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Fighting cultural socialism, with Eric Kaufmann
2.5k Plays11 months ago
Australiana is now Fire at Will - your safe space for dangerous conversations.
Across the western world, cosplay protests are ongoing in some of the most elite academic institutions. They point to a deeper malaise in places of higher education. That's a real problem. The illiberal dogmas that have infiltrated our social institutions have their roots in the cultural rot in western education systems.
To discuss how this happened, and what can be done, Will is joined by Eric Kaufmann. Eric is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham. His next book is out soon. It is titled 'Taboo: How making race sacred produced a cultural revolution.'
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
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Transcript
Introduction to Fire at Will
00:00:00
Speaker
G'day everyone, Will here. We started Australiana to chat about Australian politics and culture, with interesting people and, in the spectators, inimitable style.
Battles for Western Civilization
00:00:11
Speaker
As we've gone along, it's morphed into something different, something bigger, something more ambitious.
00:00:18
Speaker
I've discovered that the most important battles that need to be fought in Australia are the same battles that need to be fought across the Anglosphere. They are battles for the very soul of Western civilization, for freedom of speech, for the values of the Enlightenment, for the right to express heterodox ideas no matter how dangerous they may be perceived to be.
Rebranding and Ideological Dynamics
00:00:43
Speaker
To stand up for Western history and the wonderful things that our civilization has achieved. To question the illiberal dogmas that have infiltrated our societal institutions.
00:00:56
Speaker
to seek the truth, not your truth. And to do all of this in the knowledge that with every conversation, we are hopefully shifting the Overton window just a tad and giving you the confidence to have the same conversations in your daily life. In other words, to arm you with the ammunition to fire at will. From today, the show will have a new name that reflects this ethos, fire at will.
00:01:24
Speaker
Think of it as your safe space for dangerous conversations. Now cue the new jingle.
00:01:50
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will from The Spectator Australia, your safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston.
00:02:07
Speaker
John said, I never thought I'd live to see the day when the right wing would become the cool ones giving the middle finger to the establishment, and the left wing becoming the snivelling, self-righteous, twatty ones going around shaming everyone. If there is one question that arises on this podcast more than any other, it is how did that transformation take place?
00:02:29
Speaker
Several hypotheses have been explored, from the decline in organized religion, to the rise of social media, to the lack of purpose that many young people feel, to the change in cultural demographics of Western countries. The one thing that almost all of my guests have agreed on, however, is it started in the universities. Something weird and disturbing has been taking place on American university campuses, and that weirdness has been exported to the rest of the world.
00:02:56
Speaker
One only needs to look at what is happening at Columbia University as we record this podcast to get a sense of the rot.
Guest Introduction: Eric Kaufman
00:03:02
Speaker
To help me understand it, I am delighted to be joined by Eric Kaufman. Eric is an author and a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, where he has launched the Center for Heterodox Social Sciences, which is guided by the values of autonomy, independence, and freedom of speech. The US has some 150 research centers with a classical liberal ethos, but this is the first of its kind in Britain.
00:03:26
Speaker
Eric, welcome to Far at Will.
Hostility and Cancel Culture in Academia
00:03:29
Speaker
Will, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
00:03:31
Speaker
It's a pleasure to have you on. Let's start with your story. So you actually spent most of your career at Birkbeck College at the University of London. You released a wonderful book, White Shift in 2018. And I've heard you talk about what was a five year period of steady hostility, which led to you changing universities. Tell me about that period of your life and perhaps what it has revealed around the culture of universities in the UK today.
00:03:59
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's just a lot there. So what I'd say is, I got my PhD in London at the LSE in sociology, but basically wound up as a politics professor. I taught at Southampton and at Birkbeck for a combined total of 24 years. So very immersed in the system, all the academic conferences and journals and everything.
00:04:22
Speaker
Now, I would say that, see, my view is actually the rod, if you like, goes back much further than just the post 2010s. I would certainly say that I withheld opinions, withheld my political views for those 24 years, up until quite recently when I kind of came out of the closet. In terms of the cancel culture,
00:04:45
Speaker
What you what i would say about that is that yes it's certainly got worse from the mid twenty tens onwards and this has to do with a streak of intolerance to be younger but not only younger but the most far left and younger activists so really my problems begin almost.
00:05:04
Speaker
entirely with a new very sort of woke young member of staff that comes in when i'm head of department and has the temerity to sort of send me an email telling me not to not. As much as telling me what more or less telling me not to attend a debate that i was in with.
00:05:22
Speaker
four other panelists, one of whom was, you know, a black leftist, one of whom was a female leftist. I mean, these are like mainstream left of center people. And we were debating, and the initial title was Is Rising Diversity a Threat to the West? which was posed by the organizers. Under duress, they changed that, even though that was posed by people including the left liberal columnists who didn't want to sort of do that. But anyway,
00:05:47
Speaker
That's sort of the beginning and then there was some offense archaeology in my Twitter going back to 2016. They dug up some arcane tweet that it had like two likes and claimed that it was racist and then you had, you know, anything like if I retweeted Justin Trudeau not being able to pronounce LGBTQ, you know, that was added to the file.
00:06:07
Speaker
It was a combination of some open letters and Twitter mobbings, quite a number, maybe four or five, probably about four internal investigations prompted by radical members of staff or students or even people from outside lodging complaints. Perhaps to preface it, what is your area of academic focus? What would people take an issue with?
00:06:27
Speaker
Yeah, well, I'm basically a political scientist, but with a strong interest in history and sociology as well. I've focused mainly on problems of nationalism and ethnic conflict in relation to immigration and demography, but also in relation to ideology, especially cultural left ideology. So I've been studying those topics in
00:06:48
Speaker
all of them, the cultural left included since my PhD. And it's just different permutations and combinations. So my PhD was really about the decline of the WASP ethnic majority in the US in the 19th and up until the mid
00:07:04
Speaker
20th century. So that was kind of an initial interest, but then White Shift was really more a reprise of that, but looking at the recent period. So yeah, that's kind of a little bit academically about my background. But so just to say that this, all of the problems I was having, by the way, with cancel culture had to do with my public appearances, either on Twitter or what I was, you know, writing, including a review of Douglas Murray's book that one staff member claimed was a coded attack
00:07:30
Speaker
on her bizarrely. Anyway, so all the public activity is what drew the ire. And because people don't read, you know, they wouldn't have read White Shift. It's just much too long. They want something that's to, you know, 280 characters or something they can get their teeth into. I want to go back to that one student who had a problem with you being a part of debate with you debating on particular ideas. I go back to my first
00:07:57
Speaker
couple of days at Sydney University. This would have been 15 years ago, give or take. I remember I came across, coincidentally, a free Palestine protester. She was straight out of Central Casting, the purple hair and the piercings and all that sort of stuff.
00:08:16
Speaker
I had a bit of a swagger about me. I was imbued with a sense of academic debate. I came up and I engaged in a hearty debate with her about Israel-Palestine. Something's never changed. The interesting thing was, whilst she was radically opposed to everything I was saying, we both kind of enjoyed the conversation. We enjoyed the hearty debate and it was fun. That was university.
00:08:38
Speaker
Something has changed since obviously I was at University Centre, perhaps many people listening to this podcast would have done their tertiary studies where that sense of debate and disagreement is no longer accepted. The idea now is to shut down alternative viewpoints. A, am I looking at things through rose-tinted glasses? Is it always been that way perhaps? And B, what has changed that has led specifically to parts of the left going from debating ideas they disagree with to shutting them down?
Intolerance and Speech Suppression
00:09:08
Speaker
So I think this story is a sort of longer running story. I mean, I guess I would start with work that's been done on a simple question, which has been asked in the general social survey in the US since the 72, I think. Six categories of speaker, should they be allowed to speak publicly and to teach in a school? Militarist, homosexual, communist, racist. Now the key one that I'm interested in is racist, right? Amongst those six.
00:09:37
Speaker
Really, for a long time, there was growing tolerance for all of those types of speakers. People were kind of becoming more tolerant, and actually the university-educated liberals were the most tolerant of all those speakers. We get to about 1990, and the one for racists starts to diverge from the other five and move in a different direction. And by the time we get to now, it's the better-educated liberals that are the least likely to say that person should be allowed to speak in public. Now, that's a trend that
00:10:06
Speaker
Actually begins with the boomers to some degree and has sort of slowly been trending in that intolerant direction sort of for the last thirty plus years but it's getting more and more extreme so that's one thing to bear in mind is that the exceptionalism around identity by which i mean race gender sexuality identity politics.
00:10:27
Speaker
compared to all other kinds of speaker. That has really been a noticeable trend for a long time. Now, you can also, by the way, go back and see speakers being canceled. The president of the American Sociological Association, James Coleman,
00:10:42
Speaker
was he did a paper that opposed busing saying this was actually leading to white flight. It wasn't a great idea. He was picketed on stage at the national, the largest conference of American sociologists. They tried to get him debarred for ethics violations. So
00:10:58
Speaker
This intolerance actually has an earlier umbilical cord, and now it is true that this starts small. It starts in places like Berkeley and in the New York Board of Education and in a few radical departments, and then it spreads over time. And so I see this as a kind of tipping point. It's just spreading, spreading, spreading, and then suddenly it seems like it's everywhere. Again, I would really reiterate that, you know, Greg Luciano, I think it was 2008, there were 300
00:11:27
Speaker
Catholic culture incidents in 2008. We had speech codes, 300 of them by 1991 in American universities. So this kind of intolerance for debate has a longer history. What I would say is happening, however, is a scaling up, because these ideas which were confined to a few radical local government, a few radical unions, a few radical school boards, plus some departments and universities,
00:11:54
Speaker
suddenly become part of the bureaucracy and they spread off campus especially when we get social media they can reach.
Activism's Influence in Universities
00:12:01
Speaker
The new york times in the washington post and youth culture and all these other areas where they really had reached so i don't think the ideas are new but i think the scale is new. I want to pick up on that inside the end there.
00:12:13
Speaker
Is this spread or the speed at which this ideology spreads, is it being primarily driven bottom up? So radical students who are then disseminating this ideology and potentially pressuring other people to go along with them, or is it more top down coming from either staff or the academics or is it a bit of a bit of everything? Well, my my view is this, I call it an emergent authoritarianism, very much a bottom up
00:12:41
Speaker
rather than a top-down. In two ways. One is you have activists who will have followings, who will be influential. They might lead Twitter mobs, and people can like and retweet. They will then target institutions and say,
00:12:59
Speaker
corporation or university, you Columbia University, if you don't take action against this, or Harvard, let's say, if you don't take action against Roland Fryer, or you don't take action against this professor, you know, we're going to lodge a complaint, we're going to hold a march, so this kind of emotional blackmail.
00:13:14
Speaker
by activists from the bottom up putting pressure on institutions or maybe it's the new york time staffers saying that uh you know james bennett has to be fired as as opinion page editor you know so if this kind of staff activism is coming from the bottom up then you also have well you you also have the sort of general action around twitter mobbing open letters
00:13:36
Speaker
and general intolerance, which I think also is coming from the bottom up. Now, of course, you do have institutions, schools, universities, HR directors, which also get a certain amount of power, and they can act as super spreaders for this mind virus. So we're getting a certain amount of top down, but it's coming from the institutions rather than government, I would say, initially.
00:13:57
Speaker
Yeah, I was listening to one of the protesters at Columbia, and it was fascinating to hear the way that she framed the relative power dynamics between the protesters and university administration. And she basically said in pretty Marxist tones, we have the power. The university needs to listen to us. We are the ones who are in control.
00:14:19
Speaker
Any objective person doesn't understand the dynamics of campus would go that's ridiculous they can be pushed off campus they can be expelled. Potentially question is how have university administration let it get to a point where students think they are the ones who can push around the administration where is that just wouldn't have happened i don't think fifty years ago.
00:14:41
Speaker
Here, I actually think 50 years ago, it did happen, and it's worth reminding ourselves what happened in the late 60s. You know, University of San Francisco, the black studies activists, they struck for a year. They said, we want 50 black professors, we want any black student admitted, we want
00:15:00
Speaker
New Black Studies department, we want all of these things. They got quite a bit of it. Black Panther's arm to the teeth took over buildings, took over a building in Cornell in 1969. You had all of these sit-ins and the student administrations were, you know, sometimes they did something, but often they didn't. I mean, it was the same problem of loss of authority. And my view is similar to that of Shelby Steele, who wrote in his book, White Guilt, there once you had the civil rights movement and the acknowledgement of wrongdoing by
00:15:30
Speaker
you know, by the American state, you then had a loss of authority in institutions, and a lot of the new left really pushed on that, and there wasn't that much pushback. There was occasionally some pushback. But I think this is a well-established pattern now of the breakdown of authority, and if you read people like Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer from that period, they're complaining about this
00:15:51
Speaker
Even the critical theorists like Habermas and Dornall were calling these people left-wing fascists. So I think that the template was well established, and we've seen it time and time and time again. There are not many instances of real strong action from university leadership when faced with left-wing protest. And so I think that pattern has just become established. Maybe there are some differences. I mean, one is this whole therapeutic
00:16:18
Speaker
narrative of harm and emotional trauma and safety. And that, which you saw, by the way, with the Christakis-Yale incident at Evergreen State, and you see this emphasis on, you know, we're a community, we have to be protected from harm. And that kind of coddling, what Haydn, Lukianov, in the coddling of the American mind, you know, they talk about this. I mean, that is somewhat new, although I say only somewhat new, because already the lingo of self-esteem
00:16:47
Speaker
was being used in the first wave of political correctness sort of in the 90s. So I'd say it goes from self-esteem and hypersensitivity to emotional safety, microaggressions, and trauma. It's just a turning up of the dial, but it's similar ideas.
00:17:03
Speaker
I think this is such a fascinating area. I spoke to Dr Tanvir Ahmed, an Australian psychologist on the podcast a while ago. He's looked at this and he's looked at the way that trauma and particularly post-traumatic stress disorder has changed in terms of how it is perceived by people. In that 30 or 40 years ago, this was defined very narrowly the concept of trauma and generally was actually used after people had been in warfare.
00:17:28
Speaker
And the way that our scope of what we mean by trauma can be extended out and extended out basically then suggests that words can be violence. And if words can be violence, therefore it is acceptable to minimise the use of particular words, to minimise speech. I think that's a really interesting kind of linking point as to how the way we think about trauma has changed. And as a result of that, that's had implications for free speech.
00:17:52
Speaker
Yeah, completely. I mean, and if you just think of the letters EDI, equity and diversity basically mean equal outcomes is more important than equal treatment. And then the inclusion part basically means
00:18:05
Speaker
we're going to have to muzzle your speech because we don't want to make anybody feel excluded because they're offended and traumatized. So you're right. So there's no question this trauma stuff is at the core of cancel culture and that progressive liberalism. And it comes out of that therapeutic discourse. Now you mentioned the
00:18:23
Speaker
meaning of PTSD expanding over time.
Concept Creep and Expanding Definitions
00:18:26
Speaker
So there's an interesting work by a British psychologist, Nick Haslam, on what he calls concept creep. The meaning of terms like bullying and trauma and prejudice and all these things has been inflating over time. And that, yeah, you can track it in words. The number of times these words are used in English language books. You can track that in Google Engrams, which he does. And yeah, so we've got this essentially inflation in these terms. Everything becomes a trauma. Everything becomes bullying.
00:18:53
Speaker
And that's just been kind of absorbed into that initial post-60s new left discourse. And so now we've got this EDI thing. We're saying, by the way, all of that stuff also is influencing court decisions even. So this whole idea of a harassment and hostile environment
00:19:11
Speaker
in the courts, the interpretation of what is a hostile environment. I mean, it's not just a sea of pinups in a workplace. But if somebody is critical of the Iranian Supreme Leader, that could be interpreted as Islamophobic under this sort of new dispensation of hostile environment, which kind of comes in in the late 80s, early 90s when speech codes are being implemented. So yeah, that whole kind of therapeutic totalitarianism, I think that's Rod Dreher's term.
00:19:41
Speaker
I was thinking about that concept creep in the context of the question you asked before around the five types of professions that would be accepted in a university. And the thing about the racist category is that what it means to be racist, I think would be dramatically different to someone answering that today compared to if they're answering it 30 or 40 years ago.
00:20:00
Speaker
where the traditional view of racism which is you discriminate on the basis of someone's skin color, whereas today with very nebulous terms like systemic racism, the concept creep has occurred there. Perhaps a question following on from that, is systemic or structural racism, is it a thing in your view?
Critique of Systemic Racism Arguments
00:20:21
Speaker
Yeah, so I think I would take a very kind of scientific approach which says that
00:20:26
Speaker
If you make a claim that structural racism is the reason we see, say, a gap in income or wealth between white and black or more white CEOs than black CEOs, it's incumbent upon you to provide some form of measurement of these structures, independent of the measurement of discrimination. Whereas, actually, if you look at the way Kendi and a lot of these other people define
00:20:50
Speaker
structural racism, they define it as the gap. So they basically have a circular argument, and there's no way of independently separating cause and effect. So yeah, I mean, I think it's essentially pseudoscience. You won't find an academic paper that says, here's my independent measurement of the structure, and here's the independent measurement of the gap.
00:21:14
Speaker
look at other explanations for this gap, such as to do with family structure, to do with emphasis on education in different groups, or whatever it is. So we would never sort of say, well, the reason Jews earn more than Seventh Day Adventists or Jehovah's Witnesses is due to some kind of structural religious prejudice in the society, right? But somehow when it comes to color differences to do with black and white, that's the first thing people reach for. Because the other thing in science, of course, is you have to have refuted
00:21:44
Speaker
taken seriously in refuted competing arguments in order for your argument to stand up. So none of that's happened with this structural stuff. It's just now, what I would say is, you know, I could well imagine a situation where, let's say you have a society where everybody's prejudiced against the other race and there's only 10% black and 90% white and you go to a job interview,
00:22:07
Speaker
then the prejudice of the whites is going to matter a lot more than the prejudice in favor coming from the black person in the audience. So in that sense, we could say, okay, yeah, that's something that's measurable, testable, verifiable, falsifiable. But the way this argument is always made is as a sort of meta theory that can never be falsified. And so it's, yeah, it's just ideology and it's not scientific.
00:22:29
Speaker
That being said, people like Ibram X. Kendi have been given huge amounts of money to work on this type of research. I think Ibram X. Kendi was given some sort of genius grant and a lot of money that came along with it.
Funding and Academic Freedom
00:22:43
Speaker
I guess the question is, if it's not valid scientific inquiry, how do they still manage to get such levels of support from obviously incredibly powerful people in the academic establishment?
00:22:54
Speaker
Well, Shelby Steele in his book, White guilt, basically argues that a lot of these policies like affirmative action even are really a kind of virtue signaling. It's about saying, well, moral authority is passed from white to black people, let's say, because the whites are now guilty and
00:23:12
Speaker
The only way to kind of reclaim some legitimacy and moral authority is to signal that you're one of the good whites and you do that through, you know, affirmative action or giving 50 billion dollars or whatever it is to Black Lives Matter or something like that. That sort of gives you your bona fides to show that you're one of the morally upright. That gives you your moral authority. So I just think it's all about this kind of cultural power and that's what incentivizes people to do this. And of course there is
00:23:40
Speaker
you know in my current i've got a new book out which is called to be in britain the title in britain is is to do how making race sacred led to a cultural revolution and so i argue that it's really that original anti racism to do which. Rises in the mid nineteen sixties and you can sort of argue well it's it was very important to have a norm against racial discrimination but once you have.
00:24:01
Speaker
a taboo, which is very much a tripwire, and there's no bounds put on this thing. It can then be stretched out. So when Daniel Patrick Moynihan writes a report on the Black family in 1965, perfectly scientific and perfectly accurate and holds up to this day that this could become an issue, that was sidelined as too incendiary. That was the first time you had a canceling really of a piece of work. And that kind of showed you the power of this new taboo to shut down
00:24:28
Speaker
inquiry and and then once people kind of realize this power well that then gets people borrow that power it's like kryptonite you can use it against your enemies and so yeah and then of course it's gets borrowed by feminists gets borrowed by those who are fighting on the lgbtq front because this is a way of sort of silencing your opponents through a kind of emotional blackmail and that's why it's important
00:24:53
Speaker
We will dive deeper into taboo in one moment, but just before we do to round out the conversation on the state of academia today, from what I can see, there are two broad schools of thought on how you go about reforming institutions which are subject to some of the challenges that we've discussed.
Reforming Educational Institutions
00:25:13
Speaker
One is a school that is represented by people like
00:25:17
Speaker
Peter Bogosian, who you have spoken to recently, where he would say something along the lines of, these elite institutions, particularly in America, are too far gone. The cultural rot is too deep. We need to build new institutions. And say, the University of Austin, that I know you're affiliated with, would be one example of that. New institutions that are based on an ethos of classical liberalism and free inquiry.
00:25:42
Speaker
Second school of thought would be someone like a Chris Rufo, who's made it his mission to go into some of these institutions and some entertaining ways in some respects, going to stripping out the DEI dogma that is there and trying to put people in places of traditional learning that aren't as ideologically affected. Where do you stand on those, I guess, two different approaches to reforming education?
00:26:08
Speaker
Well, yeah, that's a really good question. And you kind of get at the nub of the policy issue between what I would call reformers or interventionists like Rufo and the more libertarian approach like Bogosian or Greg Lukianov. Broadly speaking, I'm more in the Rufo camp, but I'm also a sort of both and type. So I think we got to do both. The thing about universities is unlike podcasting or media even,
00:26:33
Speaker
There are very high barriers to entry. I mean, University of Austin, even with its 200 million endowment, not endowment, but the amount that they've raised, the difficulty they have to be accredited, they have to set up all of these systems. It's just very time consuming and it's difficult. And you have, of course, a lot of people have an investment in their alma mater. You've got these vast endowments and all the influence on the culture is largely in the top couple of hundred institutions. The pecking order.
00:27:02
Speaker
The prestige order, it's all very well established. It's very difficult to upend that. And the top universities 50 years ago are largely the top ones today. So I think you can make some changes and nip a little bit around the edges, but I don't think that's going to fundamentally change things. I think that's also the case in schools, by the way, the free school or school choice, I also think isn't going to really make much of a difference except at the edges.
00:27:28
Speaker
I use the analogy of Twitter and Elon Musk versus Gavin Parler. Gavin Parler and Truth Social may have, you know, they were important in some ways, but really compare that to the impact Musk has had on
00:27:41
Speaker
Twitter and you can't compare them. And so I think you've really got to, both in schools and universities, we have to pursue first and foremost a regulatory approach where conservatives and classical liberals have political power. They really need to tie funding. They really need to get rid of DEI, get rid of critical race theory in schools. Now, of course, there's academic freedom in universities. It's a different question there as to what you do. But I very much think that chilling out
00:28:10
Speaker
indoctrination is the way to go. And I think it can be done, but it takes stamina, takes personnel, perseverance. But the easy path is to just say, oh, it's lost and we should just set up our own. I think it's a pipe dream, unfortunately.
00:28:26
Speaker
It raises that old paradox as well, which is the extent to which you tolerate the intolerant. I've forgotten what the paradox is. Let's assume we're talking about private institutions, not public institutions. Do you think that the state should be allowed to say, put restrictions on DEI functions or policies in a private institution? Not put restrictions, but I think that they can tie funding. So if you want to have
00:28:55
Speaker
research grants or scholarship money. If you want to be eligible for that, then you must have the policy. You can't do EDI or certainly, I mean, I don't know about EDI. It depends which policy you could present. Presumably you could tie it even to that. But certainly political neutrality, free speech protections, political bias protections, all of that can be instituted. And I guess the private institution would have a choice. They could refuse government money.
00:29:24
Speaker
and continue to be a social justice institution, and that's fine. Declare is a social justice institution, but if they want access to research grants and scholarship money, then yes, they would have to abide by the rules set by the regulator.
Eric Kaufman's New Center and Research Challenges
00:29:38
Speaker
You have created a new center in an existing institution, the Center for Heterodox Social Sciences. I like all the words there, but what exactly does it mean, and what are you aiming to do?
00:29:50
Speaker
Well, right. So I moved over to Buckingham University of Buckingham, which is the only free speech oriented university in the UK out of about 180 institutions. The center I'm creating really is the aim there is to sort of
00:30:05
Speaker
look at the softer social sciences. So the social sciences outside economics, which are the ones that are the most politicized, and to really focus on topics that have been neglected or twisted by the bias that exists. And it's a very heavy ideological bias in
00:30:22
Speaker
most institutions, on the order of around 10 to 14 to 1 left to right. Self-censorship levels are, you know, among conservative academics, and there's a small number of them, they are running at around 7 in 10, saying they self-censor much higher. And the other three may be self-censoring and answering that question.
00:30:40
Speaker
Well, yeah, I mean, look, and if you ask a question to, say, Brexit supporting academics in the social sciences in Britain, only one in five would express that view to a colleague. It's giving you a sense of how much self-censorship is going on, and that skews the entire knowledge base.
00:30:59
Speaker
It could be something like, obviously, a case of do puberty blockers work or not. That would be an extreme example where there's no way you could get unbiased academic research on that, or it's very difficult. But if we take something like Arthur Sakamoto on the heterodox academy talked about, his finding that Asian Americans don't face a penalty in the labor market.
00:31:21
Speaker
that's not something you can really publish or speak to at a conference without, you know, he had people refusing to look at him at conference panels, you know, people in hallways. This kind of ostracism, he couldn't get published. Or Roland Fryer, an even more extreme case in Harvard, when he sort of found no bias in racial bias in police shootings, essentially, he had pative police protection at his house. And that's how extreme it was.
00:31:45
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, we need really to focus research. It's a bit like a ski slope where you're allowed to ski on the piste, you're not allowed to ski off the piste, but a lot of knowledge lies off piste. And that's pretty much what I want to focus on. And we're going to try and raise money so we can grow staff and really kind of focus on.
00:32:03
Speaker
And of course, what we need to do is get high impact out of that research, because most academic research is either never read or is only cited once or twice. If we can get this research read a lot, especially outside of academia, then it can make an impact, even though the numbers of people are relatively small. So I do think there is definitely a role for new institutions, but maybe to lead the way towards where academia needs ideally at some point to return to.
00:32:31
Speaker
Those examples that you gave were examples of unspoken truth that need to be brought to light. And it raises a nice quote that I read of yours recently, which was between the extremely controversial ethics of pedophilia, race, and IQ and the progressive controlled monoculture of academia is a vast and growing zone of unspoken truth. What are some of the unspoken truths that you're looking to prioritize with the limited resources that you have?
00:33:01
Speaker
Well, yeah, so I mentioned a couple of them, but even more, you know, we could, for example, look at public's knowledge of history. Would the, you know, so, for example, in the U.S., you know, a question that says the native peoples lived in peace and harmony before Europeans arrived, you'll get 60 percent of people agreeing to that and maybe only, you know, 15, 20 percent disagreeing. That is an astounding level of ignorance.
00:33:23
Speaker
doing a survey like that to show that and then comparing it with the actuality of how violent these societies were in terms of slavery and genocide and conquest, I think that would serve a useful function. Similarly, by the way, so looking at the historical knowledge of the public and comparing that really to the facts would be one area. Another might be to look at this very strong relationship between three things. One is far left, well,
00:33:50
Speaker
ideology essentially ideology sexuality and mental illness so we know that especially among young people there's been a surge in
00:34:00
Speaker
mental health problems. There's been a surge in LGBT identification and there's also been a shift to the left, particularly amongst younger women. We also know these things are heavily correlated. Now, there's no real way you can answer that question other than to say the reason LGBT people have more mental illness is because they're discriminated against. That's the only allowable answer.
00:34:22
Speaker
But what are the answers that are not allowable? It might be that indeterminacy about your sexuality or about your gender actually is what's driving the mental illness. That's an example of the kind of thing that is really very difficult to research. Just one example, I mean, another, again, looking at race and gender gaps and explaining them,
00:34:43
Speaker
Culturally rather than explaining them through discrimination. That's another example. I mean, there's all there's a lot of even something as basic as you know, for example the Shift towards the Republican Party amongst Latino voters is something that academics Refuse to acknowledge. I mean the let the Latino American or sorry
00:35:05
Speaker
I should say the Latino politics sections of the American Political Science Association. All of the academics there were poo-pooing the surveyors, or poo-pooing the exit polls and just saying the exit polls are wrong, our surveys are right, so on and so forth. So again, this is also why there are predictions for elections for Trump, for Brexit, we're off in a way. So it doesn't just affect the very hot topics, but it can also affect something as mundane as who's voting for Trump and getting that wrong.
00:35:32
Speaker
A couple of interesting strands there, and I take a lot of heart from the recent findings of the CAS review because it would appear to be a good example of rigorous, evidence-based research actually leading to a shift in views, obviously not from everyone, but it feels like the penny has finally dropped in the UK.
00:35:53
Speaker
on the trans issue and that's largely been because the quality of the research done as a part of that review is pretty difficult to dispute.
00:36:09
Speaker
Academics would be either soft peddling that research or not doing that research. People who disagreed with the established orthodoxy wouldn't do that research, which shows you how broken the academic enterprise is. In a way, it shouldn't have gotten to this point where an external figure has to do that work.
00:36:28
Speaker
That's a good point. The other strand that I want to pick out of that answer was the conversation around race and culture. And this goes to one of my real pet peeves with the discourse today, and that is the conflation of race and culture.
00:36:43
Speaker
So, if I think about, say, the way that we talk about Islam in UK, in Australia, in the US, a lot of people will say that if you criticize Islam, the religion, you are a racist. There is this willful conflation of what can be legitimate criticisms of a social practice, which is the practice of
00:37:05
Speaker
cultural elements of that religion, which I think should be open to criticism or critique because that is by definition a choice that someone can make compared to racism, which is based off immutable characteristics you don't have a choice in. There's a really clear philosophical distinction between the two. How do you think about how race and culture have been, or do you think they have been conflated? And if so, how do you reflect on that phenomena?
00:37:31
Speaker
Well, I think, again, I would trace this to the power of the anti-racism taboo, that kryptonite I talked about, which is such power that you want to use that wherever you can. So if you are trying to defend Islam, you don't want
00:37:47
Speaker
Islam or Muslims to be criticized, the best card you can play is the race card because it has the power. Now, of course, there is some relationship in the sense that the share of whites among Muslims is going to be lower than the share of whites amongst atheists or Christians, and therefore there's some correlation there, and therefore you can use it.
00:38:09
Speaker
You know, you've always got the benefit of the doubt if you're using that card because the taboo in the society is only angling one way.
Race and Cultural Narratives
00:38:16
Speaker
It's the onus is on the person who's being accused to say, oh, no, I'm not a racist. And so it gives you that that upper hand right away. And that's why it's used, I think.
00:38:25
Speaker
But only, I would note, used when it is suitable. So if there is a racial disparity that is negative, so African Americans are disproportionately represented in a particular job, for example. Race is used in that context, but if it is, say, African Americans or a particular racial group are disproportionately highly represented in, say, crime statistics, that is pushed to one side. And again, I suppose that is self-evident, but it bears noting nonetheless.
00:38:55
Speaker
Well, yeah, because there is this totem pole, this kind of pecking order where those with more oppression points are at the top and those with the least, which would be white males would be at the bottom. So we, you and I might, might have might be a two in the pack and somebody who is, you know, black indigenous, whatever.
00:39:14
Speaker
would LGBT, you know, they might be a king or an ace, right? So it's really about simply about, and the people who are lower down the totem pole must defer to those higher up. And so clearly, certainly, certain disparities are going to be focused on in others that, you know, so for example, Latinos apparently live longer. I think I can remember that Latinos in the United States live longer than whites. So we're not going to focus on that. We're just going to focus on where the disparities the other way may be education.
00:39:42
Speaker
But it all stems from the power of the racism taboo, which again is the center of our moral order. It's kind of like the big bang of the emergence of this anti-racism taboo then creates our moral universe. And everything revolves ultimately, I think, around this taboo. So it can be borrowed.
00:40:02
Speaker
You know, by women, it can be borrowed by LGBT. To some degree, they can style themselves to be the oppressed and victimized. Of course, the model being the African-Americans and civil rights, that was the model for these other identity politics campaigns, which drew on that cultural power. And that helps to put your adversary at a disadvantage.
00:40:21
Speaker
you have the cultural edge over them and that's where i think this all of this sacredness that's accruing around race but also to some degree around gender and sexuality which which is a derivative of that that's the center of our moral order and i mean this is one of the reasons why until we actually
00:40:37
Speaker
start to unpick that and start to move towards making these taboos more like laws where it's proportionality. There's worse and not so severe racism. There's first and second offense. There's all kinds of things, the things that we have in the law, then we're never going to get out of this.
00:40:55
Speaker
It's also interesting how a lot of the conversations around race and the way that that moral order has been formed are unique to the United States, but they've then been exported out to countries like the UK and Australia where there are racial issues, but a lot of the time the cultural and conversations are very different, but it feels like basically the racial conversations that screw out of the civil rights movement in the US and were heavily influenced by
00:41:25
Speaker
the history of slavery are now just transplanted into say into the UK.
Multiculturalism vs. Integration
00:41:31
Speaker
Oh yeah absolutely I mean each country will repurpose I mean the cultural left in each country will weaponize the power of race differently. In Australia or Canada it'll be around the indigenous and to some degree around immigrants. In Britain it'll be the colonialist narrative
00:41:50
Speaker
In the US, it'll be around slavery with maybe a little bit of Western indigenous settlement, that kind of thing.
00:41:55
Speaker
In Israel, it'll be settler versus colonizer, colonized. So each place, this sort of template is going to be applied in a somewhat different way. But in all cases, the cultural left is trying to use that oppressor-oppressed paradigm with the totem pole of who has more oppression points. It's always around race, gender, sexuality, and it's just what the combinations, what the histories are. So you're going for some kind of a critical race-based interpretation of history.
00:42:25
Speaker
And in the Canadian case, the moral panic will be around these residential schools. And that's almost entirely, you know, certainly the, some of the panics, the one that came out of the Kamloops residential school, it's an entire, it's like a Pizzagate level hoax. Explain the story to me. Well, basically there was an, you know, they announced they'd found the bodies of 215 indigenous school children in the graveyard of this former residential school.
00:42:51
Speaker
There were stories associated with, you know, priests essentially killing kids at night. All these lurid tales that came packaged with this.
00:43:00
Speaker
And this was seen as a historical fact. The entire Canadian Parliament adopted a sort of genocide resolution. Talking about the residential schools as a genocide, the flag was lowered to half-mast. You had 100 churches burnt in arson. Attacks in total. Justin Trudeau, the prime minister, said this was understandable, fueling more of these attacks, whether or not it fueled them, but it was certainly part of the
00:43:24
Speaker
the mood. But yeah, it's a staggering thing, really. And even now, I mean, the survey that I did recently, 60% of Canadians still believe that mass grave story and only 15% don't. So it shows you how effective the combination of all the legacy media in the entire political establishment coming behind this hoax has been. I mean, I would say compared to that, the whole, you know, hands up, don't shoot Black Lives Matter stuff, which also was
00:43:48
Speaker
completely based on misinformation. It's not as extreme as the mass graves hoax in Canada was. But it just shows you the power of, and actually there was even a quote of some Canadian left-wing politician saying, this is our George Floyd moment. Basically, they were yearning and pining for anything they could get their hands on that would give them some of the power that George Floyd and that narrative gave the left in the United States.
00:44:15
Speaker
This is, of course, enabled by the concept of subjective truth. So even if you can point out that it's a hoax, then it can be spun to say, well, look, it's a perspective. It is a view of history, which, you know, there is no one objective truth. Of course, recently,
00:44:31
Speaker
Catherine Mar the new CEO of NPR has come under fire for very subjective opinions on the truth which some people think is scary for someone who runs a public broadcaster how does this kind of idea of the way the truth is interpreted play into this.
00:44:48
Speaker
Well, yeah, it plays a major role in the sense that you can't use the tools of conventional science to rebut some of these fanciful catastrophizing claims, you know, or if you do raise them, you know, if you say, well, we've looked at the police shootings and, you know, first of all, there are only around 10 or 15 of them. There's no disproportionate shooting of suspects when you, especially when you correct for, you know, the murder rates, both victim, victimizers and victims.
00:45:13
Speaker
So, yeah, we don't have a discrepancy. You know, they'll just bury their head in the sand. What they'll try and do is just go quiet, radio silence, no commentary. That seems to be the approach, because they know they haven't got the facts. Or they'll say, how dare you contradict the testimonies of the survivors? How dare you contradict, we have testimony from the elders, from people who have witnessed these things. And they'll try to sort of emotionally blackmail you with anecdotes, rather than actually dealing with
00:45:40
Speaker
hard evidence, whether that be documentary evidence, whether that be forensic evidence, all of that. They'll claim, well, this isn't the same thing as a case coming to court of murder. We have to sort of bear witness to these testimonies. So it's not a rational discussion. The whole truth-based order, as Jonathan Roush describes it in his book, The Constitution of Knowledge,
00:46:01
Speaker
really under assault. Now what I would say, however, is there's a sort of very selective use of science. So where there is a progressive, there's something like climate change or vaccines, all of a sudden the science will be invoked, but when it comes to police shootings or residential schools, then all of a sudden the science is out the window. So it just depends on whatever's instrumental for them to get what they want.
00:46:24
Speaker
I want to turn to multiculturalism, which I think is a particularly contentious conversation in the United Kingdom at the moment. So we have seen since October 7, the fraying of the social fabric perhaps in the UK. Simple question would be, has multiculturalism failed in the United Kingdom?
00:46:45
Speaker
Yeah, I would say it's had a negative effect. I mean, I'd say the same, by the way, of Canada, of US, of other places, Australia. What is multiculturalism? Multiculturalism is not groups of people who look different living in one place, which that's sort of the street definition, but that's not actually the way that academics would think about this. So what multiculturalism is about is emphasizing difference rather than commonality, emphasizing groups to remain a part
00:47:14
Speaker
not to integrate, but rather that instead of assimilating and integrating into a common culture and common identity, which is very much out of fashion. And I think that's been a disaster actually in all cases. Now, I mean, it's not to say you should have high pressure state-led assimilation of the kind that existed in the US in the early 20th century with the 100% Americanization campaigns, but certainly encouraging people, you know, people who want to voluntarily assimilate, certainly not
00:47:42
Speaker
stacking the deck against that, which has really been the policy, certainly in Canada since 1971 multiculturalism act and maybe a little later in Australia. But this idea that no, we don't do a simulation. And now Justin Trudeau, of course, says so. There's no core or common culture in Canada, this sort of idea of post-national society. I think that's been a failure. Yeah.
00:48:08
Speaker
This really wasn't very controversial. I think it was 2011 that Angela Merkel, David Cameron, and a few other leaders said multiculturalism had failed. People on the left were saying it mid-2000s in Britain.
00:48:21
Speaker
Trevor Phillips, you know, black labor party member, you know, was saying it, you know, this was actually, you could, you know, have this position and be respectable. And all of a sudden now they're, the left is trying to sort of make that outside the, you know, beyond the pale. And again, mark you out as a racist. So Suella Braverman, who is the Tory MP, made this statement and was accused of being a racist. And all these people said, oh, she's an example of multiculturalism.
00:48:45
Speaker
No, actually, you're contorting the meaning of multiculturalism, right? So it's just a silly game that's played. Well, it is such a good example of your taboo thesis. The thing which I think the elephant in the room is Islam. So in Australia, most overseas migration after the early 1970s, when a multiculturalism policy was adopted,
00:49:09
Speaker
was from Asia. I think most Australians said, great, it means we get good quality Chinese food and Thai. You have ethnic Chinese or Vietnamese cultural areas in the outskirts of Melbourne or Sydney. They largely keep to themselves and there are relatively low levels of crime and it wasn't causing any real social friction.
00:49:31
Speaker
This has changed as greater numbers of immigrants have come from Muslim majority countries, where you can make the argument that the values of some of those cultures are less compatible with a Western liberal democracy.
00:49:48
Speaker
But the old model in people's minds of Australian values with good quality Chinese food no longer applies in a world where some of the people who are coming to the country potentially don't have the same core fundamental values that you think your country does. Yeah, I think that there's no question. If you look at attitudes to women, to Jews, to gays and all these sorts of things that is certainly in Britain, but also in continental Europe.
00:50:17
Speaker
less, a bit less so in the US. The Muslims there are a bit more middle class. And so, you know, there's no question that there is a friction.
00:50:25
Speaker
And certainly with the protests, we're seeing some of that. I guess I really see there's kind of two issues here. I mean, I think ultimately, as long as the numbers are low enough, the society will be able to manage this. But I do think I really think it is a question of numbers. I also think, however, that there are there's a separate issue, which is actually about the issue of the ethnic majority, which is absorptive in the sense of assimilation through intermarriage. But
00:50:51
Speaker
I think that if we look across the globe and we look historically, societies that have an ethnic majority are more stable.
Ethnic and Religious Politics
00:50:57
Speaker
The politics of societies that are truly poly-ethnic, like in the Caribbean, you have places like Trinidad and Guyana, or in Africa, many countries, Kenya would be one, Democratic Republic of Congo would be another, or a country like Iraq, where Lebanon, these are countries where politics runs sort of on ethnic and religious lines.
00:51:18
Speaker
These are the natural building blocks for politics. In the UK, we have it in micro with Northern Ireland. We've got unionists and nationalists. That's who you vote for. You vote your tribe in a way. That is a less successful model, really, of organizing society than when you have more of a melting pot and you have more
00:51:40
Speaker
politics is running more on kind of ideological left-right lines, crudely put. Not that that's perfect, but it's better than when tribe reinforces vote, where you're likely to see a greater risk of violence. So yeah, I think this is one of the problems I see is the
00:51:56
Speaker
acceleration towards ethnic majority decline now there's no question that the is a muslim part of this is also important in terms of poses somewhat of a greater risk to liberal values to certain minorities and i think that's right i still think it's a,
00:52:11
Speaker
a very small share of the Muslim total that is going to cause problems. And so a lot of this will depend on how large that Muslim group is. The projections from Pew would put it at about 20% of countries like Sweden, Britain are probably going to be Austria to some extent, are probably going to be at the top end, probably 15% to 20% Muslim by 2050.
00:52:36
Speaker
That's going to be a big shift. Britain is about 6.5% Muslim in the last census, 2021. If it's going to move to, say, 17, 18% by 2050, which is where the projections are, that's going to be a big, big change. I actually think France now has, which currently is the highest Muslim share of around 10%.
00:52:54
Speaker
I actually think it's less vulnerable for a number of reasons. One is that its Muslim population has a higher outmarriage and secularization rate. Also, it's got a higher birth, native birth rate. And so I just think it's not going to be... I would look to places like Sweden, but particularly Britain. I think Britain is going to be in a much trickier place in sort of a decade or two than it is now.
00:53:17
Speaker
Yeah, we spoke to Matt Goodwin on this podcast a month or so ago and he's beating the drum on that topic. And this goes to my final question and it goes to the response to the taboo to borrow the title of your wonderful new book.
Weaponization of Taboos
00:53:32
Speaker
This is so powerful, obviously. The accusation of racism in society is now such a potent accusation. The taboo around race is such a potent issue that can be weaponized so easily to sensible, moderate people that want to have conversations about societal values, about culture, and they want to do it in a sensible way, but they're potentially afraid of that taboo being thrown against them. Advice do you give to those types of people around how we can have those types of conversations better as a society.
Government Role in Ideological Reforms
00:54:01
Speaker
Well, I mean, there's what we ought to have, which is the good conversations, and there's the practical reality of how to get there.
00:54:09
Speaker
Again, I'm kind of a both-and person. Instead of saying no to government power, I think in a way, elected government is probably one of the only institutions, the cultural majority, that is people who are against the woke position, which is about two-thirds of most Western societies. It's the only institution they can hope to control. I think they have to use that executive power, and that means
00:54:34
Speaker
What that means is a couple of things. One is centralizing power away from devolved bodies. That could be quangos. It could be civil service or government agencies of all kinds. And also, by the way, schools. It's too bad in a way because really devolving power makes sense if you have a high-trust society.
00:54:55
Speaker
People who are closer to the problems make better decisions. But the problem is when they're captured by a determined group of ideologues, you have no options. It's a bit like there are certain schools that have been captured by Islamists here in Britain. Government has to take them into special measures or a corrupt police department. You have no option but to go in there and essentially reform them. East German universities, after reunification, the communist professors of history were let go. They had to reapply for their jobs and they didn't get high.
00:55:25
Speaker
Now, it's tough, but I think this is really what has to happen. So I think using executive power, as long as you are within the Constitution, you're working with the law. So the law plus executive power is one way of, because we have to turn the schools around. A study that I did with Zach Goldberg looking at critical race and gender teaching in American schools showed a massive impact. 50%, even if you have Republican parents, kids with Republican parents,
00:55:53
Speaker
Their partisanship, their views on white guilt, on affirmative action were shifted greatly when they heard more critical race concepts in school. We have to get control of the public schools again and depoliticize them. That's a political project that requires patience, stamina.
Cultural Discourse and Change
00:56:10
Speaker
It requires changing personnel, political appointments, doing whatever's necessary legally and through guidance and executive action to get to that position. Now that's one side of the equation.
00:56:21
Speaker
is legislation and more than legislation, personnel being the policy, getting your people into the right agencies, closing down certain agencies if you have to. The other part of the equation, of course, is the cultural battle of ideas.
00:56:36
Speaker
And there I think it's partly a lot of people operate in this zone of where they don't have a lot of time to pay attention to politics. You've got to make it vivid. You have to make it one word. Rufo has this word, critical race theory. OK. Another example would be Billboard Chris. Instead of gender affirming care, it's chemical castration of children. DEI, instead of DEI, diversity and equity, anti-white, anti-Asian, anti-male discrimination. Inclusion is clamping down on free speech.
00:57:06
Speaker
There has to be a way of unmasking these euphemisms so that most people understand what's going on in a readily digestible way. And so there is this battle for ideas, not just intellectually. I think intellectually at the sort of upper end, it's fairly easy through logic and evidence
Educating on Historical Atrocities
00:57:22
Speaker
to win. I don't think that's the problem is when it comes for hearts, not minds, but winning the battle for hearts.
00:57:28
Speaker
We have stories about Jim Crow and about slavery and about all of these things, colonialism. What we don't have stories about is the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Kids don't know anything about that. They don't know about indigenous slavery on the West Coast that was ended by the British. They don't know about what went on in Africa, which was large-scale slavery and
00:57:50
Speaker
the chief would sacrifice large numbers of people to have enough blood to pour over the new stool when they were, you know, these sorts of atrocities. None of
Towards a Post-Woke Society
00:57:58
Speaker
that is known, right? So you have this tremendous amount of ignorance that we have to turn that around if we're going to have any hope really of changing the sort of society. Now, what doesn't mean we stop caring about racism and sexism
00:58:10
Speaker
It does mean we have to take a much more proportional and graduated approach, more like an ethical jurisprudence, a jurisprudential approach that's not the sudden death visceral kind of disgust reaction to anyone who's accused of being racist for
00:58:26
Speaker
saying that immigration needs to be reduced or that maybe we need to ask some questions about Islam. So yeah, that's sort of where we would like to get to. I kind of talk in the book about moving to a post-woke society based on resilience. And this is also going to help minorities. I mean, the sort of noble savage myths that Australia and Canada about the Indigenous policies that leads to this sort of
00:58:50
Speaker
fairy tale explanation for their problems. That's not helping these people. Whereas maybe a much more honest appraisal where, no, the problem is alcohol, the problem is families, the problem is homeownership and ban corruption and all these other things, that that needs to be on the table discussed rationally. And actually, I think that would lead to a much better situation. But no, we can't get there because we have
00:59:14
Speaker
All of these taboos, which are getting in the way of public policy that will actually help the society become more resilient, become, you know, help. So I talk about this distinction between cultural socialism, where we are now, EDI, moving to a regime of cultural wealth and human flourishing, which is something that includes freedom and social cohesion and authenticity and a whole bunch of beauty, merit, all these values that have more or less been sacrificed. We got to move back in that direction.
00:59:44
Speaker
You've given me enough material for another two hours of this podcast, but we are at time, Eric. So I will encourage instead everyone to go out and buy the book. A link is in the show notes. You've also started, I think the world's first online course for the origins and dynamics of Woke, which sounds awesome.
01:00:05
Speaker
And I will be signing up myself. We've got a link to that as well. We need more people in education and in academia with courage and with common sense intellect, which obviously you have in abundance. Thank you for coming on Fire at Will. Will, it's been a pleasure. Thanks very much.