and various conservative governments over the years have tried to degrade art because they see it is having no practical purpose what are you going to do with that how are you going to make money out of that not realizing that it's actually integral to the human spirit and by extension therefore to society and how we relate to each other and the cohesion of society and it also acts as a prophylactic against ideology I think not just in terms of the work ideology but all kinds of forms of ideology absolutely this is why erdogan satiris yeah this is why tyrants behead people for writers and artists to say the wrong thing this is why Ben Johnson was almost mutilated or executed because of what he wrote but I think he got away with it by there was a reading Latin there was there was a loophole that if you could read Latin you you wouldn't have your ears cut up um but but the attacks by tyrannical regimes against Artists Against writers it's always the way it's always been the way and so they're always they're that I think is the prophylactic that's the prophylactic against ideology is Artistic freedom and when you allow that to flourish you know that's when the greats are produced that's when you know I don't think a society that's run by woke values will never produce any great art I think it is fundamentally antithetical to it I mean can you think of any great artwork that's been produced by a woke artist it does such a thing exist I can't think of anything great being produced by anybody as well no all you've got is for instance like Hannah gadsby's show which is critically acclaimed because all the critics are also High priests in the in the same religion as she that's not doesn't tell us anything that show can win as many awards yeah it's like the difference between Rotten Tomatoes critics and uh if you've seen this right yeah exactly it's like it it it means nothing right because of course High priests are going to slap each other on the back it means nothing um we you know we've kind of lost that if you go back to that there's a bio or the you know the artist Cellini no so Renaissance Italian artist uh he created the one of my favorite Works about which is the statue of uh of Perseus in the square in Florence it's if you go to oh yeah I know exactly yeah and it's Percy is holding their head and Medusa um and it's I think it's an incredible work of art he also created a very famous salt seller which is in a museum in Vienna I think it's Vienna now he was nuts and he was like uh he wrote an autobiography which is a fascinating book you know because he he was not a nice guy kill people he was he sexually assaulted people he he uh he was put in prison he escaped from prison he had this really wild life um and you know if you're reading that and you want to know about whether we should take on board the morality of the artist when we appreciate their art it's a really good test case right um but when he unveiled that Perseus in the Square the look everyone gathered everyone gathered and cheered and pinned sonnets of appreciation to the thing not just the elites Working Class People every strata of society there was a culture where art was lauded and appreciated by everyone and Beauty was appreciated in the Lord by everyone can you imagine that happening now can you imagine in London on the fourth plinth they unveil what would happen they had that stupid thing with that blob of cream with a fly on it you think people are going to pin sonnets of appreciation to that no because it's bad art and it's bad art because we have a culture that doesn't value art it values ideology so and that sounds maybe very regressive and conservative am I am I doing this sort of nostalgia for a golden age I'm not because there's all sorts of things wrong with Florentine Society at that time not least epitomized by some of Cellini's behavior from a moral perspective all sorts of things wrong with it the ancient Greeks all sorts of things wrong with the society that keeps slaves and degrades women in that way of course but they also produced some of the most important philosophical texts that we have but but by showing that by by just harking back to this idea of the Primacy of Art and the potential benefits that can come of that I think there's something there to emulate without romanticizing without sentimentalizing not saying that we want to go back to that but just emulate that ideal that we 've Foster the creative spirit I love you man you've just I love you that's all right that's fantastic I mean I literally could talk to you all day and I think if everybody had that attitude and if everybody adopted that General stance and general position society would not just be more sane but it would be in more rational but it would be more kind and compassionate yeah well I would like to think so Andrew Doyle author commentator public intellectual awesome guy friend thank you thanks for having me all right foreign

Channel: Peter Boghossian

Views: 206,459

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Id: FAgAVy_awh0

Length: 94min 27sec (5667 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 25 2023