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A heretic's manifesto, with Brendan O'Neill
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Brendan O'Neill is the chief political writer for Spiked and a regular contributor to The Spectator. His new book, 'A Heretic's Manifesto', is a rallying cry to stand up against the woke orthodoxy of our age.
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Transcript
Introduction and Purpose
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, it's Will here. Before we get stuck into this week's show, I just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who has been leaving us their ratings and reviews. It's a wonderful way to help us grow Australiana, and it's super quick and easy. If you are yet to do so, please leave us one now so we can remain in the good graces of the mystical, algorithmic podcast gods that control our destiny. Now, cue the jingle.
00:00:41
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia, a series of conversations on Australian politics and life. I'm Will Kingston. The word heresy has an instinctively negative connotation for me when I hear it, which is odd because this podcast is committed to heretical conversations. It may be because the church did its job too well in the middle ages, or it may be because we live in an age where heresy is once again under attack.
00:01:08
Speaker
Alternative views are suppressed and acceptable positions are ruthlessly enforced by an intolerant elite. We need a heretics manifesto more than ever. Fortunately, Brendan O'Neill, chief political writer for Spiked and spectator contributor, has written one and it's out now. Brendan, welcome to Australia.
00:01:25
Speaker
Hey Will, how's it going? I'm very well. I'll start at the outset of your book. You start the book, which I should actually add is titled A Heretics Manifesto, by warning that we are living through a war on heresy.
Modern Heresy and Suppression
00:01:41
Speaker
As you point out, and it came to mind for me as well, it's certainly not the first war on heresy in history. In fact, history is one long story of silencing unorthodox views. I want to put this conversation in a historical context. To what extent is the work phenomena unique to our times, and to what extent is it just another swing of history's pendulum?
00:02:06
Speaker
Yeah, good question. Well, I think one of the points I'm making at the start of the book and kind of throughout the book is that we have the atmosphere of the witch hunt in the 21st century, but we don't have the witch hunt itself. So I wouldn't want to exaggerate the troubles that we face. No one's been burnt at the stake. No one is being strangled in public, as happened to heretics in the past. Very few people are being imprisoned, although it does happen. People do get arrested, particularly here in the UK. The police have developed a real taste.
00:02:35
Speaker
for knocking on the doors of gender critical feminists or people who abuse the pride flag or people who say unacceptable, unpolitically correct things. But it's not like it was in the 1500s or the 1600s. It's not as violent and bloody.
00:02:52
Speaker
But I do think that the woke era that we live in, I think it has the vibe of the witch hunt. It has a real feeling of intolerance to it. I think that's particularly pronounced around, as I say, gender critical feminism, people who question climate change alarmism, people who push back against
00:03:08
Speaker
the teaching of gender ideology in schools, there are some aspects of contemporary woke conformist culture where if you question them, you will be thoroughly demonized. You could potentially lose your job. You could be no platformed, i.e. blacklisted from university campuses. So the consequences for criticising this stuff can be quite severe. And to my mind, that does add up to a new war on heresy, a less violent one than we had in the past, but a new one nonetheless.
00:03:37
Speaker
Well, another thing that can happen if you do question the prevailing orthodoxy is you can be labeled a conspiracy theorist. I don't think you mentioned it in the book, but it really came to mind for me as I was reading it that the term conspiracy theory is now the go-to phrase to discredit heretical views. You know, if you don't have a mainstream view on COVID or on climate change, you're labeled a conspiracy theorist. What are your reflections on how that label is used today?
00:04:04
Speaker
It's very interesting. I get accused sometimes of being a conspiracy theorist, even though I have written a lot of stuff over the years criticising genuine conspiracy theories. I do think there is a problem in the modern era, as there was in past eras as well, in relation to conspiracy theories. I think sometimes a sense of powerlessness
00:04:24
Speaker
a sense that democracy isn't working, a sense that we're not really sure who's in control of our society. That is very often the kind of conditions in which conspiracy theories, the real ones, can take hold, where you convince yourself that everything is being puppeteered by these faceless actors over whom we have no control. So there are conspiracy theories out there, but you're absolutely right. One of the problems with
00:04:49
Speaker
The language of demonisation that is used against heretics, the kind of grammar of condemnation that builds up all the time, you're a climate change denier, you're a transphobe, you're an Islamophobe, all these new terms are invented to demonise certain ways of thinking and certain individuals.
00:05:08
Speaker
Part of that is now the branding of people as conspiracy theorists if they raise questions about certain policies or certain ideas. A really classic example of that is anyone who criticizes the idea of the 15-minute city. So the 15-minute city is this notion, it's really taking off in the UK and other European countries too, where local councils, local government
00:05:29
Speaker
will create the conditions that would discourage people from driving and encourage them to walk. So they might change the way the roads are laid out, or they might put barriers up to prevent you from going down a certain road in your car, or they might bring in new cameras and new charges, new costs to drive in your car, all of which adds up to a form of economic and political pressure to stop you from driving, to save the planet, and to get you walking instead.
00:05:55
Speaker
Anyone who raises this as a problem, or who says that it's an attack on the freedom of the motorist, which I think it is, or who says that it's not for local government to use these forms of pressure to tell us how we should get about. Anyone who does that is denounced as a conspiracy theorist. People will say there's no such thing as the 15-minute city. It's an invention. You've made it up. And it's not an invention at all. Sometimes I feel like
00:06:17
Speaker
I'm banging my head against a brick wall. You can literally read documents in the Oxford local council here in England, for example, where they talk about embracing the ideology of the 15-minute city. So, yeah, there are some issues. Covid is another example, too. There are some issues on which the main way in which heresy or questioning or any form of criticism is controlled and
00:06:42
Speaker
borderline criminalized is through saying, well, you're a conspiracy theorist if you hold that view. It's a very sly tactic.
00:06:48
Speaker
Yeah, it is very slight. I think as well that the wording has got a bit confused. I think conspiracy theorists or conspiracy is now just used for any kooky or extreme idea when the word itself means there has to be some level of coordination across people within power to do something. Now that sometimes gets played out in stories about the WEF and Davos and an all powerful elite working together to implement an agenda.
00:07:17
Speaker
In my view, a lot of the time, there isn't that level of conspiracy as much as just the elite class across media, across politics, across all different elitist groups in society generally tend to think the same way independently of each other, but they tend to think the same way. Why is that the case? How has that happened?
Political Discourse and Decision-making
00:07:34
Speaker
I think one of the key problems of our times, I think it's a problem because I believe very strongly in democracy. And one of the chapters in my book, chapter five, which is called Rise of the Pigs, is about the importance of democracy, the importance of democratic rights, the importance of ordinary people having control over their communities, the political destiny of their nation, and so on. So I'm, I would say I'm a radical democrat, I would like more democracy in everyday life.
00:08:01
Speaker
And one of the problems we face today is that so many governments are outsourcing decision making to unaccountable, undemocratic institutions.
00:08:11
Speaker
So that's the whole problem with the European Union, for example. For me, the entire problem with the European Union, which is why I supported Brexit and still do, is that it involves the governments of Europe elected by the peoples of their nations, outsourcing certain forms of decision making and lawmaking to institutions in Brussels which are unaccountable to the people of Europe.
00:08:32
Speaker
I have no direct way of controlling who is on the European Commission, for example, and yet for a significant chunk of my adult life, I lived under laws that were drawn up in the European Commission. That is flat out anti-democratic. You see a similar dynamic. It's less
00:08:47
Speaker
It's not in the law making realm so it has less of an impact on European people's everyday lives but you see a similar dynamic in something like Davos in the coming together of billionaires and government officials and politicians of all stripes and John Kerry, the climate czar, and Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party. They were both attendees of the most recent Davos gathering.
00:09:08
Speaker
And what that is, that's a less impactful but nonetheless very important version of what the EU does, which is the elites of society coming together far away from plebs like me and you and the pesky electorate and all us awkward people who ask difficult questions and make difficult demands and say, when are you going to fix the potholes in my local community? And when are you going to make sure I get a good wage for the work I do? And when are you going to make sure that people have
00:09:37
Speaker
a happier, healthier, wealthier life, we ask all these difficult questions to which they very often don't have many answers. So their instinct is constantly to remove themselves from the democratic sphere and to elevate themselves into these new post-democratic realms in which they can
00:09:54
Speaker
talk to each other. I think Davos is an example of that. As I say, the EU, I think the United Nations is quite similar, the WEF and so on, which obviously is related to Davos. There are these new institutions in which those things happen. So I understand people's temptation to say, well, they're running everything. I don't think that's strictly speaking true. There is still a relationship between these post-democratic
00:10:18
Speaker
globalist institutions and governments in our own countries. There is still a relationship there. But I think the problem I have with the idea that say the WEF is running everything and there's nothing we can do about it. It's a kind of a fatalistic argument and it is itself kind of anti-democratic because it grates against the idea that me and you and other ordinary people can actually change things.
00:10:41
Speaker
We can challenge governments. We can challenge people who rule over us. We can say, listen, stop going to Davos. Stay at home and fix the problems here. So I'm reluctant to go too far down that road because I still believe it's possible to understand the power structures of 21st century society and also to change them in some way.
Religion, Atheism, and Belief Systems
00:11:01
Speaker
Interesting. I want to go back to just the underlying principle of
00:11:04
Speaker
What you said there, which is effectively for a particularly class at the moment, they've sold out and said democracy is too hard. Persuasion is too hard. There are alternative channels through which we can exert influence.
00:11:17
Speaker
I don't think that's always been the case. And it gets me thinking, why are, I would say, particularly politicians, but why have people given up on persuasion as a skill? So in Australia at the moment, we have a great example of this with a constitutional referendum coming up later in the year for The Voice, which you may be somewhat aware of.
00:11:35
Speaker
And the really interesting observation for me is that so many people are not interested in persuading people who are on the fence but they're very happy to say we know better than you this is the morally right thing to do if you don't support us you're a racist or you're a bad person.
00:11:54
Speaker
I don't think that was always the case, or maybe I'm just looking at history through rose-tinted glasses. Are we not as good with persuasion as we used to be? No, I think you're absolutely right. Something major has changed in the way in which we approach political issues, social issues, and there is a greater reluctance to try to persuade people through rational debate, democratic discussion. I think there's a twofold reason for that. Firstly, because
00:12:18
Speaker
the woke elites or whatever we call them, the kind of chattering classes, some those layers of civil society who, for example, think that the voice having a kind of racial layer of constitutional government in Australia is a good idea. They think they are morally righteous. Everything they think is pure and beautiful and correct. There's no problem with their opinions at all. So they have this almost priestly
00:12:45
Speaker
self-confidence. We know it's right and that's all there is to it. And at the same time, the second element is that they have a growing distrust in the rational capacities of ordinary people. Ordinary people are low information. That's the new terminology. That's what they now say instead of thick as shit. They now say low information. It's a more politically correct way of saying it. They think that ordinary people are
00:13:09
Speaker
brainwashed by the tabloid newspapers or by the right-wing press or by Fox News or Sky News Australia or whatever else it might be. They are pushed this way and that way by the tricks of demagogues. That was the great idea during the Brexit referendum here in the UK in 2016 where we had the exact same phenomenon where the Remain camp didn't seek to persuade people but instead used the politics of fear
00:13:34
Speaker
If you vote against the European Union, everything will come crashing down. Your lives will become more miserable. Fascism will return. Don't follow the demagogues. Don't do what they want you to do. Just do what we're telling you to do. So there was no attempt at political engagement. It was just a kind of form of political instruction from on high. So I think it's those two interacting forces. Firstly, the
00:13:58
Speaker
misplaced arrogance of the influential sections of society who think they are beyond reproach, morally and politically. Everything they think is brilliant and wonderful. And they're growing contempt for ordinary people who they increasingly see as this massive sponge that just sucks up everything that it's told. So a combination of their elitism and their snobbery
00:14:22
Speaker
means that they've lost faith in the idea of democracy or they've simply turned their backs on it and they now think that their idea should be implemented really without very much discussion at all. Yes, I think that's well summarized and the Brexit parallel is a very good one. I'm more fascinated by the day how the voice referendum is coming to mirror out the Brexit vote
00:14:42
Speaker
very, very closely. I wanted to pull out one word you use there, which is interesting, which is the almost priestly tone from which some elites take to what are fundamentally practical debates. And there is a religious undertone to debates around climate, to debates around COVID, rational issues these days, which is a theme that comes through your book very strongly.
00:15:05
Speaker
So let's begin to religion a bit can you draw a line between the decline in organized religion in most of the west and the rise of quasi religious attitudes in policy and scientific debates or do you see them as separate phenomena.
00:15:21
Speaker
That's a really good question. I haven't thought about it like that. I don't think it necessarily one thing instantly happens after the other. I think there's at least a delay. I mean, organized religion has been declining in Western society for quite some time now. And the kind of woke psychosis really only took off over the past few years, although there were earlier manifestations, political correctness in the 1980s, for example.
00:15:47
Speaker
So I don't think it's a direct link, but I do think it's interesting that the woke ideology or whatever we're calling it does take on some of the elements of an organised religion. One point I always like to make here is that one can sometimes appear anti-religious when one makes this argument. And I don't really want to do that. I'm not a religious person. I was brought up religiously. I was brought up as a Roman Catholic. I was an altar boy. I went to Catholic schools. I was educated by nuns.
00:16:17
Speaker
And I know I'm supposed to think, oh God, what a terrible experience that was. But it really wasn't. It was a good school. It was a very good environment to be brought up in. It was a great community. I think it's actually quite good for kids to have something to believe in and something to push back against if that is how they are so inclined. So I wouldn't want to criticize that kind of lifestyle. It can be a very positive life. But I think that what's interesting about the woke ideology is that it has some of the less pleasant
00:16:47
Speaker
aspects of religion, the kind of demand for conformism, the demand that you genuflect, the punishment of heretics or doubters or dissenters. It has those elements, but it doesn't have any of the positive elements. It doesn't have the community element or the fact that people can come together around a religious idea and derive real meaning from it.
00:17:06
Speaker
It certainly doesn't have the element of transcendence. I think one of the reasons people are drawn to religion is because it is very transcendent. This is the way in which you transcend the difficulties of everyday life and there is the promise of the afterlife for those who believe in it. If you look at the woke religion of climate change,
00:17:24
Speaker
it feels like a religion because they're constantly talking about the end times and the evil of human hubris and the need to self-flagellate for our crimes and our sins against the planet and you have Greta Thunberg who's basically this kind of millenarian
00:17:39
Speaker
end of days figure coming to tell us that the world is coming to an end and we're all going to be judged. So it feels like the book of revelations, but it has no transcendent qualities whatsoever. Not just it has no transcendent qualities, but it's also fundamentally inwardly focused on my identity. This is about me. It's not about this is something greater than myself or about other people. It is almost by definition about my identity and who I am.
00:18:03
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And it has no redeeming features at all. And whereas religion, organised religions have many redeeming features in my view, I mean, you know,
00:18:12
Speaker
If you look at what climate change demands of us, it demands that we shrink our footprint, we become more meek, we make less of an impact on the planet, we just turn everything down, ask for less, do less, expect less. But with no redemption at the end of it, you don't even get into heaven. There's no heaven in climate change. There's only the promise of being someone that Greta Thunberg might approve of.
00:18:35
Speaker
It has some of the components of religious fury, but it has none of the qualities of religious transcendence or redemption. So I find it, if it's a religion, it's a very depressing, nihilistic religion. And one in which I think the need for heresy is enormous because if people don't free themselves from the stranglehold of some of these ideas, I think they will lose their way in life. We'll get back to the climate change debate more deeply in a second, but to continue on the line on religion
00:19:04
Speaker
I was a teenager when the new atheism movement was in full flight. I binged Harris and Dawkins and Dennard and Hitchens and et al. Could books like The God Delusion or God is Not Great be written today?
00:19:19
Speaker
I have to tell you, Will, I don't know how you're going to take this, but I am a bit of a new atheist skeptic and it's quite funny because on the cover of my book very nicely, Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine refers to me as the reincarnation of Christopher Hitchens, which is incredibly flattering and I like it. I can see that, by the way. I think that's a good shout.
00:19:38
Speaker
But I think the one sticking point I had with Hitchens, Christopher, not Peter, was the new atheism stuff. And I was never really into the new atheism. I thought it was... I am an atheist, by the way. I should say that. I'm not agnostic. I am an atheist. I was formerly religious now. I'm not. I had a couple of problems with it. The first is, I don't understand why you would define your public identity
00:20:02
Speaker
as atheism, which is simply what you don't believe in. So there was this definition through a negative. I'm going to define myself. I'm going to enter into this public sphere through the thing I don't believe in. I don't believe in God. That's who I am. Whereas I think it's far better to
00:20:20
Speaker
enter the public sphere through what you do believe in. So for example, I consider myself a humanist, I consider myself a democrat, I think my lack of belief in God is one of the least interesting things about me, I want to talk about the things I do believe in. So there was a problem there and then I think there was also an element where
00:20:37
Speaker
I think one of the things that offended them about religion was its idea that humankind is a special species. If you look at some of the new atheism, they do make fun of the idea that humankind is this special category of
00:20:55
Speaker
creature. So Hitchens, for example, in Christopher Hitchens writing on new atheism, he said, religion is such a stupid idea, but what do you expect from basically a clever chimpanzee? And you get the same feeling in some of Dawkins stuff, you know, we're just stardust, we're just the residue from the Big Bang, you know, that's all there is to it. We're not designed, we're not anything particularly special. I found that quite depressing. And I'm always thinking about
00:21:23
Speaker
someone like Karl Marx who wrote very interestingly about religion and he said religion is the sun that revolves around man so long as he doesn't revolve around himself. And Marx said that we looked to the heavens for a superhuman figure that designed our society.
00:21:42
Speaker
entire being and all we saw was a reflection of ourselves. So earlier humanists and atheists understood religion as man's attempt to work out why we are such an elevated category, why we are so intelligent, why we are so clearly superior to all the other beasts on the planet.
00:22:01
Speaker
they were trying to work that out for thousands of years and religion was their way of doing that. Whereas I think the problem with the new atheists is they said, well, just don't bother doing that. We're stardust, we're clever chimpanzees, we're above the beasts, of course, but we're not intelligently designed and there's no fate and it's not a big special mission. So I do think that possibly contributed to today's post-religious atmosphere in which people are squabbling around and looking for an identity and confused about
00:22:46
Speaker
articles from Spiked and these sources and go, these sorts of sources are very good at doing the whole woke people silly idiots shtick. People would listen to my podcast and would possibly say the same thing.
00:22:47
Speaker
what it means to
00:23:01
Speaker
Let's move past that. So that's right. What is your positive vision in an age where religion is declining in an age where there is a sense of confusion around what is that sense of purpose that I hold on to? Is there a positive vision for the future that say you would offer after getting past the point of saying these sorts of woke agendas are dangerous and harmful? Yeah.
Freedom of Speech and Censorship
00:23:24
Speaker
I mean, I get, I actually get asked that question quite a lot because I do.
00:23:28
Speaker
criticize things a lot and on spite we criticize things a lot and people will often say okay well what's your answer to these problems I do I'm reluctant to come up with any kind of blueprint because firstly who am I to come up with a blueprint for society that's I don't want to end up like those people
00:23:44
Speaker
behind the voice referendum saying we must do this, otherwise we're screwed. But I do think there are certain values and virtues that it's worth celebrating rather than denigrating. And that would be my, I suppose, assertive, positive contribution. So, for example, freedom is unquestionably the most important idea of all. There's no question about that in my mind, particularly freedom of speech. And defending freedom of speech in every instance, I think, is probably the most important contribution people like you and me can make.
00:24:12
Speaker
for future generations in terms of fortifying the freedoms that will make their lives better. One of the points I try and make in the book is that sometimes we are so clueless, and by we I mean all of us, we're so clueless as to how much our lives were improved on a day by day basis by the sacrifices of people in the past who fought for freedom.
00:24:34
Speaker
And I give the example of William Tyndale. I write about William Tyndale, who was a zealous Protestant reformer in the early 1500s, who translated the Bible into English, which was an offense punishable by death. The Bible was not allowed to be published in English, only in Latin, so that only learned men could read it, and then they would give snippets of it to the masses in church on a Sunday. And he said, no, no, I trust ordinary people to be able to read for themselves, to make up their own minds. So he wasn't just translating a book.
00:25:02
Speaker
overhauling the entire view of ordinary people and he was putting the case essentially for freedom of conscience and freedom of thought and he did this he had to go to Germany in order to do it he had to sneak his Bibles back into England on ships hidden in sacks of grain and then they would be distributed amongst his supporters who would have to read them in the dark by candlelight in case anyone came knocking on the door
00:25:25
Speaker
And then he was caught and he was strangled to death and he was burnt at the stake and he was reduced to a pile of ashes. And it's because of what he did that we can now read the Bible in our own language. It's because of what he did that we have greater liberty today to read books, to think for ourselves, to make up our own minds, to not have to rely on priests or princes or woke ideologues or whoever else it might be to tell us the right way to think.
00:25:50
Speaker
So I think those kinds of history lessons, I guess, or lessons from the past, examples from the past, is something that is really worth bearing in mind today, because I think if we struggle for freedom today, thankfully, we don't have to pay with our lives, although in some countries they do. Men and young men and women in Iran, hundreds of them have been killed over the past year in their struggle for the freedom not to wear the veil and the freedom to express criticisms of the Islamic theocracy. So people are still being killed in public and executed.
00:26:20
Speaker
for William Tyndale's style demand for more freedom. But I think that's the most positive contribution we can make. Defend freedom of speech every single time it's under attack, even if you disagree with the person who's speaking, especially if you disagree with them. In fact, defend freedom of association.
00:26:36
Speaker
defend the right of women to their own spaces right now and to their right to say that men are not women. All of these battles might seem small in the daily brick bats on Twitter and the arguments we have in the media but they are absolutely essential to fortifying freedom against all the assaults on it and to improving the lives of people who aren't even born yet who we have to make sure they have the right to think freely and to think for themselves.
00:27:01
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's very well said. I can see my teaser being cut from that 30-second snippet right there in my mind.
00:27:09
Speaker
This is something I've been thinking a lot about after reading the book. It's really hit home to me that so many of the problems that we face is because of a society-wide failure to be able to argue for free speech on first principles. John Stuart Mill style, this is why it is good, even if what someone is saying is morally abhorrent, which would still allow them to say it. You won't hear any politician or very few who have the guts to be able to make that argument now. Maybe Elon Musk is the only major public figure somewhat having a crack at it.
00:27:39
Speaker
I think the final chapter of your book is probably about as good as it gets, which is very good in trying to do that in the public sphere. The question is, how and why did we forget to argue for free speech in the 21st century?
00:27:53
Speaker
Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it? I mean, free speech has always been a struggle. I mean, every generation has had to fight for it at some level, some harder than others. And I do try to remind people in some of the stories in the book that people have been fighting for freedom of speech for a very long time. I mean, my favorite period in world history is the 1640s in England, when we had a civil war between the parliamentarians and the royalists.
00:28:19
Speaker
Cromwell versus the king and so on which is the most fascinating 10 years in world history in my view because as Christopher Hill the great English historian in his book he described it as the world turned upside down because all of a sudden you had people reading pamphlets in pubs and taverns saying why should kings tell us what to do why should priests tell us what to do maybe the church is a
00:28:42
Speaker
load of nonsense. Maybe we should rethink how we do everything. Maybe we should develop new forms of religious thinking and new forms of liberty. The things that if you had said them 10 years earlier, you would have been thought a lunatic and possibly had found yourself in the stocks. So it's just this incredibly transformative moment. And it's worth reminding ourselves that that can happen. And maybe one will happen soon. Maybe there will be a radically transformative moment in which there will be these furious public discussions about the essential nature of liberty. Let's hope that happens.
00:29:11
Speaker
But I think you're right, people have lost the ability to make the case for freedom. I think it's been a long time coming. I think the state is always a bit suspicious of freedom of speech and a bit worried about what we're all talking about. The rulers of society have never been entirely comfortable with the idea of freedom of speech.
00:29:28
Speaker
But more recently other factors have contributed to that suspicion as well. So the therapeutic culture, for example, the idea that individuals are weak and we need the assistance of experts and lifestyle guillaries and the scaffolding of therapeutic protection and advice, that's contributed to a notion that we're quite weak.
00:29:47
Speaker
that our self-esteem is very fragile that if we hear a sore idea or a difficult word we might be ruined for life you know the ideology of the safe space on campus for example is a very good expression some of them actually mimic kindergartens or nurseries they have colouring books they have dogs that these students can pet in order to alleviate the pain they feel because there's a speaker on campus saying something they disagree with that is a really good
00:30:12
Speaker
man example of the infantilizing consequences of censorship because what censorship does it turns you into a child it says listen you don't have to think for yourself you don't have to work out what's right and wrong you don't have to use your moral muscles because we will do it for you
00:30:27
Speaker
we will make those decisions on your behalf. You can behave like a child and we'll cover your ears and we'll cover your eyes and we'll tell you what to think. That is censorship's greatest crime. It infantilizes people. It tells us not to use our moral and mental faculties. And in fact, John Milton wrote about this in the 1640s. He said censorship's worst offense is that it weakens our moral muscles and it's only through
00:30:50
Speaker
deciding for ourselves what we believe, that our moral muscles become stronger, that we become strong-willed individuals, that we then become more willing to engage in society. And John Stuart Mill made similar arguments a couple of hundred years later. So we have to recover the ability to argue for freedom of speech. And that does mean having a view of individuals as robust, as capable, as intelligent,
00:31:15
Speaker
as deserving of the right to make up their own mind about what is right and what is wrong. And it was Frederick Douglass who said that censorship is a double offense. It's an offense against the person who wants to say something, but it's also an offense against everyone else who is deprived of the right to make up their own mind. And we've got to move beyond that.
00:31:33
Speaker
A related strand to freedom of speech is language and the power of words. And this is arguably the most powerful theme that emerges from the book, in my opinion. I've been thinking a lot about how the culture wars are in many respects a war for the control of words. I don't even think even the lupius person can argue that chromosomes don't exist, for example.
00:31:58
Speaker
So the debate then becomes whether the words female and male are associated with chromosomes or with some other nebulous categorization language to buy why do words matter why should people be fighting for certain meanings to be associated with certain words.
Language, Ideology, and Clashing Interests
00:32:14
Speaker
Yeah, defending the meaning of words, I think, is such an important task right now. And yeah, that's one of the themes of my book. And I talk about Orwell a fair amount because, of course, George Orwell's great insight was that control of words leads to control of thought. And that's the whole storyline, essentially, of 1984, that if you can control language, you can control how people think, and you can change how people think.
00:32:37
Speaker
And we see that all the time these days. I think the trans issue is a very good example of it. And the replacement of the word mother with birthing parent, for example, now they will say that's just about being polite. It's just a different term. Don't worry about it. Actually, that's a grotesque assault.
00:32:54
Speaker
on one of the most important words in human language, which is the word mother, which means so much to pretty much everyone who is in existence. We all come from a mother. Most of us have a mother. It has a very particular meaning in our lives, in our communities, in society itself. If you start to erase a word like that on the basis that it might offend a micro minority of people,
00:33:18
Speaker
That gives an extraordinary amount of power to the language police to determine how we should think about ourselves, our relationships, our communities. So it's an attempt at controlling thought itself. And there are other examples in which this happens. In my chapter on climate change, I talk about the way in which
00:33:37
Speaker
that language has changed as well. They now talk about climate catastrophe, the latest or climate emergency. The latest iteration of that is climate apocalypse. Now, just think about what that does to thought, because when it's climate change, you can have lots of discussion. You can say, well, it's been exaggerated. We can bring in technology to alleviate the worst impact. But if it's climate apocalypse, there's no discussion on that.
00:33:59
Speaker
the apocalypse is a world ending event. It directly shrinks the capacity to think that this is a manageable problem or that there might be different ways to tackle it. I also give the example of radical Islam and the police in the UK have openly talked about
00:34:15
Speaker
changing the language around radical Islamist terrorism. So they wouldn't call it Islamist terrorism. They would call it faith-claimed terrorism. They wouldn't say jihadist. They would say a religious-claimed terrorist. And if you look at what they say, they openly say,
00:34:31
Speaker
this language change could improve community relations by shrinking people's criticisms of aspects of Islam. So the language change is explicitly designed to bring about community change and the changes in thought. And I compare it to Iran. In Iran, you can be jailed and or whipped for criticizing Islam. In the UK, they want to make it impossible even to think ill of Islam by removing the words that through which one might do that if one was so inclined.
00:35:00
Speaker
So language manipulation, I think is a key theme of the woke era. It is directly aimed at thought manipulation and it's directly aimed at changing how we think of ourselves and how we relate to other people. So tyranny today stems entirely, I think, or predominantly
00:35:17
Speaker
from language control. So that's why it's so essential to push back and say, no, there isn't a climate apocalypse. That's not true. There are there are such things as mothers and they're all female. That's a fact. Islamist terrorism is real. It's killed hundreds of people in Europe over the past 10 years. It's so important to keep saying this because unless we preserve the accuracy and the truth of language, we will cede truth and reason itself.
00:35:41
Speaker
to these people who want to control how we think and how we behave. Let's dig a bit deeper on Islamophobia, specifically perceived Islamophobia. I think it's a really interesting example of the cognitive dissonance that's required when different identity politics groups come into conflict with each other. So, for example, that the same people that demand tolerance of Islam are also demanding respect for LGBTQ plus people. In my view, they are fundamentally incompatible positions.
00:36:11
Speaker
How has that cognitive dissonance arisen amongst the woke classes? It's interesting. I think you're absolutely right, but I think something else is going on at the moment which I'm trying to work out. I'm trying to put my finger on it. I wrote a piece for Newsweek last week in which I said that
00:36:28
Speaker
I support the minority parents who are protesting at American schools against LGBTQ plus education. And that includes Muslim parents. It includes Armenian parents, Latinos, African-Americans, Christians, and white parents as well.
00:36:45
Speaker
Lots of parents are now protesting against gender ideology in schools. And I make the point in my piece that we shouldn't find this surprising because gender ideology is an attack on the idea of the family, fundamentally. It says the family is a patriarchal, problematic institution. There's not really any such thing as fathers and mothers. Sex isn't real, et cetera, et cetera. And for those kinds of communities, most of those communities are working class communities. They're not wealthy communities. The family is an essential institution.
00:37:12
Speaker
And so they recognize this, I think, very clearly and rationally as an attack on their class interests. And their class interest is to have family structures and strong communities and the authority of the mother and the father. When I was growing up in a working class Irish community in an Irish part of London, those things were essential just to everyday life. The authority of the father, the presence of the mother, the integrity of the family. If those things were chipped away at, we were in big, big trouble.
00:37:42
Speaker
as a community. And I think these communities in America and other parts of the world are starting to recognize that. But you're right, there is, there's a, so there is a tension in wokeness because on the one hand, they are paternalistically obsessed with protecting Muslims from offense, which I think is, I think there's a, there's a racial paternalism to that when you have these largely white graduate elites who say we have to defend Muslims from hearing criticism of their religion or criticism of radical elements in their community.
00:38:10
Speaker
There's a real racial paternalism to that. Who the hell do these people think they are telling this minority community that they are so weak and pathetic that they can't even hear everyday criticism, whereas I think they can. And I think many of them want to have that kind of critical discussion about radical elements in their communities, which they are very worried about. The exact same analogy with the Indigenous Fizz conversation in Australia as well.
00:38:34
Speaker
Exactly. And so there is this tension, but I think it's playing out in a way that I hadn't quite expected. And actually, I did a speech for the Social Democratic Party here in the UK a few years ago, when there were Muslim parents protesting at a school in Birmingham in England, and they were protesting against transgender education. And they were saying, stop telling our kids there are more than two sexes.
00:38:58
Speaker
And back then I was thinking, this is really interesting because it's thrown the Wokeset completely off kilter. They didn't know how to respond to it at all. They were so confused. Whereas my instinct was, well, I'm on the side of those parents. They might have a religion that I don't agree with. They probably have many views I don't agree with. Maybe some of them are homophobic. I don't know. That's their business.
00:39:18
Speaker
But I'm on their side because I think they're right to say that their kids should not be taught things that are untrue and which are disorientating. So the tensions between the woke elites and the minority groups are very interesting. And I think it's coming to a head. And I think we are witnessing, as I say in my Newsweek piece, a new ally has joined the revolt against wokeness and that ally is minority communities.
00:39:41
Speaker
And that could be the thing that really starts to undo the tyranny of wokeness because the woke elites who are largely white and upper middle class, they've been using minority groups as a moral shield for so long as a kind of fodder, as a stage army for their own ideology and their own class interests. So if minority groups now start saying, no, no, no, we have our own interests, which are different to yours, that will probably be a good thing.
00:40:06
Speaker
That's a very interesting thought. I hadn't considered that. I generally at this stage of the episode look for some sort of corny segue into my plug for The Spectator. I haven't been able to find money in the last few words that you've just said, so I'm just going to say Brendan is a regular contributor to The Spectator. As a reminder, if you subscribe to The Spectator Australia, you get all of the wonderful content from the UK edition, including Brendan's writing, as well as the best Australian political and social commentary. Subscribe today via the link in the show notes.
00:40:34
Speaker
I will use that, Brennan, to detour from the book to actually one of your recent Speccy articles called The Nasty Side of Pride. For people who aren't aware, in Australia, Oxfam recently released a Pride animation, included a vile caricature of a turf trans-exclusionary radical feminist. It can very easily be assumed to be J.K. Rowling being portrayed as a ghastly witch-like figure.
00:41:00
Speaker
And you point out the irony here, which is the animation is ostensibly about celebrating diversity, but at the same time, it exhibits a deep disdain for intellectual diversity, for the right to express gender critical views in this instance. And this gets me into something which we've kind of discussed at the margin of this conversation, but I want to really drill down into it. And it goes to the question that I think underpinned every culture wars issue, and that is this deep disdain from the woke class for intellectual diversity
00:41:30
Speaker
why is it there why must hateful language be shut down in today's day and age as opposed to saying what our parents did which is saying well you know ignore the bully or sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me why we moved from just ignore it to we have to silence it.
00:41:46
Speaker
You know, I think about that a lot and I kind of flip between thinking it's because they're so arrogant and conceited in that priestly way that we talked about that they don't think any criticism is necessary or should be allowed because they are perfectly correct about everything.
00:42:02
Speaker
I flip between that and thinking it's because at some level, maybe they recognize the fragility of their ideas and that they're worried about criticism. I think that's particularly true of the trans ideology. I do think it's very interesting that the trans lobby is the most censorious of all the identitarian groups. I mean, they will tolerate absolutely no discussion.
00:42:24
Speaker
There's a famous TV presenter here in the UK called Davina McCall, who used to present Big Brother. She's very well known in Britain. And she just she did a tweet yesterday or the day before we're talking where she said the podcast with JK, the witch trials of JK Rowling, which is a podcast that's come out recently, she says it's very interesting and it's a good listen. And there's this furious response. How dare you say, you know, a woman with an opinion, a woman listen to a podcast, stop the press, hold the headlines. You know, what are we going to do?
00:42:54
Speaker
about this. That has got to, at some level, be driven by an existential fear that your House of Cards ideology could fall apart. It just has to be. There's no other rational explanation for such a furious attempt to close down discussion. I think there is an element, particularly in the trans ideology, where it's intellectual weakness, in fact.
00:43:13
Speaker
that underpins their extraordinary levels of intolerance. But I think more across the board, you talk about diversity. Diversity is one of the buzzwords of our times, but it doesn't really mean diversity. There's no intellectual diversity. Another buzzword I find fascinating is inclusion, because very often inclusion policies are explicitly about excluding certain people. So if you go to a university campus, their inclusion policy is really often a manifesto for censorship.
00:43:43
Speaker
We're an inclusive university and therefore, TERFs can't speak here and right-wing racists can't speak here and people who don't like mass immigration can't speak here because we're inclusive. So they use the language of inclusivity to justify excluding wrong thinkers.
00:43:59
Speaker
So there's a double speak element there. It comes back to the language question. They're misusing certain words. They're using positive sounding words to dress up entirely negative, censorious ideologies. That's what's happening.
00:44:14
Speaker
that's very worrying and once again that comes back to language we should say this is not inclusive this is not diverse it's the opposite it's tyrannical and exclusive but I think in terms of why they're doing it I just think there is it's it comes back to that priestliness it comes back to this the way in which they've convinced themselves that their ideology is the only acceptable way of understanding the world they are so incredibly hostile to alternative ways of thinking and I think
00:44:43
Speaker
It's a combination of arrogance and frailty and whatever we can do to poke at that, to tear down the arrogance and say, listen, you're wrong, or to exploit the frailty and say, yeah, you are right to be scared of reasoned, free discussion. The more we can do that, I think the better for everyone. Well, the interesting thing that you point out in the book is they're obviously not doing a very good job because we live in a society where hatred, in inverted commas, it
Hate Speech and Cultural Change
00:45:09
Speaker
bounds. And you introduced the concept of the
00:45:12
Speaker
The paradox of hate you basically say we live in a society that is preoccupied with policing hatred but at the same time there is no argument to say that that hatred is more readily available may not be the right word but but it's more more obvious than it has ever been. How do you explain that paradox.
00:45:30
Speaker
Yeah, so that's the chapter called Viva Hate after Morrissey's album. I just thought I have to write something on this. I don't think what I've written on it is the final word, but I just wanted to get some thoughts out there because I'm so struck by the fact that we live under societies that are obsessed with controlling and policing and outlawing so-called hate speech.
00:45:53
Speaker
I have a real problem with that. To my mind, the idea of hate speech is as offensive as the idea of thought crime would be. And if you look at all the stuff that gets described as hate speech these days, I mean, gender critical feminism is now a form of hate speech that is basically a woman standing up and saying biology is real. So lots of perfectly legitimate
00:46:11
Speaker
moral and political and scientific viewpoints have been collapsed under the banner of hate speech in order that they might be censored and restricted and so on. So I completely reject the whole idea of hate speech. But what I find fascinating is that even at the same time as there is this all out war on hatred,
00:46:27
Speaker
Hatred seems to be everywhere these days. I made the point in that chapter that hatred has become the lingua franca of everyday discussion. This is one of the reasons I don't use social media, apart from Instagram, because it's just recipes and pictures of people's cats, so it's much more of a calming environment.
00:46:44
Speaker
But I don't use Twitter. I don't use Facebook. I don't use any of those outlets. And so I'm slightly under the radar and all of that. But I just think these places are such hateful places. And I also give the example of the university campus. The university campus, every university campus in Christendom right now will have a policy outlawing hatred. And all these student, puffed up student union officials will be going around saying, we don't stand for hatred. Look at our policy. But the minute a pro-Israel speaker turns up on campus,
00:47:12
Speaker
Or someone who supports JK Rowling, JK Rowling herself is obviously far too sensible and famous to turn up on a university campus, but if a woman who supports her turns up.
00:47:24
Speaker
then just witness how hate-filled these anti-hate people will become. And I talk about the two minutes hate in George Orwell's 1984 when the mob is whipped up into a frenzy and their eyes are bulging and they look like they want to smash people's faces. And that's what happens at a university campus when someone they disagree with turns up. So I was just thinking, how do we explain this? They're anti-hate, but they're full of hate. And so the point I make there is that I actually think anti-hate laws and laws against hate speech and so on,
00:47:54
Speaker
They're not actually about controlling hatred. They're actually given a green light to hatred. They actually give us a license to loathe people. Because if you hang a sign around someone's neck saying this is a hateful person, or if you hang a sign around an ideology or a religious faith like Christianity and say this is a hateful faith,
00:48:12
Speaker
you're actually giving people a license to hate those individuals and to hate those ideologies. You're saying that these are destructive people, their ideas are dangerous, they have a polluting influence on society and therefore you may hate them. In fact, you must hate them.
00:48:28
Speaker
It's your duty to hate them. And I give the example of the Inquisition, which was often referred to as the perfect hatred because it was seen as hatred for those who hate God. So the Inquisition was justified as a form of perfect hatred. And I think the woke ideology and the campaign against hate speech is quite similar. It's hatred for those who hate the woke ideology. And so that's where I think the Inquisition element, the witch hunt vibe,
00:48:56
Speaker
makes its return under the guise of controlling hate speech.
00:49:00
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. I think this goes to what would be my final question for the listeners. I'm looking at Brendan. He's in a loose fitting Hawaiian shirt. He's on a holiday in Spain. I want to let him get back to it to his holiday. But you rightly said that hatred abounds. You rightly said that the underlying or the woke ideology gives people a license to hate further. I guess my question is, this is a divided society. And I say society, the West is a divided society.
00:49:27
Speaker
Are there any practical ways that we can start bringing people together again or are we too far gone and do you see that we will only become more and more divided as time moves forward.
00:49:38
Speaker
No, I am not fatalistic like that at all. I'm an optimist by nature, but I'm also optimistic because of things that have been happening over the past few years. Now, that sounds contradictory because you and I have just spent the past hour moaning about all the terrible things that are happening, which is a really important thing to do, by the way. We need to know what we're up against if we're going to challenge it.
00:49:59
Speaker
But I feel very inspired by some of the extraordinary acts of solidarity we've seen over the past decade. I am very inspired by the populist moment. I know that's not something you're not supposed to say, but I do feel inspired by the vote for Brexit. 17.4 million people rejecting the politics of fear, rejecting the diktats of the establishment and sticking with their principles, sticking with their guns. And I remember that moment in 2016, June 2016,
00:50:28
Speaker
People were talking about Brexit all the time, at work, at bus stops, with their families, with their friends. There was a survey done which said, where are you getting your information about how you will vote in this referendum? And I think the media came near the bottom and politicians were in the middle, but at the top was family, friends, workmates. People were really engaging in that discussion and offering each other solidarity to fortify themselves against the irrational dictatorial establishment. I love the solidarity of
00:50:57
Speaker
you know the working class people in the uk at the moment who are pushing back against just stop oil who are pushing them off the street and saying look we have the right to get to work we have the right to earn a living and i i hope something similar happens with blockade australia where you have kind of um those greens holding up working class people as well i was very moved by the iranian protest
00:51:17
Speaker
I think the lack of discussion for it and the lack of solidarity for it amongst woke Westerners was absolutely unforgivably repulsive and that one of the chapters in the book is about that. How the ideology of Islamophobia means people are now unwilling to offer open solidarity to young men and women fighting for their freedom in case it comes off as Islamophobia.
00:51:37
Speaker
So lots of things are happening, which I think are incredibly positive. And again, I'm very interested in the new alliances at the school gates in America and the school gates in England, where you have Muslims and Latinos and Christians and all sorts of people, African-Americans, white people, working class people coming together saying, look,
00:51:56
Speaker
We have a shared interest in defending family life. We have a shared interest in defending the truth of motherhood and the truth of fatherhood. Let's get together and do that. So things are happening that are very positive, but in order for them to continue happening, we have to continually defend people's freedom to associate in that way, their freedom to think how they want, their freedom to speak back against the new ideologies.
00:52:18
Speaker
And the more that we defend that freedom, the more we create the space for this coming together of different communities in an aspirational, hopeful way. And I think that's probably the best solution to the tyranny of woke.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:52:30
Speaker
Well, Brendan, there are a few people in the public discourse who are defending freedom as well as you do and as eloquently as you do. Heretics Manifesto is a brilliant read. Congratulations to all the listeners. You can purchase the book via the link in the show notes. Of course, you can also read Brendan regularly by going to Spike or of course subscribing to the Spectator Australia. Brendan, thank you very much for coming on, Australiana. Thanks, Will. A real pleasure.
00:52:54
Speaker
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Australiana. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating and a review. And if you really enjoyed the show, head to spectator.com.au forward slash join. Sign up for a digital subscription today and you'll get your first month absolutely free.