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"Reality is now subject to ideology" - Lionel Shriver
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Australiana is now Fire at Will - your safe space for dangerous conversations.
Journalist. Contrarian. Iconoclast. Intellectual. Provocateur... And one of the most successful novelists of the 21st century.
Lionel Shriver has, in her own words, spent a career courting self-destruction. But she's still standing.
In this no-holds barred conversation with Will, Lionel gives her inimitable take on identity politics, the trans debate, and the manias that continue to afflict society in 2024.
Note: Lionel's dog makes a cameo in the second half of the episode. Apologies on his behalf.
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Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
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Transcript
Introduction to Controversial Viewpoints
00:00:14
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from The Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston.
00:00:19
Speaker
Regular listeners to this podcast will know that one of our guiding principles is to discuss points of view that are underexpressed, unpopular, or downright dangerous. These views should be debated, they should be discussed, they should be examined, they should be condemned if appropriate. The one thing they absolutely should not be is silenced. Unfortunately, the default setting for most of the Western media is to stifle dissenting viewpoints as opposed to discussing them.
00:00:48
Speaker
It's perhaps no surprise then that I so thoroughly enjoyed the book Abominations, selected essays from a career courting self-destruction. The essays are bound together by a common theme. After publication, they brought hell and damnation down on the author's head.
00:01:05
Speaker
That author is Lionel Schreiber.
Lionel Schreiber's Political Ideology
00:01:08
Speaker
Lionel has written 17 books, of which 15 are novels, the most well-known being We Need to Talk About Kevin, which won the Orange Prize for fiction in 2005. The non-fiction commentary has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Economist, and most prestigiously of course, The Spectator. Lionel, welcome to Australiana.
00:01:30
Speaker
Hi. I've cherry picked some quotes from abominations that I particularly liked to act as starters for discussion. I'll start with how you described your political ideology. And you said, during the nine months of the year I live in London, I'm regarded as an arch conservative nut. When I fly home to the US, I transform mid-Atlantic to a leftist radical with the same opinions. What do you think that says about both countries?
00:01:59
Speaker
Well, first off, I would probably have to update that summary because since I wrote it, politics have transformed considerably in the United States. But I think I was trying to explain that the center of gravity in the UK has for some time now been to the left of where the center is in the United States. So the conservative party, that is capital C conservative,
00:02:25
Speaker
in the UK has in majority swallowed the whole woke basket of opinions. They go on about trans rights and microaggressions along with the best of them. And then there's certain crucial issues in the US that are still a matter of debate that aren't simply settled in the UK. For example, abortion. It's just not a talking point. National health service.
00:02:55
Speaker
is accepted as it's going to stay. So there's no battle against socialized medicine in the UK. So just in general, they tend to be more left wing. And that actually leaves a lot of boaters out in the cold, particularly on the issue of immigration, because there is no party that really wants to cut down on mass immigration.
The Shift in Political Orthodoxy
00:03:25
Speaker
and there's nobody to vote for. We'll get to immigration. It's on my list, but just before we do, I want to talk about those neglected voters that you just mentioned. You called yourself a libertarian in the past. I would consider myself a libertarian. And I think most people, even if they don't, or many people, even if they didn't use the word, they'd probably consider themselves broadly socially moderate to progressive and broadly economically liberal.
00:03:51
Speaker
in that stratosphere, and yet at the same time, libertarianism has never really taken off at the ballot box in Western democracies. Why is that the case? Well, I think as a term, it's widely misunderstood. Most people don't get what it means. And furthermore, it's been recategorized in recent years as some kind of far right ideology, which is absurd.
00:04:19
Speaker
I think libertarianism essentially comes down to you should be allowed to do whatever you want as long as it's not hurting other people and it's not infringing on other people's rights. It's a simple principle which has its complexities when applied in practice, but it's really the central understanding and assumption of the US Constitution. Most Americans
00:04:48
Speaker
who haven't ever really thought about it are libertarians. The left now are not libertarians because they're into control. They want to design their own perfect society according to their own likes. They no longer believe in freedom of speech and therefore, yeah, the left does not believe you should be able to do whatever you want as long as you're not hurting other people.
Impact of Academia on Ideological Development
00:05:14
Speaker
want to coerce you to be a good person in their terms, period. Yes, you've said that when you were growing up, it was the conservatives that were the voices of oppression, authority, and orthodoxy. It was the right that imposed restrictions on liberty. That baton has now passed to the left. How has that transition taken place? Sneakily. I mean, it's a little bizarre. I feel as if I woke up one day and
00:05:42
Speaker
suddenly the left and right had changed places. Freedom of speech used to be a left-wing cause. American Civil Liberties Union would go to bat for Nazis and their right to march down Main Street. And that was always the cliche. That would never happen today. And the ACLU has been completely captured by the woke ideology. And they don't believe in free speech. You couldn't get more ironic than that.
00:06:12
Speaker
But yeah, when I was growing up, the oppressors were conservatives. They wanted you to go to church and you couldn't take drugs and you had to be patriotic and you had to dress it in a certain way. They were the ones who were bossy.
00:06:34
Speaker
and had a very rigid version of what it meant to be an American in my country. And they were big on rectitude, just more broadly. Now the source of rectitude is on the left. And I find that completely bizarre.
00:06:50
Speaker
When I speak to people on this very question, many of them point to the universities as the seed of this change. It is where certain fringe positions have grown from and then they've slowly taken root in institution after institution from the corporates to media to any number of different areas. Do you see the universities in that way or do you put the genesis of this somewhere else?
00:07:18
Speaker
I think it started with my generation. I grew up at the tail end of what we call the 60s, which actually extended into the 70s politically and culturally. A lot of the positions I used to espouse myself when I was much younger have been now taken over by the mainstream, most particularly the hostility to Western civilization.
00:07:46
Speaker
In my country, it was specifically hostility toward the United States, and we thought that made us special. When I went abroad, when I was much younger, I was ashamed to be an American, and I thought that that shame kind of opted me out of my nationality.
00:08:05
Speaker
all the ugly Americans, they were loud and uncouth and fat. And they didn't know anything about the places they visited. So if I were critical and I chimed in with foreigners who had a poor opinion of Americans, then I wasn't really one of them anymore. So I know that attitude from the inside. And there were some, you know, I've spent the majority of my adulthood outside the US. And at a certain point, I kind of pull up short.
00:08:34
Speaker
And we realized, first off, this didn't make me special. This was in the terms of the political group that I then identified with, American liberals. It was trite and it was conformist. And furthermore, it wasn't attractive. And that was the real, that was a real revelation to me because I thought I was, you know, I was living in Belfast and I thought I was pleasing people.
00:09:02
Speaker
by being so super critical of my own country. But no, it's not attractive to try to disavow the people you belong to and the place where you come from. And it didn't get me out of being an American. It was actually typically American at that time. And besides which, I didn't choose where to be born. I wasn't naturalized. I woke up in my crib
00:09:31
Speaker
with American citizenship.
Mainstreaming of Anti-Western Attitudes
00:09:33
Speaker
There were a lot of worse places to be from, and so I've stopped fighting it. I think that's one reason that I still have an American accent, whereas I lived in the UK for 35 years, and a lot of people in my position, especially Americans, would have deliberately achieved a British accent by now because it's perceived as prestigious back in the United States. It isn't, of course.
00:10:01
Speaker
This is another misunderstanding. When Americans who've been living in the UK go back to the US, other Americans hate you to start speaking with a British accent. It's pretentious. But this whole thing of being very hostile to
00:10:21
Speaker
the idea of patriotism, of emphasizing all the sins of the past so that you're obsessed with slavery and what Americans did to the Indians and all the racial discrimination up until the Civil Rights Movement especially. This was something that my generation really clung to.
00:10:48
Speaker
You know, it made us feel special. It made us feel savvy and that kind of faux self-criticism. It's not real self-criticism because you're not really criticizing yourself at all. You're criticizing other people. But it came with status. But only within this small group of people. And what distinguishes that kind of guilty, critical attitude toward your own civilization
00:11:17
Speaker
then and now. It was a fringe position when I was a kid. We were a tiny minority, and it didn't really matter what we thought. Now it's mainstream. Now it's the establishment. Now, weirdly enough, if you want to be anti-establishment, then in the US, you're pro-American.
00:11:40
Speaker
And more broadly, in the West, you believe in Western civilization and you admire its achievements. That is a fringe position now. I remember listening to Nick Cave on Unheard, and he said something along the lines of,
00:11:59
Speaker
The counter-cultural position today is to be religious, is to be patriotic, is to believe in the value of Western civilization. The ultimate irony is that's what makes you a rebel in 2024, as opposed to 30 or 40 years ago when you were part of the establishment.
00:12:16
Speaker
It's extraordinary how that's happened. And I've never quite heard before the explanation that at least it started from a place of almost intellectual snobbery as part of a fringe group. And so that that's really interesting. Well, my generation with these left wing views disproportionately went on to infest, if you will, academia. So people like me who didn't have any kind of revelation in Belfast
00:12:46
Speaker
they took over all of, especially the humanities and that their, this position influenced what they taught and they created the next generation who also went into the humanities. And, you know, ideologies don't stay the same. And if, if, if your position is starts out as hoping to be revolutionary in some way, then,
00:13:16
Speaker
then if it doesn't just get defeated or become boring as old hat, then it's going to get more
Critique of Language and Social Movements
00:13:24
Speaker
extreme. And that's exactly what's happened.
00:13:26
Speaker
It's interesting how you identified status as being a really important component of this. And I do sometimes think that these particular positions are status symbols on the left of or the progressive side of politics today. There's a really lovely little line in your collection of essays. It was the left's collective vocabulary functions as a t-shirt. And I think this may go to this in some way. Can you expand on that for me?
00:13:53
Speaker
Oh, I think one of the things I find most repulsive about the modern day left is their use of language. And they're very proud of their use of language and they're constantly trying to foist new rules and regulations on the way people write and speak. And it's ugly, right? It rapidly becomes trite. So it's also strangely lifeless.
00:14:23
Speaker
and negative, heavily prescriptive, so it's not optional. You're told as if on a single day, you can no longer refer to the obese. It has to be people living with obesity. Now, not only is that not really any more complimentary to people who are fat, but it's clumsy. As a writer, also just as a person who wants to be articulate and
00:14:52
Speaker
be able to speak freely and express things well. I resent these impositions. And I have to say, I have contempt for people who just pick them all up. I mean, these so-called rules that the left hands down and, you know, they put the university like Stanford University put together hugely long list of expressions and words that are no longer acceptable.
00:15:21
Speaker
But they're not legally binding. And I find it just utterly astonishing that people take this stuff seriously. And I also, I mean, I'm just, I have an aversion to conformity across the board. And that's something that my generation started out with in our little rebellious way. And I've clung to that.
00:15:45
Speaker
But that's any conformity, not just the kind of conformity that I rebelled against when I was 15. And I just find the way people obediently pick up these expressions, you know, they're in the air and they get the message that now we're not supposed to talk about marginalized group. No, no, we're not supposed to talk about minorities anymore. Now we have to call them people of color.
00:16:12
Speaker
Then they become marginalized groups as if this was done to them. And everyone, especially in the media, gets with the program immediately. It's like, don't you have any self-respect? It's pathetic. But the trend, just in terms of the use of language, is to make it more and more unwieldy, more repetitive, more multi-syllabic, and heavy.
00:16:42
Speaker
If you ever read some of this stuff that's written in the lingo that uses all of it, it is unreadable. So for me, this is partly an aesthetic issue.
00:16:54
Speaker
Yeah. And I think more than that, or in addition to that, it's euphemistic and deliberately tricky. So it takes, in many respects, what are very dangerous concepts and then cloaks them in words that sound at face value to be positive or to be an offensive. So the classic is diversity, equity, and inclusion. Most people don't listen to spectator podcasts and don't read the newspaper every day and don't keep up to date with the culture wars.
00:17:23
Speaker
And if you hear your HR department saying, well, we support diversity, equity, and inclusion without knowing the undertones of those terms, it's very hard probably not to go along with that because you go, I am a good person. I do believe in, in helping other people and, and being supportive of other people. So I can see how this stuff does catch on if you don't, and you can, and some people can be hoodwinked into the ideology through the manipulation of language. Well, a lot of the language is loaded.
00:17:53
Speaker
And you pick up also that it frequently means the opposite of what it seems to mean. So DEI, the E, you know, equity is all about discrimination. It's not about equality. It's about active discrimination against white people and men, right? And anyone who has biologically standard sexual inclinations.
00:18:19
Speaker
or another loaded word is neurodiversity, right? And that comes with a whole set of assumptions, some of which are highly dubious. And the point being that being autistic, say, is just as good as not being autistic. And I don't think so. And using a word that imposes
00:18:48
Speaker
that kind of neutrality doesn't change reality. If you're a parent who has a severely autistic child, that is so difficult, often almost incapable of communication, incapable of establishing a real emotional relationship with you. It's excruciating. And don't tell me that's just as good as having a kid
00:19:17
Speaker
who doesn't have that affliction. Of course, even using a word like affliction, I'm sure that's against the law. Well, the almost battleground for this control of language would be, in my view, the trans movement. Absolutely. Not even the most hardcore woke
00:19:34
Speaker
could suggest that there isn't difference between chromosomes, between different people. That is a biological fact. So then it becomes, well, it's the control of what the word woman means. It's a definitional debate. Why should we fight for that definition? Why does it matter? Why does the word woman, why is it important? I mean, we're talking about reality and
00:20:01
Speaker
And I think the trans movement is the ultimate in a break with what is in a way that's literally deranged. I mean, that's a good working definition of insanity, is someone who's insane has lost touch with reality. And that's what the trans movement has done. And its success in imposing that
00:20:31
Speaker
denial of one of the most primitive facts about human beings. Its success is astonishing. I mean, you would think you would never have the National Health Service refusing to use sex-specific words, refusing to say pregnant woman. Their materials are eliminating any reference to women. And it's just like,
00:21:00
Speaker
I don't know how this was achieved. As far as I can tell, one of the successes of the trans thing is that so many other civil rights battles had already been won. There wasn't much left. And therefore, everyone piled on to that as the ultimate litmus test as to whether or not, as you put it, you're a good person. But I mean, I'm horrified.
00:21:27
Speaker
linguistically, but I'm also more practically, as so many other, not just feminists, but women have been, by the fact that we're now letting convicted rapists into women's prisons. So it's not just a linguistics problem.
00:21:47
Speaker
Yes, I agree. I spoke to Brendan O'Neill about this quite recently, and he sees it as a very conscious, deliberate focus for social justice ideology because if you can make people believe this untruth, they will believe anything. It is almost like it is the point where you can completely fundamentally alter what is true and what is not true.
00:22:09
Speaker
I've got a new book coming out this spring and it's really all about that. It's called Mania. And I made up my own social hysteria set in the very recent past. And I suppose that somebody wrote a book declaring that we are all equally smart and any perceived difference is just a processing issue.
00:22:33
Speaker
And cognitive discrimination is the last great civil rights fight. So you can't call people stupid anymore, nor can you discriminate against them because they don't know anything. So you have to hire total morons for anything, including flying airplanes, et cetera. It's a lot of fun. But it springs from a real concern, which in some ways for me is greater
00:23:01
Speaker
is in my concern about any of the individual social manias that I have watched roll over the entire Western world and sometimes the entire world since about 2012. There was the trans thing started in 2012, then we had Me Too and Black Lives Matter and the COVID lockdowns that everyone bought hook, line and sinker. And now we're into another one over climate change.
00:23:30
Speaker
And it's not just the individual lunacies. It's the phenomenon itself that so many people virtually overnight suddenly are obsessed with the same thing, say all the same things, believe all the same things. And that's even if what those things are were completely contrary to what you believed 10 minutes ago.
00:24:00
Speaker
I guess the moral of my story is just as you put it, people will believe anything. And as a consequence, especially after having gone through COVID and watching Londoners march down the street with their hands up, please don't shoot when you don't even have an armed police force in the UK.
00:24:26
Speaker
After going through this, I suddenly find most of world history understandable. All the things that used to baffle me don't anymore. I find Pol Pot, the killing fields, perfectly understandable, not shocking in the least. Mao's cultural revolution makes total sense to me now. So does World War II. Nazism, I decided.
00:24:55
Speaker
somewhere in 2020, I think the UK would take about three weeks to bow down to Hitler. And I don't like this understanding of mine, not in the slightest, it's depressing. And it's actually quite frightening because I don't know what's next around the corner. But as a species, we tend to a herd mentality and we now have the technical facility
00:25:25
Speaker
to communicate ideology and faddish obsessions to the entire world in a matter of minutes or hours. And I don't think there seem to be any limits to what people would believe or how much they would change or what new idea that everyone is supposed to think it's going to come along.
00:25:55
Speaker
they will buy into anything. And it's worse than it's ever been because of the internet.
00:26:04
Speaker
The word mania itself is such an apt description for our times, and I want to put mania in a historical context, which you started to do just there. Some people would argue that we live in unique times because of, say, technology and the ability for it to disseminate a mania more quickly. Some people, like the Andrew Doyles, for example, would say that there are a lot of similarities between
00:26:28
Speaker
today and the Salem witch trials where people over a short period of time lost their collective minds. Is what we are seeing today the mania of today unique to our times or do you see parallels throughout history? How do you reflect on that?
00:26:43
Speaker
Oh, there are lots of parallels throughout history. People have always thought really stupid things. And I guess the revelation I've had in the last decade or so is that we have this conceit that we're modern. And so we don't believe anything barbaric or scientifically ludicrous anymore. That's not true. We're the same as we've always been.
00:27:11
Speaker
Not only that, but we are capable of going backwards. Right now we're going backwards. Science is going backwards. It's been infected with so many of these social manias that science itself is becoming anti-science. I mean, in Australia, the whole notion of taking on indigenous myth as part of science is absurd.
00:27:41
Speaker
and it's anti-science, but the ideology is more important than the science, than reality, than becoming a good scientist and discovering reality. Reality is now subject to ideology. And that's going backwards. I mean, that's basically, it's hurling backwards to when the church controlled everything, right?
00:28:09
Speaker
And it was anathema to imagine that the sun didn't revolve around the earth. Yeah, we're going back there. I mean, this whole experience has been quite humbling and it makes me fear for our future.
00:28:28
Speaker
Let's investigate that. My question is where does this end? Look forward to the future. Does this continue to culturally devolve to a very, very dark place? Or can you see the possibility of a cultural fight back for some of the established older truths that perhaps we once believed in and then because of the manias of our time, we no longer do to the same degree? Well, I mean, I don't have a crystal ball anymore than you do. So I have no idea where this is going to go.
00:28:56
Speaker
I have been heartened by the fact that this era, especially in the last few years, has thrown up any number of courageous, intelligent, articulate, sensible people who have really stuck their necks out.
00:29:16
Speaker
And, you know, it's funny, I think it must have been about 2010 I got approached by a newspaper with one of these filler gigs, you know, and they wanted me to write about someone whom I admired, you know, that kind of stock. I couldn't think of anybody, which was really horrifying. And now, 14 years later,
00:29:44
Speaker
I could give you a list of 25 people without even trying. And that's actually improved my life. I hesitate to call it a community. It isn't that exactly, and I hate that word, but I feel that I am in touch with and in league with what my father would call my brethren. My father was a
00:30:11
Speaker
a minister and seminary president. But I like that word for these people. They are my brethren.
Cultural Battles and Generational Shifts
00:30:18
Speaker
And they've often stood up for sometimes reality, fairness, for getting a grip at some cost to themselves. They've written a lot of good work, which is much more entertaining and daring than the
00:30:39
Speaker
orthodoxy, all the woke stuff, it's dreary. So these people give me hope. In the UK, Matt Goodwin, Eric Kaufman, Toby Young, even someone like Jordan Peterson has played an important part in the trans issue in particular.
00:31:07
Speaker
Douglas Murray has been great. And I think that these people are getting stronger. I think we are getting stronger. That doesn't change the fact that the lunatics have taken over all of our major institutions and they have high paying jobs and they don't want to resign. And they're going to be very hard to get rid of.
00:31:34
Speaker
that whole DEI industry is quite a little money maker. And I've been heartened to see certain Republican-dominated states refusing to fund DEI programs in state universities. I think that's brilliant. That's never going to happen in blue states, however. So it's a long fight, but I am encouraged by my contemporaries, and I'm also
00:32:04
Speaker
hopeful about younger people who they get a bad rap with people like me, which isn't always fair. At a certain point, surely this way of thinking is what their parents are into, and it's a big turnoff. I mean, after all, it is very dreary.
00:32:34
Speaker
atmosphere, you know, it's touch and feel is oppressive. It's not fun. It's, it's anti fun. It's humorless. And it has therefore has no natural appeal to young people, proper young people who are their physical prime. They have lots of sex drive or they should. And
00:33:03
Speaker
are naturally mischievous and mistrustful of their parents' shibboleths and surely that kicks in eventually, right?
00:33:15
Speaker
I'm not sure because you said that this is something which shouldn't appeal to young people. I agree. It's an oppressive authoritarian headmasterly ideology that says you can and can't do certain things, which kids have gone against. And yet very recently, the younger generation has been some of the most enthusiastic advocates for this new way of thinking, which I find difficult to fully comprehend. And the only thing I can come up with is going back to that branding point to say that they have been.
00:33:44
Speaker
taken in by the branding which is around inclusivity and positivity and feelings without looking at the layer underneath which says that this is actually, in many respects, the opposite of those things. I can't come up with any other reason as to why this would capture so many young people. Well, I think that especially a few years ago, younger people got the message that this was a movement to take over.
00:34:13
Speaker
In other words, it was a power move to kick the old has-been writers like me out of the catalog, then they could step into the catalog.
00:34:28
Speaker
That's been the case across the board. The message was, we're catching you out with all these barbaric misuses of language and you don't have the right opinions. We're going to get you fired. That's what cancel culture, that's part of what cancel culture is motivated by. Part of it, of course, is just it's a sport, just getting people fired. But
00:34:51
Speaker
writ large that's getting rid of a generation and then you get to step into their shoes so i think that was part of the incentive.
00:35:01
Speaker
Well, this is a nice segue into identity politics, specifically within fiction. So in 2006, you said, fiction writers should have a vested interest in protecting everyone's rights to offend others, because if hurting someone else's feelings, even accidentally, is sufficient justification for muzzling, there will always be someone out there who is miffed by what you say, and freedom of speech is dead.
00:35:24
Speaker
Fast forward in 2016 at a now infamous address in Brisbane. You said with the rise of identity politics, that battle is a battle that fiction writers were losing. Fast forward again eight years to 2024. What's the state of that battle in fiction today? We're still losing, but I'm still standing.
00:35:45
Speaker
I think publishing has really suffered from being taken over by women. And women are particularly susceptible to woke ideology because they like to think of themselves as so caring and empathetic. I think they're a little more... I mean, this is obviously to overgeneralize and I'm suspicious of any generalization that
00:36:09
Speaker
I opt myself out of. But I think women tend to be more communitarian. They don't like conflict. And I think they're a little more driven to please. That's the worst of it. And in publishing, this has meant susceptibility, especially post George Floyd, to all of this pandering. And so it's overt racial pandering.
00:36:37
Speaker
And I mean, it hasn't made them money. It's interesting in its very economic self-destruction. They've lost a lot of money on splashing out huge advances for minority writers just because they're minorities and not because they wrote a great book. And I shouldn't have to say this.
00:37:00
Speaker
nothing against minority writers, but all I care about is the good books. I don't care who you are. In fact, I generally am not interested in authors, who they are, their biographies. I never read biographies of writers. I don't care what your story was. I don't care what your relationship with your mother was. I just want to read the book and I will judge it on its own terms.
00:37:29
Speaker
This whole thing of bringing DEI to publishing, I think has been quietly catastrophic. And I'm interested in how long it will take for them to start pulling back on it. I noticed that the woke obsessions in filmmaking are starting to subside, and that's because it involves too much money. Whereas you can afford to squander advances in
00:37:59
Speaker
Publishing because in the big scheme of things it's kind of chump change so that the bigger companies that own these Publishing companies are not going to get up in arms that you just lost What in your tiny terms? There's a lot of money, but it's just in worldly terms. It doesn't
00:38:21
Speaker
actually matter. I mean ultimately publishing right now culturally even doesn't especially matter. Novelists have suffered a subtle cultural demotion and are mostly regarded as useful if they generate Netflix series. So it's a very small world and the people who read literary fiction for example
00:38:46
Speaker
not very many of them. It's a small audience in comparison to the TV audience. So to a degree, it's a tempest in a teacup. It's obviously a tempest that reigns on my personal head. I can see why people outside of publishing or people who are not big readers wouldn't especially give a toss. Even in tiny publishing, there have been
00:39:10
Speaker
some occurrences that give me hope. I mean, there've been more than one publishing company to come along and scoop up unpopular writers, people with, or, you know, perish the thought, straight white male writers. And they're doing very well, even in nonfiction.
00:39:28
Speaker
There's money in anti-woke. I think there's a lot more money in anti-woke than in woke. I mean, yes, there was that wave of books that sold absurd quantities because people wanted to put, you know, Ibram X. Kendi on their coffee table as a badge of honor and goodness. But I think the money right now is in people who are pushing back against this stuff.
00:39:52
Speaker
And we think more broadly, what we were talking about earlier, it's cool to be conservative. I mean, it's the conservatives who are risky and edgy. They're the only people who are funny in comedy. It's kind of interesting. And I think promising.
00:40:14
Speaker
Yeah, look, it is one of the great paradoxes of our time that it is patently obvious that a lot of these sorts of, say, woke marketing campaigns, for example, are counterproductive. People don't like them. The Bud Light phenomena is an example of just the backlash that will come if you do this. And yet businesses still keep doing it. It still keeps
Gender Differences in Ideological Leanings
00:40:33
Speaker
happening. Marketing departments still do this stuff.
00:40:36
Speaker
even though facts are staring them in the face, that it is not popular with a mainstream audience. It's difficult to fully get your head around. Can I reverse back to the start of your answer, looking at the innate differences between men and women? Because it brought to mind a really interesting graph that I saw, I think, in The Economist in the last maybe few weeks. And it said that across a lot of different countries that they surveyed,
00:41:01
Speaker
The ideological differences between men and women had actually been increasing rapidly in the last 15 to 20 years. I think kind of those one which was Korea and Korea.
00:41:12
Speaker
I think at the start of 2000, I think there was more men that were voting for the equivalent of their Democrat party or their Labour party. And then that's just completely inverted dramatically over the last 20 years. Similar in the US, women have got more liberal, men have got more conservative. That same phenomena has played out pretty much everywhere. So everything you said around the differences between men and women, I think there are really strong
00:41:38
Speaker
biological, cultural Darwinian almost reasons for those differences. But it seems like those differences in terms of ideology are getting more pronounced. Why do you think that change is actually getting more exaggerated over the last little period?
00:41:53
Speaker
Well, certainly in the United States, Trump is an ingredient here. I think that's one of the big dividers between men and women is Trump's support. It's not all male by any means, but there are a lot more male Trump supporters than female ones.
00:42:11
Speaker
You know, I guess it's still, you know, a lot of the same explanations, the desire to please, the susceptibility to conformity, the desire to be considered a nice person. Now, funnily enough, I've never especially been consumed with being considered a nice person, certainly not with being a good person. I care about being regarded as good at what I do. I want to write good books, but I don't want to write virtuous books.
00:42:38
Speaker
I don't understand that whole impulse in some ways. I mean, I grew up in a household where the dominant ethos was altruistic, but I didn't buy it. And it really came down to the fact that my father had a big ego on him and wanted to be well regarded.
00:42:58
Speaker
So, I saw the dissonance between being good and wanting to seem good. It's always been suspicious of that, but most women just take it on face value. They want to be seen as good people. It's not an ambition I share.
00:43:18
Speaker
That's the whole line with the woke thing is that this has to do with virtue. This is how you prove that you're a good person and they seem to buy it. And it's that dominant desire to please. It's being more oriented toward what other people think of you. I don't say that proudly as a fellow female. And I think maybe men are a little more rebellious. Besides, they're being shafted like crazy. And people don't like being shafted.
00:43:48
Speaker
They're being deliberately and conspicuously discriminated against in education, in hiring, in everything, as well as in the culture. I mean, Jesus, you look at all the university presidents in the Ivy League, all falling to women.
00:44:08
Speaker
Yes. There is one group or demographic in America where life expectancy has been falling over the last decade, and that is non-college educated white men. Now, when you think about that startling statistic, you can hate Trump. That's completely fine to hate Trump. It's a valid, as in one can hate Trump. That's a valid position. But the people that quite frustrate me are the people who don't try and understand the underlying reasons for why someone like Trump can be popular.
00:44:37
Speaker
with that demographic of largely
Reflections on Happiness
00:44:39
Speaker
men. There are very clear underlying social reasons as to why that's the case, but it is easier for a lot of people just to call that group dumb, ignorant, redneck, racist, hicks. Same thing happened in Brexit. Supposed to understand the underlying reasons for these types of protest votes, there are a lot of people who find it more comfortable to dismiss it out of hand and that does frustrate me. There are a lot of pieces written by
00:45:05
Speaker
Democrats in the United States trying to explain Trump. And it's hardly ever done with good faith. You rarely see an effort to identify with these people and understand what might be motivating them. It's always skewed so that they seem like deplorables. It's almost as if it's too frightening to genuinely understand what the appeal is.
00:45:34
Speaker
I'm not a Trump supporter either, I might clarify. And there are aspects of him which I am genuinely baffled about why that would be appealing. I find him tedious. He speaks badly. He's crude in presentation. I don't mean that in a moral way, but there's just a kind of roughness to him and ugliness. He's impolite in a way that a lot of his supporters in their normal
00:46:03
Speaker
social life would find unacceptable, rude, abusive. So I don't pretend to totally understand. It's not that I'm trying not to. And I honestly think that Democrats try not to. We are running short of time, Lionel, but indulge me one last question.
00:46:23
Speaker
You wrote in a Guardian article, and as an aside, it's a testament to your neurodiversity to use the parts of our times that you can be written. You can be covered in both the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian and the Spectator. It's probably increasingly rare. But in that article, you said, in the US, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to pursue it is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?
00:46:52
Speaker
Ronald Shriver, what is happiness to you today? Well, in that essay, I put forward the notion that happiness is not a point but a trajectory. It is a direction. It is proceeding with purpose. And generally, if you are truly happy, you're not thinking about whether or not you're happy.
00:47:13
Speaker
You're too absorbed in what you're doing. And I think misconceiving of happiness as some kind of Valhalla that you arrive at is one of the things that makes people unhappy. That they don't understand it's not something that you achieve. It's not static. You never achieve it. It is the process of achieving something.
00:47:34
Speaker
that makes me happy and I don't think that I'm alone in that. It's one of the reasons I like writing books because they take a long time and I always have something to think about, something to do, something to achieve both in the short and the long term. And often that process entails a certain amount of suffering, but that's okay. I think a good parallel also is
00:48:05
Speaker
raising children, which I have not done, and I feel a little guilty about that. But it involves a lot of sacrifice and tedium and sometimes outright boredom, having to deal with screaming kids and
00:48:23
Speaker
sticky hands and you name it. But at the end of the day, and it is a risk, you don't know how it's going to turn out. But an awful lot of parents will tell you that it's the most satisfying and meaningful thing that they did in their entire lives. And I think that's happiness. And I think one of the reasons that we have a low birth rate across the West is that we misconceive what happiness is.
00:48:50
Speaker
so that we think, oh, you know, I don't want to do all that. That sounds like a big pain in the bum. I'd rather go on holiday. It's not understanding that deep happiness has to do with undertaking something hard. Beautifully put.
00:49:07
Speaker
Lionel, there have been very few writers who have been able to straddle fiction and nonfiction with the success that you have, probably even fewer who have been able to do it whilst maintaining their integrity in the way that you have. We're all looking forward to your next book, which I believe you said is coming out in the spring.
00:49:27
Speaker
April. I can't wait for that one and would love to chat to you about it when it comes out. Thank you so much for both your thinking, your continued fight for what you believe is right, and thank you more immediately for coming on, Australiana. Well, thank you for having me. I've really enjoyed talking to you.
00:49:44
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.