We must defend freedom of speech | Lionel Shriver | Brendan O'Neill |

hello and welcome to the latest center for independent studies webinar i'm monica wilke a policy analyst at the cis and today we are going to be talking to two past cis guest speakers from new york we have lionel shriver lionel thanks for being here oh i wouldn't miss it for the world lionel's latest novel the emotion of the body through space is out now and if you would like an escape from the current world i thoroughly recommend it it is an excellent satirical look at the cult of exercise and if you do not want an escape and would like to be thoroughly petrified by the possible outcomes of financial collapse i recommend lionel's book the mandibles now from new york to london we have spiked editor and host of the brendan o'neill show brendan o'neill brendan thanks for being with us hi monica now lionel and brendan are both past cis guests and you could find their talks on our channel and since they were out here last there has been a pandemic civil unrest and now little britain has been cancelled so there's going to be no shortage of things for us to talk about but today we're going to be mainly focused on cancer culture the arts and freedom of speech lionel i'll start with you you are famous or infamous now depending on how you want to look at it for speaking out against the idea of cultural appropriation are you more or less pessimistic now about the future of fiction i'm a little more pessimistic i'm afraid uh certainly that concept of cultural appropriation when i first spoke about it in 2016 i hadn't really hit fiction yet i was trying to head it off and i failed so we've had a big tumult in the u.s for example over the novel american dirt because it was written by a white author who didn't have permission to write about the experience of mexican immigrants in the united states um and it's now just assumed that you can pull out cultural appropriation as as a as a sin you know this is a terrible thing and it's one of those insidious terms that assumes the conclusion which is if you if you use it then you believe that it must be taboo and uh activists have somehow successfully introduced that concept into the culture just poisonous you know we you know artistically uh when we're in a healthy artistic environment we borrow from each other all the time if not steel and uh you know and therefore put together uh artistic creations that are more than the sum of their parts you know that it's it's a productive and exciting thing to do to use bits and people pieces of other people's culture but i think even more broadly beyond that one issue uh the sensation of being a fiction writer is is an anxious one now i mean it's uh you're not sure which characters you're allowed to use uh it seems very dangerous to even have your characters voice opinions that are at odds with liberal orthodoxy right now brendan on this on this idea of cultural appropriation an argument you often hear is that well certain voices for a long time have been marginalized and therefore shouldn't these people be allowed to tell their stories how do you respond to that um i i think cultural appropriation is the idea of cultural appropriation is is a racist idea because what it essentially says is that all races all ethnic groups have got to stay in their own lane have got to do their own thing they shouldn't borrow from other cultures they shouldn't dare to mix cultures together it's a fundamentally um fascistic idea this notion that the races are innately separate and cannot possibly come together in any celebration of culture or any lending of culture or any uh celebration at all and i you know there have been some absolutely crazy examples you know yoga is now discussed as a form of if white people do yoga that's cultural appropriation there have been some scandals on american campuses about um you know upper middle class white students eating ethnic food and how terrible that is and you know of course there's the whole discussion about music and literature which lionel has spoken about at great length over the past couple of years and just this notion that um if you're a white person you can't write about black people if you're a an indian person you can't possibly understand black culture if you are a a white a young white woman who puts your hair hair into cornrows you are offending every single black person on earth i find it a really fatalistic depressing ideology and one that is fundamentally driven by the racial the the hyper racial idea that the races should never mix and it's a very good example i think of of of the nature of the crisis we currently face you know the crisis of council culture the crisis of uh increased censorship increased sport control all these problems that we talk about what all of this really represents i think is a winding back of the great gains of the past 50 years you know there have been so many wonderful gains from the 1960s and 1970s onwards in terms of equality in terms of racial progress in terms of progress for women all these things that or gay rights all these things that all of us would agree are good things and i think the current culture is really winding back on all of that stuff and taking us back to a time when women were seen as fragile creatures reaching for the smelling salts if anyone ever offends them black people are seen as diametrically different to white people and they can't possibly mix together um gay people are seen as incredibly sensitive beings who must never be you know submitted or subjected to offensive material or slightly homophobic jokes so i i think the ideology of cultural appropriation is a good snapshot of just how backward contemporary culture is and how it really undermines some of the great positive things that have happened over the past 50 years lionel brendan has just painted quite a dismal picture of the situation we're in but is there is there a slight glimmer of hope when we just saw over the past week a letter appear in harper's from 150 prominent authors journalists intellectuals saying that perhaps we've gone a little bit too far and we should wind this back we have open debate and free speech is at risk what were your thoughts on the harper's letter and is it a turning point uh i wouldn't be so naive claiming that it was fine i think it was a good idea i admire the people who put it together i think the text uh is something that i would have been glad to put my name to and in fact i sent a letter mild complaint to the um to the editor of harper's that uh they didn't ask me to sign it um i think it was just an oversight uh and it's it actually what struck me about the letter is that the claims it was making the that is the ideolo the ideology that it was supporting especially in the united states should have seemed perfectly self-evident and um not the kind of thing that you would have needed to get a a bunch of people together to sign it should have gone without saying that we all believe in freedom of speech that we all uh would like to have a a public square uh intellectually culturally artistically where we can all share different ideas and disagree uh and not punch each other's lights out i mean it's it's that that is a healthy society and that the whole concept of western society is one that allows very different people to to live and get along and not necessarily agree with each other but but it at least allow for that disagreement without it breaking down into uh violence or or repression and you know this this is just standard american thinking uh for most of the country's history and the fact that we now have to marshal all these luminaries to sign such a document i found itself a a little depressing uh that said you know i was glad of it and i was glad that it got as much publicity as it did i was disheartened that two or three signatories withdrew because they couldn't be on the same document as jk rowling i thought that was a sign of the times it was a sign of exactly why the letter was in existence is that you're supposed to be able to be on the same document endorsing these same principles even if you disagree about some element of transgender activism i mean i just thought that well here is the problem in a nutshell but i don't see something like this um you know coming out and making a broad statement like that it is going to do anything to seriously shift the nature of the times we're living in and the one of the frustrations for me is that i you know i am constantly discovering new confederates if you will uh people who who feel much the same as i do on these fundamental points maybe we disagree about which political party we vote for or whatever but in terms of feeling fiercely that we need to preserve the the right to disagree with each other in a civil manner uh and and being upset about the kind of oppressive attitudes and tactics that we are seeing from the hard left uh to with a great deal of success i have lots of lots of other people on this side shouldn't even be assigned um but we don't know what to do you know so we do podcasts like this i write columns uh brendan has a a a whole site uh who's uh whose articles i i read religiously it's a great site spiked online and there are others like it you know unheard.com there are lots of people out there who are reasonable rational liberally minded in the old-fashioned sense of the term and we can't stop it and and people still we're still having everyone fired we're still living in a in a time of you just never know when you've penned the one line or the one phrase that is going to end your career and no matter how much rational argument we put out there and how much we warned that you know this is maoist this is stalinist this is a lot like the mccarthyite era it doesn't change the fact that that is true and i'm a little at my wit's end brendan just to go back to the harpers letter specifically for a a minute lionel brought up that a couple of people after it was published did rescind their name and said that they should never have signed it what is your what are your thoughts on this sort of you know guilt by adjacency so even you can't agree with someone on principles because you are somehow possibly endorsing everything they've ever said or their their entire body of work what are your what are your thoughts on that yeah i mean i really liked the letter the only thing that shocked me about the letter was that lionel shriver's name wasn't on it so i'm i'm pleased to hear that lionel uh wrote into them about that that's that was an emission a bigger mission um i thought it was a pretty good letter i thought that the thing about the letter i liked most was the fact that it said that it's it's unlikely to be the big huge famous literary names who are actually cancelled you know lots of the apologists for cancel culture or the denialists of council culture the people who say it doesn't exist and they're lying and they know they're lying that what they always say is look at jk rowling she's still a billionaire or a multi-millionaire she still has 14 million followers on twitter she obviously hasn't been cancelled but the letter in harper's makes the point that the people who are most likely to be the victims of this culture are not the huge famous names but the ordinary people in their workplaces who might get sacked or reprimanded or disciplined for expressing views that are now considered to be beyond the pale and i think that's very true the thing is um in relation to the people who who pulled out of the letter after knowing that jk rowling signed it i think the jk rowling phenomenon is really fascinating and and worth thinking about because the reason she has become a focal point of so much of this stuff is that she has done something extraordinary which is that she has not apologized she has not backed down and that doesn't happen i mean i can't think of many instances in which that has happened now people will say well she can afford not to back down because she's very wealthy she's very culturally secure she's uncancelable in a sense because she's a global cultural phenomenon but it still takes a certain amount of backbone to refuse to apologize and refuse to back down so i think actually jk rowling with whom i have numerous disagreements particularly on brexit but she has shown the way in relation to the council culture which is the way you defeat it and i am completely in agreement with lionel shriver i am also at my wit's end in relation to this discussion uh because i keep um bumping into people who say this phenomenon doesn't exist which is completely untrue but what i think rowling has done very well is demonstrated that the way you overcome this culture is simply by refusing to apologize don't give up on your views just hold firm to them and the final point i would make on this is that my only issue with the term cancel culture is that if anything it's too quaint it's too slight it doesn't quite capture the ideological moment we are living in which is a moment in which as far as i can see the very foundation stones of western civilization are being smashed apart if you look at what's happening in the united states where there is an open explicit attempt to make 1619 the founding year of the usa rather than 1776 this is an explicitly orwellian attempt to rewrite history um or if you look in the united kingdom where british history has now been reimagined as just one horrific crime after another completely airbrushing all the wonderful things that have happened in this country or if you look at the way in which the transgender issue for example chips away at the most basic um organization of human life which is male female mother father the idea that there are two sexes and that they do slightly different things which is how children in particular are socialized into community life the fundamentals of western the western way of life are being attacked by large groups of influential people so my only concern with the term cancel culture is that it doesn't capture the depth and the horror of what is currently happening in our societies yeah i have to agree with that um the the term is a little small it reminds me of uh back when uh the 2008 recession first came along and we you remember we used to call it the credit crunch yeah i noted i sounded like a candy bar i mean that was such a tiny word for the entire international financial system coming within two inches of total collapse and we were calling it the credit crunch and i think that that you know we we do have a problem with naming i mean we because the names we're out insults wear out um identity politics doesn't even quite do it anymore yeah right i mean it's a bigger it's a bigger issue than that i don't know what else to call it uh because it has to do but it has to do with keeping people in their little boxes and you you that's that little tiny box into which you were born you're never going to get out of it it's the only thing that makes your life important and all your identity comes down to your skin color your your sex it's incredibly depressing as a viewpoint and it's hard to know what language to use to get across how depressing and how retrograde that really is i mean i i would also like to say brennan is right about jk rowling's refusal to apologize um it's highly admirable we can say oh right she's rich she can do whatever she wants but given the circle she runs in she's under enormous pressure to back down so i think that this does express real backbone on her part and i really admire it and i would like to see more of it and i would advise anyone else who finds themselves in that position to remember that if you look at all the other instances of generally fairly liberal-minded people bending over backwards to uh say how sorry they are for saying something incredibly reasonable apologies don't work you know they don't save you from cancellation you still get cancelled you just lose your dignity so even on a on a strategic level it doesn't make any sense this movement in so far it is it is a coherent movement uh only takes victory as inspiration for more and that's why it's a big mistake to give in on certain statuary right whereas i can see the argument for taking down certain statues at this point in time taking down any of them endangers every monument in your country every single one i'm in the united states right now it endangers the lincoln memorial and i am not joking so it's all very well to say throw them a bone you know what let them have this of course it makes sense to take down certain confederate statues and i could i could easily make that argument but the trouble is that at this point in time you let you get to the inch and mile problem and and it's certainly the case that when you feed this movement scalps it just gives them it makes them feel more powerful and it inspires them to go after more people more important people and to tackle whole institutions it's a very aggressive vengeful um movement that i think it has very little in terms of positive vision for any country but you know it's it's very good on tearing things apart and it's really easy to tear things apart i think that's one of the things that the um the whole movement doesn't understand in fact they don't understand that civilization itself is extremely fragile it's really easy to tear apart the bonds that keep us from killing each other on the streets uh on a daily basis uh we do it enough already and and so you know anarchy is always an inch away sorry but i always speak in imperial i tried to illustrate that in my uh previous novel the mandibles which is all about you know the united states completely falling apart and it doesn't take much and that's the trouble with these the the nihilistic movements and anarchistic movements which fundamentally this one is don't realize how dependent they are for on on order for their own disorder for even being able to be activists and have the internet and and be out there and organize on social media to get these protests together they don't understand that a certain amount of social cohesion is necessary for them to be a cohort current coherent force of disorder after all if nothing else they need to be able to eat and go to the supermarket and you know you we need to reform in an orderly fashion i have no problems with reforming say the police force that was the that was of sound purpose uh behind the protests it got out of line but you have to do it in an orderly fashion and i'm worried that the forces of destruction right now are very powerful and and there is no positive vision on the other side of it just before i get uh your comments brendan remember to like this video subscribe to our channel and hit that notification bell so you can stay up to date with cis content just to go back for a minute brendan on this idea of apologizing we just saw the example of jk rowling also saw when they tried to remove an episode of faulty towers john cleese spoke up uh and said that that was quite a bad idea whereas little britain those creators apologized and now some of their shows if not all it's hard to keep up i have now been removed so what are your thoughts on this whole idea of you know when people are called out as they say that automatic reaction is to apologize yeah you never never never apologize and um i think the cult of apology is a really one of the creepiest things about contemporary society i mean australia i love australia so much but it seems to be in a constant state of apologetics for its history which i think is incredibly unhealthy um and probably has fueled the current moment in in australia and and other parts of the world uh in the united kingdom we have we've had bizarre spectacles of apologies in recent years we've had um you know david cameron apologizing for the bloody sunday massacre in northern ireland in 1972 now i actually think that was a horrific event but you know david cameron didn't didn't really have any connection to it even more bizarrely we've had tony blair apologizing for the irish potato famine which was 150 years ago so there's this constant um there's this fashion for apologies there's this effect there's fashion for self-flagellation where you and we saw extreme versions of it over the past few weeks in in the george floyd protests and the george floyd riots we saw people we saw white people on their knees in the united states begging black people for forgiveness for the crimes of history that these white people obviously had nothing to do with um we you know white liberals uh one of the reasons i think why white small l liberals love black lives matter is because it allows them to um you know get off on their own self-hatred and to self-flagellate and to say what a horrible group of people they are for being white and for being supposedly privileged so the cult of apology i think is incredibly destructive and not positive at all and apologizing when you are accused of a speech crime or a thought crime is always a mistake it's like um the accusation of racism has become like a religious denunciation it's i think it's more it's like when people said that they saw a young woman cavorting with the devil it's not a rational accusation it's a it's a religious denunciation and you have two op choices when you are responding to it either you deny that you are a racist in which case it will that will be held up as proof of just how racist you are or you confirm that you're a racist and of course that is also proof that you are racist it's like this it's like the salem witch hunt when if you were accused of being a witch there were really only two responses you could confess to being a witch in which case you might just about get away with it with a you know a flagellation and and being ostracized from society or you could deny being a witch and the risks attached to that were often far greater so and i think that's the kind of culture we live in now where the the finger the pointed finger saying you're racist or that thing you did in 1994 was a bit racist or your joke was racist your your novel was racist your your anything you do is racist this is not rational discourse and so if you apologize in the face of these people you're really just bowing down to them and accepting their entire narrative and as lionel says you end up emboldening them and i think the the culture of i i think the reason that the woke mob is so powerful at the moment is precisely because of institutional cowardice and the unwillingness of politicians and corporations and other powerful bodies to stand up and say no we're not racist we're not going to invite robin d'angelo to come in and tell us how disgusting white people are we're not going to adopt the policies of of black lives matter we're actually going to defend ourselves against these accusations so few people are willing to say that you know one person who did say it was donald trump in his um independence day speech at mount rushmore which is actually a really good speech i say this as someone who is highly trump skeptical he did a very good speech at mount rushmore where he talked about um canceled culture and he talked about how this was a cultural revolution against the american revolution where he defended 1776 where he defended progressive values and modern values and my i kept thinking why hasn't boris johnson done this why hasn't scott morrison done this why haven't western leaders stood up and say we defend jk rowling's right to freedom of speech we oppose the destruction of statues by mobs we think our national histories are full of wonderful things as well as various crimes that we all recognize were bad why aren't more western leaders standing up and doing that the more they refuse to do that the more they embolden this mob this powerful academic upper-middle-class literary mob which has taken it upon itself to rewrite um western history and to demonize all westerners as being racist and horrible and disgusting never apologize and defend your beliefs and i think that's one of the lessons we can learn from people like jk rowling and also not to blow her trumpet too much also from for from people like lionel shriver who has been doing what um jk rowling has been doing but but for much longer you've got to stand up for your belief you've got to make clear that you will not back down and that's the only way at the end of the day that we can hold back this tsunami of intolerance i'd also add that um you have to resist the temptation to become one of the finger pointers because that's that's how everyone is invited into the fold because you're given what is actually a false impression that if you point the finger at other people that nobody's going to point the finger at you it's a it's a way of protecting yourself so uh uh this is by the way is another thing that doesn't work it doesn't protect you at all but that is that is the illusion and furthermore i would i would say the other motivation for this um taking upon yourself the sins of the world that that the white woke protesters are are doing you know oh we're all guilty this is you know racism slavery is all all our fault um aren't we shameful i wrote my last spectator column on this this is completely fake emotionally this is not the actual experience of doing that is not one of shame shame being one of the most horrific experiences that human beings can can go through you and and it is not you don't show off shame it is not something you display it's something that you do in private and keep secret so this is the opposite of shame this is display this is preening this is showing off this is and it is also an act it it's similar to the finger pointing it's it's a taking yourself away from the guilty because you know you're guilty so it doesn't apply to you right you know how shameful your racist history is and in embracing that ostensible shame you are superior you are better than the other white people you've become a kind of honorary black person right that's what this is all about and that therefore the guilt does not attach to you it is actually an act of of denial and expiation and and and that kind of inversion really messes people up because it seems as if you are coming clean and understanding history and realizing what terrible things people before you have done but you know all all of us know the truth is that the the white westerners we're talking about now did not have any part in slavery and so it's actually a complete denial of reality and to go along with that is it borders on insane and and as i pointed out in my last column it's not only ludicrous but it's it's a kind of vanity yeah i think um just on that i i completely agree and i think there's such a there's a close relationship today between white shame and white pride because when you have all these self-flagellating usually very well-educated white people as lionel says they seem to be expressing shamefulness about their their races their race is history but what they're actually doing is demonstrating their superiority over the other white people the unaware white people the um uneducated white people the white people who have never read white fragility by robin d'angelo and who have never taken part in one of these kind of self-flagellating protests so there's a very thin line between those two things i think um the one of the ugliest trends in human history has been the idea of racial collective guilt and whenever that raises its ugly head it has absolutely devastating consequences for humanity for freedom for justice you know when if there is crime among certain sections of of of the black community and you hold all black people responsible for that that is repulsive and that is destructive if you know if you go back to europe in the 1930s and the 1940s when all jews were held collectively responsible for the alleged overblown um crimes as the nazis saw it of certain jewish capitalists for example which which was a conspiracy theory um then that was repulsive that was destructive and what we've seen over the past few weeks is the attempt to apply collective racial guilt for the killing of george floyd and it was explicit i mean in in leading mainstream publications we saw people saying all white people bear responsibility for this crime all white people were reflected in derek chauvin's arrogant face as he kneeled on george floyd's neck this is a crime of white people and that was an attempt to instill collective racial guilt in a new fashion against white people for apparently being this repulsive evil historically compromised group of people it's it's an incredibly regressive way of understanding society it absolutely stirs up racial tensions and it completely negates as i was saying earlier it completely negates all the wonderful leaps forward that have been made over the past 50 or 60 years which have been towards racial equality blindness and all these other things that we traditionally considered quite valuable so the moment we're currently living through i think is incredibly regressive and one that we we really have to start to counter in a very serious way it's also a little dangerous because um the majority of both the uk and the us reject this way of thinking out of hand the majority think what do you mean i'm sorry but i didn't do anything which is self-help i mean yes i've had my moments where i i might have caught myself uh making some stereotypical assumptions about people and i don't i don't mind i don't mind catching myself up on that but don't dump slavery on me i didn't do it and that's the way most people think and when you push the majority you're you know of ordinary people and shove this stuff down their throat at a certain point they rebel and uh you know here if this were to go too far before november and i'm no trump supporter i've been very clear on that that's a good that's the best way i can think of getting trump reelected and it's it this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum everyone is not just a patsy for this ideology everyone's not just thinking oh well i guess they're right it's all my fault i'm so sorry i think i'm going to kill myself i mean it's no no it doesn't work on the mainstream and there is such a thing as the silent majority and they sit and they watch the bbc and they watch cnn and and they think yeah okay kind of background noise but you know you push this stuff too far and especially if you bring it into the political realm and and start you know changing the law you know i don't like to be ridiculous but here in the us to talk about the possibility of serious civil conflict if not civil war it's it's not as ridiculous as it used to be so we have sally from auckland who asks by arguing that cancer culture activists embrace a stalinist or maorinous or mccarthyite mindset are you overstating your case and risk losing the center i don't think so i think um i i actually think those words came from lionel so maybe she'll want to come in on this but i actually think um i i think it's a very apt description i think the cultural revolution is the closest description of this stuff now that doesn't mean people are going to be killed in their hundreds of thousands no no well let's hope not um and certainly that's not the case at the moment but if you look at the cultural revolution in mao's china in the late 1960s in particular it was very clearly aimed at people who had wrong think who adhered to what were considered to be outdated traditional values it involved the tearing down of statues the burning of statues the kicking of statues into rivers all of which has happened in the uk and the u.s over the past couple of weeks past few weeks and it involved primarily reordering the minds of people who were considered to be old-fashioned out of sync um on pc as we would call it now although i'm sure they had a different word in mao's china it had all of those um connotations and it's very comparable i think when you have this kind of energized intolerant young generation who are going around sneering at supposedly old-fashioned older people um trying to no platform them raging against them for for expressing incorrect thoughts that is incredibly reminiscent of the cultural revolution in china so i do think it's worth looking back at moments in history in which intolerance exploded into violent attacks against monuments against books and against people it's worth learning from those moments in order to work out what's going on right now i think one of the things that it's important to bear in mind about the current moment and and line alive lionel and i have kind of touched on this over the past 45 minutes is that it's um one of the problems is that we often focus i think too much on the mob itself and not enough on the cowardice of institutions and that's one thing i think it's really worth turning our attention to because when you have and i have personal experience of this you know when i was supposed to speak at oxford university in 2015 on the issue of abortion i was going to give the pro-choice case in a debate with another male journalist who was going to give the pro-life case and a mob of feminist students decided that it was unacceptable for two men to talk about abortion and they would they said they would turn up at the event with instruments and and they didn't mean musical instruments and prevent the debate from taking place and then the management of oxford university itself agreed with them and cancelled the debate and that's a small example of the problem we face right now which is the symbiotic relationship between an agitated mob which is attacking all of the foundational values of western civilization and the the institutions of western civilization which are throwing their doors open to these people and saying come in take down our statues tell us what to do rewrite our history and and and teasing out and working out why that relationship has come about and encouraging institutions to have a bit more backbone i think is actually an incredibly important thing to do at the moment well just i mean you you speak there brendan about institutions what we've also seen over the last couple of weeks are corporations who who are lining up behind black lives matter you see ben and jerry's are vocally supporting it and we have i'll i'll ask you this question uh lionel we have a couple of similar questions from mark and stanton talking about the corporate the corporatization of work for lack of a better phrase at the moment the renaming of the washington redskins there's a couple of popular brands of lollies in australia that are going to be renamed because of perceived offense we have several multi-billion dollar companies who are currently boycotting facebook because they think they don't do enough to counter hate speech lana what are your thoughts on the role of corporations in this current moment well it's the ultimate in emotional insincerity i mean this is more branding it's completely cynical it has nothing to do with having fierce convictions about the equality of of all men and women it's uh it's uh partly just uh oh this seems dangerous get get this stuff away from me let's make ourselves look good um the stuff with facebook is obviously just posturing um they have the money to stay off facebook they can live without facebook with that for a month it's it is a gimmick it's a theater um you know there's been certain brands over here like the aunt jemima pancake syrup and the uncle ben's rice that have rethought their logos you know if i were if i were in the uh in those companies i i'd probably do the same thing cynically um just because uh you know this this could be interpreted badly right now so let's make a big gesture but it's it's um it's certainly not a sign of some kind of great act and moment of self-examination in in the corporate world it's just um it's very superficial and so are all these um anti-bias training workshops it's it's cosmetic they're going through the motions they want to look good wanting to look good is chalk and cheese from wanting to be good but in um brendan in saying that you know these companies are doing it purely for cynical reasons or profit reasons i mean aren't aren't we possibly being a little bit too uh harsh on them i mean there are a number of phrases you said one before that we're colorblind that are now seen as a a dog whistle and and people would say that you know you're hiding a secret agenda when you talk about free speech you're just guarding privilege aren't we in danger of doing the same thing to these corporations when they might sincerely believe what they're saying and putting out there brendan i think if anything we're not being harsh enough and um you know you guys know how much i love cis cis is one of my favorite organizations in the world and um i know you guys are generally generally in favor of uh the free market but at the moment corporations and big big businesses have lost the plot in in a similar way to every other institution in western society and the thing is i think um i mean i would even go slightly further than lionel in fact and i think what some of these big businesses recognize at an instinctive level is that the current moment lends itself very well to their agenda and so you know if you ask yourself why are these huge corporations which are largely driven by the profit motive why are they buying thousands and thousands of copies of robin d'angelo's book on white fragility why are they buying thousands of copies of books called why i'm no longer talking to white people about race the reason they're doing this is because i think at some level they recognize that this new racialism is a useful tool for reordering the minds of their workforce for disciplining workers for institutionalizing speech codes and behavior codes which will allow them to have a greater control over how their workers interact with each other and and the danger of solidarity the great danger for these people is is solidarity between workers and the possibility that workers will demand higher wages or better paying conditions so i i think they're recognizing instinctively that this new racialism lends itself to the project of divide and rule i really do and when you have a massive silicon valley corporation like google embracing the politics of intersectionalism so going even further than black lives matter and embracing intersexualism itself this notion that everyone is separate and different and we can only possibly manage the differences between people i do think they're recognizing that there is something useful in that for them and so the great irony of the current moment of course is that a lot of this complete nonsense and insanity is being led by supposedly radical leftists but it's been cheered along all the way by corporations and the the unholy marriage between you know multi-billion dollar corporations and um supposedly radical leftists i think is something that's really worth untangling and corporations really ought to have a word with themselves as to how they found themselves on the side of these very destructive people i think there's a a sneaky little deal with the devil going on because behind the black lives matter movement which and we have to remember there's a distinction between the sentiment and the organization yeah um but there's what's going on right now and what what's had been happening ever since the joy george the first big spontaneous indi and justified uh uprising over the george george floyd murder there is a whole segment uh they're not all exactly activists but they are opportunists and they they tend to be uh well-educated uh uh and they are fairly well off and this is an opportunity to make a lot of money you know all those courses all those books all this you know all this prostrating showiness of awareness in schools in in corporations there's money to be made in it the whole race awareness thing is becoming an industry and you just watch i mean uh it's it's really about the transfer of resources and it's not going to be that much money but it's going to be a lot of money in a few pockets we focused a lot talking about left progressivism the work black lives matter a question we have here from glenn is the cancelling at least currently is coming from these forces but aren't conservatives also guilty of being would-be counsellors by encouraging certain moral or religious codes uh brendan yes absolutely and i think um you know i won't i i moan about the woke left all the time but i think conservatives have actually played a role in this culture too either by rolling over backwards and allowing themselves to be cancelled in a kind of very craven way or by taking part in council culture and um you know one of the problems one of the issues i have with some of the um criticism of this current culture which i think is essential it's essential to criticize this culture is is the lack of consistency in relation to freedom of thought and freedom of speech and my view i have a very old-fashioned view you know which goes right back to um george orwell john stuart mill right back to thomas paine thomas paine said that if you don't defend freedom of speech for your enemy then you're opening yourself to censorship at some point in the future i mean that's how old this idea is i think a lot of conservatives a lot of people on the right don't realize that and so for example i've had numerous discussions with arguments in fact with conservative people and right-wing people who would very happily ban radical islamists from speaking in public or pro-choice activists from speaking in public or any other group of people who they find disagreeable or difficult and they can very easily lapse into the same kind of culture that they gen generally tend to criticize so i do think there is a problem of political correctness on the left but there is also a problem of moral correctness and and traditional correctness on the right and my view is is very straightforwardly that the only way around this current crisis that we all agree is a problem is to uphold the value of freedom of speech in all areas of life and the value of freedom of thought in all areas of life and that means freedom of speech and freedom of thought for people you agree with like jk rowling i happen to agree with jk rowling that someone who has a penis is a man not a woman so i defend her freedom of speech but then there are other people i disagree with passionately whether they are on the supposedly radical left or or the whether they are islamist neo-fascists in my view who think that we need a caliphate and buckingham palace should be you know the heart of the uh british caliphate i disagree with these people to an extraordinary degree but i think it's essential to defend their freedom of speech too so long as they are not inciting actual violence and so long as they are not um using their speech in the in the process of commissioning a crime that's not a free speech issue of course if you use if you use words to try to bring about a crime then you are um conspiring in the commission of a crime you're not expressing an opinion but outside of that we need to be far more consistent in our defense of freedom of speech and i have this argument with conservatives and people on the right all the time and i think it's incredibly important that we set a precedent where every expression of opinion whether it's a good opinion or a bad opinion must be defended from censorship lionel what are you what are your thoughts on this idea that everyone involved in this both sides for lack of a better term needs to be more principled when defending free speech and open debate um well i do think it's a tragedy that free speech has become a primarily a cause of the right uh it's a it's a freedom that applies to everyone and i think that uh on the left we've got a a lack of imagination because they think everything's always going to be the same and that they're always going to be on the side that there's no problem saying what they believe because that's just broadly regarded as right and the people they want to shut up are wrong and nobody is ever going to use censorship against them and unfortunately history moves on and if you lose freedom of speech or you've you've complicated it so much that effectively you don't have it anymore that could sooner later shut you up um i think one of the most pernicious uh erosions of freedom of speech has been the evolution of this notion of hate speech which is poisonously slippery slope uh you know i people don't seem to realize anymore that racism in and of itself a feeling an opinion is not actually against the law now i may not like it and if i ever hear people saying things that i regard as racist i did deeply i am offended but it's not illegal and it shouldn't be because after all we all have slightly tainted views of the world i mean in that sense yeah i do believe in original sin none of us is pure so in order to have free speech we need to be able to speak our impure thoughts but hate speech has come along and said there's certain opinions you may not have and there's certain things you may not say and they don't actually they don't incite violence it is a new it is a new category of of of restriction and it's potentially infinite uh and and it is it does nothing but grow the categories of of what is regarded as hate speech down to using the wrong pronoun is is now hate speech and i i would have not i would never have gone there if if i had anything to say about it i would never have made hate speech uh a crime it's uh it's it it potentially expands uh to almost anything you might say we are fast uh approaching the end of the chat so uh because i have the microphone i'm going to ask the last question and get both of you to respond so a lot of what we're seeing now in terms of cancellation shows being cancelled particularly historical examples it's all you know we now know that these are wrong i mean you have to have a warning in front of god with the wind because those attitudes back then we now think are wrong so i'll ask both of you lionel i'll get you to start off with what do you think we are doing saying a thought now that in 5 10 whatever year's time we'll get people cancelled well of course i like to imagine that this entire period of racial hysteria and uh uh aggressive predatory left-wing activism will be looked back on later as as horrifying right and and and as a moment of uh i'm afraid no longer a moment a period of madness that that we now feel a little sheepish about you know i pray for a time and race for example becomes less important that's that's what i've been hoping that i was living through for my whole life that little by little we can just see each other for human beings and we can relax around each other which is the absolute opposite that's happening now so you know when i'm optimistic i like to think that we will all in 15 20 years time have relaxed a little with each other stop being so super sensitive and look back at uh look it back at this period and think you know what was that brendan um i hope for the same thing and i think um you know one of the most awful consequences of the recent woke culture or cancelled culture or whatever um you know not particularly helpful term we use to describe this current period i think one of the worst things about it has been the way in which it has reintroduced racial thinking into everyday life and like lionel i thought i was privileged enough to live in a society post martin luther king um post the um the the anti-racist protests in the uk in the 1970s and the 98 1980s um post the 1967 vote in australia um to overthrow the white australia policy and to move into a new era i thought i was privileged enough to live in a moment in which race did not matter in the way that it mattered in the past and we in which we could be relaxed around people and we didn't care about their origins or their skin color the fact that these woke warriors have made that unlikely and made it made everything more frazzled and difficult and confrontational i think is completely and utterly unforgivable and i hope that the thing we look back on with horror in five or six or seven years time is the fact that people dared to say that race was a was an important idea dare to silence people they disagreed with dare to demonize and shame and sexually harass women who simply expressed biological truths and dare to suggest that the expression of certain opinions was so unacceptable that people had to be expelled from polite society and sacked from their jobs for doing it i hope we look upon cancer culture with horror and if we do that in five or six years time i think that will be a sign of progress well i'm going to take that as ending on an optimistic note that both of you think that we can possibly move past this in hopefully the not too distant future so an hour goes by fast so i would like to thank brendan o'neill in london and lionel shriver in new york for joining us for what was a fantastic discussion thank you for decades the cis has been a fiercely independent voice working tirelessly to deliver evidence-based public policy we rely solely on the generosity of people like you for donations to advance our cause check out the links on screen now to see how you can get involved with the cis and to be notified of future videos make sure you subscribe then hit that notification bell

Channel: Centre for Independent Studies

Views: 128,655

Keywords: Centre for Independent Studies, CIS, AusPol, Australian politics, On Liberty, Classical Liberalism, freedom of speech, Classical Liberalist, Lionel Shriver, Cancel Culture, Brendan O'Neill, Woke Inquisition, speech is cancelled, harper's letter, anti cancel culture, crisis of cancel culture, what would JK Rowling do, motion of the body through space, anti woke, Liberal views, defend freedom of speech, defend free speech, spiked online

Id: P60G1gJ3Q8Y

Length: 60min 12sec (3612 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 16 2020

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So they want to limit free speech to have free speech? Hmmmmm