Very proud to announce the result of 12 months of writing and 35 years of learning: The Really Practical Guide to Debating: How to Win Every Argument That You Don’t Lose is now officially published on Amazon Direct Publishing by LockeStep Publishing, and features a foreword by Distinguished Toastmaster Paul R. Carroll.
Honest, good-faith debating is not all about winning (that would be sophistry), but about having meaningful exchanges of opinions between rational people – something that seems to be in shorter and shorter supply these days.
I hope this book will inspire, entertain, and spur you on to make better arguments, to listen better to other people’s arguments, and perhaps even to come along to a debate at some point!
My semi-autobiographical novel, In Good Faith, is available on Amazon and in good, independent bookstores.
Much of the book is based on real events from a religious sect in London with more than one skeleton in the closet.
Here’s what one reader says:
5.0 out of 5 stars: “A master of the English language
Mr Hagerup has a very humorous approach to telling a gripping account of a person’s journey in life. His power of observation and attention to detail is second to none, painting pictures with words. This is the sort of book that hooks you from the start and is difficult to put down.”
KW, England
It can be ordered from the link below, or message me privately for a special discount AND personalised signature.
Whether you need to tackle the racist uncle or endure the woke niece, there are a couple of debating principles that can stop disagreements from turning into rancorous shouting matches and instead allow conversation to flow as smoothly as the gravy.
Merry Christmas!
“As a rule, the most dangerous ideas are not the ones that divide people but those on which they agree.” – Stephen Vizinczey
Banning any mention of politics or religion at dinner is a boring rule. It’s not dangerous to disagree; it is in fact far more dangerous if everyone is, or appears to be, in total agreement about everything. Whilst agreement on some things can be … well, agreeable, and a nice way to bond with a new acquaintance, the more interesting conversations often arise out of some degree of unalignment: different perspectives, different views, different ways of thinking about the world and the things therein.
And whilst that is fine as a general attitude, the question remains of how exactly to go about it to enable disagreement between the first and second course, without ending up throwing bread rolls at one another? Read on to learn my two chief tips (plus one more) to achieve continued good cheer all the way through to the pudding and port.
Method 1 – Stasis is for Starters
As the smoked salmon or chicken paté makes its tentative way from plate to palate, and the conversation starts bubbling like the cheap Prosecco from Aldi in your glass, and you notice your blue-haired niece, down from university, has a non-meat, non-dairy, non-fish, non-starter on her plate, and she loudly declares she is now a vegan (don’t worry: if she’s a vegan, she will loudly declare it) because she is concerned about the inhumanity of the meat and seafood industries, how do you react if you are strongly in disagreement with her pronouncement?
This is where the concept of stasis comes in handy. The term comes from Greek and literally means a standing still, or what we might call the common ground. In debating, it is the point of agreement before disagreement starts. You are served a stasis when one of the debaters says, “I agree with my opponent that…, but he is wrong to say that…”. You may, for example, say to your niece that you agree with her that it is important and right to treat animals as well and as humanely as possible, and that you respect her making a choice based on principle. And then try to find where she might agree with you. “Would you agree that it is possible to produce animal-based food and other products humanely?”
This question moves the conversation away from the specifics of how food is produced today to the principle of the matter, and will lay bare whether your interlocutor is against animal-based products per se or just against the current methods of production.
If you both agree that it is possible to have humane livestock farming, a constructive conversation can be had on what is a reasonable way to ensure that food and other animal-based products are made in an ethical way.
If, on the other hand, the niece says that no, all forms of animal products are wrong, then you may want to move on to the next course and the next technique. And since at dinner we turn at the changing of courses to the person on the opposite side to converse, let’s reverse the roles:
Method 2 – For the Main Course, a Second Helping of Questions
Your Gen X, or even worse, Boomer, uncle has just said that he would welcome Nigel Farage deporting all those illegal immigrants. You are appalled at having to endure not only Brussels sprouts but also such xenophobic language. Do you confront? Do you educate him? No, that would be an extremely bad idea, which would only invite even stronger disagreement with anything you have to say.
Rather than offering answers and pointing moralistic fingers, Socrates asked his interlocutors a series of probing questions to clarify their beliefs.
Instead you should use the Socratic method. This is a form of dialogue put by Plato in the mouth of the Greek philosopher Socrates (c. 469–399 BCE), where you use disciplined questioning to explore complex ideas, uncover assumptions, and stimulate critical thinking.The Latin name for it is elenchus (ih-leng-kus) from the Greek ἔλεγχος (élenkhos), a term that suggests testing or exposing falsehood through questioning.
Rather than offering answers and pointing moralistic fingers, Socrates asked his interlocutors a series of probing questions to clarify their beliefs. The great thing about this method is that you can uncover more of what the other person thinks, the weaknesses and strengths of his argument or viewpoint, and you may even help him to question some of his own premises and assumptions.
You could start by asking for definitions – what is an illegal vs a legal immigrant, who would qualify for deportation, to where, etc. Keep going to uncover inconsistencies and weaknesses, if any, and as you allow him to speak, at some point you will have earned the right to present your perspective on the issue without interruption.
If voices rise and tempers flare in competition with the flambé Christmas pudding, go back to the first technique: find the brandy sauce of common ground, the stasis, “well, I suppose we can at least agree that…” and then start again from that point.
And remember: the purpose of a debate is almost never to convince your interlocutor. In a formal debate competition, it’s the judges you need to win over; in a debate club the audience; and in an informal conversational discussion you are better off leaving aside any notion of “winning” over or even convincing your sparring partner. My third additional tip would therefore be to avoid trying to change anyone’s mind. If you leave it at exploring the other person’s views and perspectives, and perhaps occasionally sharing your own, you may ironically stand a better chance of actually shifting someone’s thinking than if you try too hard to do so.
And provided there has been enough alcohol, nobody will remember anything the next day, and so you can start the whole thing over afresh.
The argumentum ad baculum (literally argument/appeal to the cudgel) or the appeal-to-violence fallacy, as it’s better known in English, is often explained as meaning “either you agree with me or else …
The explanation I alluded to above – that the fallacy consists in saying “support me or I beat you up” – can be found in online resources and it’s the first one ChatGPT suggests when asked to define this fallacy, although the bot changes its mind when challenged. But saying that you must vote for me/support this stance, otherwise harm will come to you, is a threat of violence, not an appeal to violence for the sake of persuasion. The difference is an important one.
You may feel compelled to vote for X because of his threat, but you are not persuaded to do so.
Violence is not rhetoric
In rhetoric we seek to persuade by arguments, and the moment we use threats of violence, we step outside the realm of reason and rhetoric, into the realm of the intolerant, as Karl Popper explained in his famous work The Open Society and Its Enemies, where he warned against tolerating the intolerant. This paradox of tolerance is often misunderstood to mean that we should not tolerate opinions that we today see as less tolerant in the sense of less liberal, i.e. being critical of gender self-identification or against multiculturalism, gay marriage, or in favour of religious conservatism. But this was not what Popper meant, as he went on to explain:
“I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.”
(Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato, 1945, Note 4 to Chapter 7, p. 226, Routledge edition)
The key phrase there being “they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols”.
Blaming the victim
Answering arguments with the use of the pistol, or more precisely a rifle, was of course exactly what happened in the case of Charlie Kirk, the American religious-conservative activist. As a classically liberal (libertarian) secular atheist, there is much I disagree with Kirk on and I sometimes found his style a little overbearing. Nevertheless, I admired very much his willingness to engage with those he disagreed with, and on several issues I did agree with him. The point of a debate, however, is not always to reach agreement or even to “win”, but to understand different viewpoints better. Kirk certainly contributed to that.
Where, in the Charlie Kirk tragedy, the fallacy of the appeal to violence came in, was when commentators in the wake of the shooting said, or intimated, that Kirk had somehow brought it upon himself, because of his words or viewpoints.
Matthew Dowd, political analyst on MSNBC, infamously said that, “Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions… you can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts… and not expect awful actions to take place.”
This is a perfect example of the appeal to violence fallacy: that words, opinions, and views somehow ineluctably lead to some form of violence, as if the perpetrators of that violence had no agency and were just zombies spurred on by certain magical words.
Some people on the right have in response suggested that if any words contributed to create an acceptance of violence, it would be the left-wing activists’ use of “Nazi” and “Fascist” for those with whom they disagree. The use of such terms is indeed the fallacy of reductio ad hitlerum, as it’s been humorously called, and adjectives are clearly not arguments. But again, the person who pulls the trigger or wields the club, he is the guilty party, not the one who used words, however moronic or provocative those words may have been.
In 2006, following violent protests against the printing of cartoons depicting the so-called prophet Mohammed, many newspapers chose not to reprint them, not out of respect for religion, but for fear of violence. The appeal to violence was the argument that persuaded them not to do so, rather than whether it was right or wrong in principle.
Appeal to violence in politics
A way in which this fallacy may be used in a political argument is exemplified by a friend of mine who argued that Reform UK’s deportation plans will not work, because there will be riots and civil unrest. Here, my friend was trying to argue that we should not support this policy, because it may lead to violence in the form of rioting. In other words, he was trying to persuade me (or the audience) not to lend their support because of the fear of violence. That is the appeal to violence fallacy, because the policy is either right or wrong, whether it leads to rioting or not. The policy is not wrong just because some people smash windows and burn cars in the street. The policy may be more difficult to implement because of that, but that is another question altogether.
Punishing the victim
An even more dangerous and insidious use of this fallacy was seen in the judgment of a recent and rather bizarre court case here in Britain:
Hamit Coskun, a Kurdish-Armenian Turkish national set fire to a copy of the Koran outside the Turkish consulate in West London. Coskun was then attacked by a Muslim brandishing a knife who slashed him and said he was going to kill him. Shortly after, a random delivery man also joined the party, and kicked him as he was lying on the ground. The police arrived and arrested…Mr Coskun!
Mr Coskun is an Atheist and the burning was an act of protest against Islam and the government of Turkey. I recommend you take a look at District Judge John McGarva’s summary statement where he references the agreed facts as well as making his assessment of them. What is shocking about the judgment (apart from the poor use of English) is the judge’s fallacious reasoning in taking the fact of the attack, i.e. the fact that Coskun was the victim, as evidence of Coskun’s guilt!
“That the conduct was disorderly is no better illustrated than by the fact that it led to serious public disorder involving him being assaulted by 2 different people [neither of whom appear to have any justification for the nature of their response].”
So what Judge McGarva is saying here is that Mr Coskun’s action was illegal (disorderly) because someone else did something violent to him, even though he adds that they did not have any justification for their actions. The circularity and inconsistency of this argument is blatantly obvious, but more revealing is how the appeal to violence fallacy actually underpins the legislation itself.
The legislation used in this case was the Public Order Act, and the legislation is written in such a way that it is almost impossible not only to end up blaming the victim, but punishing the victim as well, as we saw in this particular case.
The judge says towards the end of 13 pages(!) of badly written remarks that:
“I therefore do find so [sic] that I am sure that a criminal conviction is a proportionate response to the defendant’s conduct. I am sure that the defendant acted in a disorderly way by burning the Quran very obviously in front of the Turkish consulate where there were people who were likely to be caused harassment alarm [sic] or distress and accompanying his provocative act with bad language. I am sure that he was motivated at least in part by a hatred of Muslims.”
Regarding the attacker, Mr Moussa Kadri, the judge H.H.J. Hiddleston of Southwark Crown Court, sympathetically opined in his (only 3-page) sentencing remarks that “You were clearly deeply offended by a man who was protesting outside the consulate and who as part of his protest had set fire to the holy Quaran.”
Note that the judge here, a representative of the British Crown, uses the adjective “holy” about this religious text, thus implicitly condoning a special status for this particular printed matter. Not at any point does he refer to the distress caused the victim, Mr Coskun, nor ever mentions him by name:
“You slashed towards the other man and when he went to the ground you kicked at him a number of times and spat at him. These events must have been very frightening indeed for other members of the public to observe.”
For other members? WTaF?!, as the youngsters might say. Again, apart from the primary school linguistic standard, what is scary here is the hidden premise or assumption (this is looked at in my coming book The Really Practical Guide to Debating) that (non-violent) freedom of expression must be curtailed if it causes someone else to be provoked into reacting in a violent manner. A bit like saying women must not wear the miniskirt, lest men are “deeply” moved to rape them.
This is in effect basing our law on the fallacy of the appeal to violence and the result is a de facto veto of the mob, as we see when universities or other venues cancel events with controversial speakers or subjects, for fear of the reaction caused, citing “security fears”. In reality it is the appeal to violence; a fear of the mob written into our badly drafted laws and enforced by unthinking judges.
Summary
The fallacy of appeal-to-violence is not the same as a threat to use violence, rather it is arguing that some cause of action, policy or opinion is wrong because it will lead to a violent reaction. This could be against your person, but more commonly actions such as rioting, attacks on buildings/persons or other civil disorder. It is illogical because it doesn’t follow that something is wrong simply because it might provoke a violent reaction, and we risk blaming the victim of the violence rather than focussing the blame on the perpetrator of violence, which in turn can have a chilling and strangulating effect on freedom of speech and expression, especially when this fallacy forms the basis of important parts of the legislation used to regulate this particular liberty.
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Those who know me know that I have the greatest affection for aspects of our English Church with its traditions, rituals and the important role it has played in communities around our country and in the life of the nation. But my own “journey”, as they say, with religion as a system of belief, came to a gradual end well over two decades ago, through a process of rationally assessing what I could with honesty believe in. My experiences working for Kensington Temple in the late 90s to early 2000s certainly helped to kick-start that process, and you can read a fictionalised version of those events in my novel In Good Faith.
I was recently interviewed on the Reason For Living podcast, with the philosopher Thomas Walker-Werth, where we spoke about these things and many more. Do please have a listen and let me know what you think, the podcast is on this link: REASON FOR LIVING with WILLIAM HAGERUP
Podcast host Thomas Walker-Werth (L) with author William Hagerup
A man once complained to his wife that the paper was rather thin that morning. “I disagree,” she said, “it has lots and lots of pages.” “No, no,” he replied, “I meant there wasn’t much news in it.”
This exchange from the days of real paper newspapers illustrates something we all have experienced: two people talking past one another. In any debate, whether a formal debate, a discussion at work, or an informal exchange of views between friends or in an online forum, it is absolutely crucial that all parties are clear on what exactly you mean by the words that you are using.
When you say “we should lock up all criminals” do you mean including traffic offenses? When you say “multiculturalism is a great thing” (or a bad thing), what exactly do you mean by “multiculturalism”?
Very often in a discussion or debate, the two sides will simply be talking about different things, getting further and further away from a meaningful exchange of views.
When both sides of a debate clearly and calmly explain their terms, a meaningful exchange can be had, and even if you still disagree, at least you will know exactly what you disagree about.
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The author, William Hagerup, has been a debater and public speaker since the age of 16, and for the past five years made a study of debate and rhetoric theory, winning a record number of best speaker awards and debates. In addition to writing a crime book, Vegan Slaughter, William is writing a handbook for debaters, to be published later in 2025.
Before you rush to disagree with someone, ask them questions to not only understand where they are coming from, but so that you may reach a common ground of agreement. This is called “stasis”, the bedrock of standing still before you go separate ways.
It may be something as simple as agreeing about a fundamental value that you share or on what the problem is.
You’ll be amazed how often disagreement turns out to be agreement in disguise, because you are talking about different things but didn’t realise.
Determining a shared point enables you to refer back to it if the discussion starts going off track, and it helps you to build a meaningful exchange of views.
The row over the editorial vandalism of Roald Dahl’s children’s books to sanitise them for a modern audience and the outrageous fact that Penguin’s editors have attempted to “improve” the greatest prose writer in the English language, P.G. Wodehouse, have raised the debate temperature about words, wokeness and the culture war to yet another boiling point, provoking an unprecedented backlash. Is this the definitive turning point, where our shared, classically liberal values are reasserted, or will the more extreme versions of “woke” continue to triumph as long as we avoid a confrontation with the real culprit: Political Correctness?
The semi-Norwegian author Roald Dahl: perhaps the cigarette ought to be censored out…
Changes to literary works to “update” the language is nothing new. The term “bowdlerise” was born when Mr. Thomas Bowdler decided to shave off a bit of Shakespeare’s more fruity language in an 1818 edition of the Bard’s work, as Bowdler himself explained, “… nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.” He clearly hadn’t met my family.
In 1939, Agatha Christie’s crime novel Ten Little Niggers were renamed for the American market to And Then There Were None, which also became the name of the subsequent film version. In Britain, the original title was printed until 1985(!). I have one of the offending articles in my bookshelf (hidden behind How To Be An Anti-Racist).
In 2011 the Guardian reported that Mark Twain’s work would be “cleaned up”, to stop his books being banned by schools. Twain himself, as is well known, was an active voice against racism who donated to civil rights organisations, and as Dr. Sarah Churchwell, senior lecturer in US literature and culture at the University of East Anglia, said at the time,
“The point of the book is that Huckleberry Finn starts out racist in a racist society, and stops being racist and leaves that society. These changes mean the book ceases to show the moral development of his character. They have no merit and are misleading to readers. The whole point of literature is to expose us to different ideas and different eras, and they won’t always be nice and benign. It’s dumbing down.”
Or said more simply: the educators are failing to educate. The word in this case was again “nigger” but also “injun” and other derogatory racial terms. But even in Scandinavia, thankfully lacking the particularly difficult historical context of the USA when it comes to race, books have been sanitised for modern sensitivities.
In 2006 the word “negerkonge” (negro king) was removed from Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking stories, and replaced with “Sydhavskonge” (King of the Southseas). Even the extremely popular TV-series from 1969 based on the stories was edited to remove the reference and also to cut out a scene where Pippi attempts to look Chinese by pulling her eyes back to make them more slanted.
So changes in literary texts have a long history and even Roald Dahl’s children’s stories have been changed before, indeed by the author himself. The original description of the Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was as black pygmies from Africa and not only that but (which ought to upset the Right and the Left equally for different reasons) they were cheap foreign labour brought in to replace the English workers who were sacked. Faced with mounting pressure, Dahl eventually changed the description of the happy little workers to dwarfish hippies with long golden-brown hair and rosy-white skin. Important to note that this was the author himself making these changes in a way that he felt kept the integrity of the wider story and tone of the text.
What is particularly interesting about the recent controversy around Roald Dahl’s work is that the words that are being ripped out are so … well, non-offensive. They are adjectives such as “fat”, “ugly” and nouns such as “men”. It may not be polite to describe someone as “fat”, but if “fat” is to become unacceptable, we will have to yet again set to work with the scissors on naughty old Shakespeare, as he repeatedly used the adjective, for example in the Merry Wives of Windsor, “There was a fat woman with me.” Oh fye! And this they teach kids in schools?!
Politically correct Oompa Loompas. Or are they …?
The reason Puffin gives for the changes in Dalh’s work is the need “… to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today“. This entails a massive assumption: that Mr. Dahl’s stories cannot be enjoyed by all today in their original form. Is that really true? And why should “all” enjoy them? Hardly any work of literature appeals to everyone.
The troubling thing as I see it, apart from going against Dahl’s expressed wishes, is that these publishers charged with looking after Dahl’s literary legacy seem to have completely missed the mark: one of the main reasons children (and some adults) like Mr. Dahl’s stories is that they are slightly subversive. They are naughty. Although good mostly triumphs over evil – children do like to see order and justice restored – there is something in Dahl’s writing that flies in the face of po-faced grown-up niceties; which is of course exactly what these changes are.
The truth is that these changes are not done for pragmatic reasons to make the text more accessible, such as regularising old-fashion spelling or inserting modern “translations”, as they do with Shakespeare for college students, but rather they are ideological: “people” substituted for “men”, for example; the addition of a sentence about how some women wear wigs for “other reasons” and how this is “perfectly fine” in The Witches; and removing references to Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad in Matilda and replacing them with Jane Austen and John Steinbeck. These types of changes do not make the books more accessible to a modern audience, but it does make them more ideologically aligned and certainly less Dahl-ish, which is actually pretty offensive, if you ask me.
These changes, along with the changes I mention further up, are the logical consequences of our old friend Political Correctness of which wokeness is only one expression. There has been an unprecedented backlash against these changes and the publishers have partially relented and said they will also publish a “classic” (i.e. uncensored) version alongside the bowdlerised new version.
But those who are only now waking up to what is going on, including authors rushing to get written guarantees from their publishers on how their legacy is to be dealt with, are rather late to the party. Nevertheless, they are welcome. But in order to combat the phenomenon that the Dahl-controversy is only one example of, and stop it happening in future, we need to tackle the root of the rot: Political Correctness.
The three basic components of Political Correctness
The assumptionof guilt: One of the principles of political correctness (PC for short) is that it starts from an assumption of guilt. You may be familiar with the Anglican church’s general confession: “We have left undone those things we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us.” (My bolding). PC is premissed on a secular notion of original sin being present in each and every one of us (implicit bias, toxic masculinity, heteronormitivity, etc.), and only by actively declaring your turning away from sin and conforming to the expressions of the politically correct creeds, can your assumed guilt be temporarily commuted.
The various Pride events in different countries in the summer of 2021 offered countless prime examples of the phenomenon I refer to; corporations and public bodies were falling over each other in the clamour to be the loudest declared gay-friend with flags, banners, posters, adverts and all kinds of public relation messaging to drive home the message: we are on-board, we have NOT left undone those things we ought to have done and we have NOT done those things which we ought not to have done, and we’re not guilty!
Of course, had this been in the least bit controversial, not a single major company would have done it. How many of these multinational banks declared their gay-friendliness in Muslim countries? PC means people and organisations do things, not from conviction, but to conform and express their lack of presumed guilt.
One of about a dozen almost identical posters with similar people stating broadly the same message in the name of celebrating “diversity”. (Pic. taken Dec. 2021, London Underground).
Ignorance of intention: In 2015, the British actor Benedict Cumberbatch used the phrase “coloured actors” in a discussion about the need to make sure non-white actors get the same opportunities that everyone else has and immediately faced a barrage of criticism (mostly online which was then picked up by real news outlets) for his use of this phrase. As a linguist, I feel duty-bound to point out that the clunky expression “actors of colour” is pretty much semantically identical to “coloured actors”, and so the difference is not in the meaning but in the expression being used as a signifier of membership of the correct tribe.
What’s crucial though, is that although some critics did acknowledge that Cumberbatch (probably) did have good intentions, they still found his use of the adjective+noun structure “offensive”, and so Mr. Cumberbatch issued the following statement: “I’m devastated to have caused offence by using this outmoded terminology. I offer my sincere apologies. I make no excuse for my being an idiot and know the damage is done.” He could have added There is no health in me.
Of course, the only “damage” was to his reputation among the “woke” PC tribe. Nobody else cared. No actual “damage” had been done to anyone and none had been intended – indeed, exactly the opposite had been intended, but the intention had been wilfully ignored. As with Mark Twain, the context and the intentions are disregarded in order to assert tribal purity or due to misguided safetyism, as discussed by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in the The Coddling of the American Mind.
Roland Barthes spoke of the Death of the Author – in the sense that meaning is always created afresh each time a text meets a reader – but Political Correctness, as expressed in the editing of Roald Dahl, P.G. Wodehouse, Twain and others, represent the Death of Context – an extraordinary ignorant and ignorant-making approach to “looking after” our literary heritage. Sensitivities change over time, if you’re unable to contextualise, you need to learn it. If not you remain less informed and enlightened than you might otherwise have been. Are we seeing what the philosopher Roger Scruton called the anti-Enlightenment at play here? Instead of educating our younger readers, we censor the texts to make them conform to orthodoxy.
Evelyn Waugh called Wodehouse “The Master” for his unparalleled ability to write perfectly shaped sentences with an new original simile on pretty much every page. Who would dare to edit such perfection?
Controlling the narrative: If your intentions and the context are immaterial and it’s only outward conformity that matters, then this gives an awful lot of power to those with the power to define what the correct outward show of orthodoxy is, to control and steer the narrative.
The criticism of Mr. Cumberbatch or the order to clean up Roald Dahl’s or P.G. Wodehouse’s work was not issued by a central authority of Political Correctness; there is no episcopal structure issuing edicts on the correct use of language, and talk of a conspiracy of the Woke Elites misses the point.
Instead I would point to what the German sociologist Elisabeth Noelle-Neuman called a “spiral of silence”. The concept is discussed in Jonathan Rauch’s book The Constitution of Truth (reviewed here), and points to the fact that we all tend to have a strong conformity bias, “we harmonize our beliefs and even our perceptions with those of the people around us“, as Rauch puts it, and the more uniform and mono-cultural our environs are, the stronger the pull will be towards certain opinions becoming dominant. As Rauch explains:
“[…] a view which may initially not represent a consensus at all, which indeed is in the distinct minority, can make itself first seem dominant and then actually become dominant as holdouts fall silent, succumb to doubt, or convert to what they think is the prevalent view.” (P. 195).
So it’s not about a small cabal of powerful wokesters trying to control the rest of us, but rather that a narrow set of beliefs become dominant and take control of the discursive narrative, setting the parameter for “acceptable” speech and therefore “acceptable” thought because the gatekeepers dare not speak up or deviate.
The consequence of that is an intellectual and cultural impoverishment – as any mono-culture tends to lead to – but also an entrenchment of positions and a deeper and wider polarisation of society as people retract into their respective comfortable echo chambers where the circle of silence spirals into ever darker depths.
As John Stuart Mill said in On Liberty, “Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promising intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought, lest it should land them in something which would admit of being considered irreligious or immoral?” Substitute “politically incorrect or unwoke” for “irreligious or immoral” and it’s pretty much spot on 160 years later – Political Correctness has a massive opportunity cost.
What can be done (and why should we do it?)
What happened in the Dahl controversy was that the spiral of silence was interrupted by the sort of people whose opinion matters to the editors at Puffin. This is a crucial point. That some right-winger whines on about “political correctness gone mad” or “woke madness” or “free speech” has no traction whatsoever to break the spiral of the gatekeepers, indeed it rather contributes to strengthening it, as such people are already beyond the pale; the deplorables.
The spiral must be broken from within, which is why I believe it is so important that on the issue of classical liberal values, the bedrock of a free society, we must build a strong consensus across the left-right divide, and that includes a strong commitment by those on the left as well as those on the right to educate the younger generations in these values, why they matter and what that looks like in practice, for example tolerating opposing views and the rejection of compelled speech.
A good example of a spiral breaker is the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her excellent Reith Lecture on Freedom of Speech.
Why should we do it?
Anyone can get caught up the spiral of silence or intellectually sterile echo chambers, including right-wingers and churchgoers, but it matters much more when they are the gatekeepers of society’s wider discourse, i.e. newspaper editors, book editors (as we have seen), museum curators, journalists, senior academics, and those activists and students who have such people in their Twitter cross-hairs. The reason is obviously that although this is a very small proportion of society, they are disproportionately powerful when it comes to setting the tone and deciding what words and phrases that are to be used and which narratives are to be permitted.
And that matters because what words and phrases are permitted is important for delineating what thoughts are permitted. In his essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell writes, “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought“. It is a theme he goes on to develop in his dystopic novel 1984 where the regime’s new version of English, Newspeak, is designed to make heretical thinking or Thoughtcrimes impossible. In an entertaining appendix to the novel, Orwell explained Newspeak more in depth:
“It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought – that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc – should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words […] This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.” (Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four: The Annotated Edition. Penguin Books Ltd. – my bolding).
An example of this happening today is the term “equity”, which suddenly seems to be everywhere; used by institutions and corporations as a matter of course, usually displacing the term “equality”. So what?
“Equality” is a nuanced term that can mean on the one hand equality of opportunity and before the law (which is broadly supported by some on the left and most on the right), and on the other hand equality of outcome (which is mainly supported by the left). Equality of outcome entails an active enforcement of some policy of distribution or even more controversially by what is often called “positive discrimination” (or “affirmative action” in the US).
“Equity”, on the other hand, as eminently explained in this PDF published by Marin County in California, can only mean equality of outcome:
“Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.”
Note how “equity” functions exactly as Orwell’s Newspeak intended: it precludes the undesirable concept of equality of opportunity and allows ONLY the concept of equality of outcome. Wrongthink becomes literally impossible if “equity” is the only acceptable term and “equality” goes out of usage (which it hasn’t quite done yet, I’m glad to say).
From Marin County’s PDF: an example of inequity or stupidity? He could have just moved the ladder!
“But surely,” you may say, “it’s a good thing that we slowly and gradually make racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry or prejudice impossible by changes to the language?”
There are two problems with that: the narrowing of the field of “permitted thought” will not only expunge bad and horrible ideas, it will also inevitably disallow true and good ideas. We know that in recent years academics have held back from stating publicly what they know privately to be true, because the truth may be “unhelpful”, i.e. it goes against what is politically correct.
The second problem is that any attempt at limiting Wrongthink will for the most part only lead to surface conformity, not a genuine change of heart. Rauch makes the point that homosexuality has become accepted in Western societies, not because gay people was successful in censoring anti-gay sentiments or opinions being uttered, but because they took advantage of freedom of speech to argue, explain and show why same-sex attraction was something to be tolerated rather than feared. (P. 251).
“The biggest breakthrough for gay equality was not the Stonewall riot of 1969; it was the Supreme Court’s ruling in 1958, more than a decade earlier, that the government’s censorship of ONE [a gay magazine] was illegal. That decision gave Frank Kameny and other homosexuals the weapon they needed: their voice.“
At a time when being anti-gay was the political correct opinion, it was the assertion of a politically incorrect view that in the end changed minds and hearts, and in turn how people spoke about gay people.
The controlling of language may lead to an impoverishment of academia, high literature and culture, but it won’t change most people’s hearts and minds. True change requires understanding and understanding arises from conversations, debates and discussions in good faith (which is one reason why I am very enthusiastic about debating clubs and societies, such as the one I am involved with, called 104 London Debaters).
If all good people, left, right, centre, and all over the place, stand together against politically correct whitewashing of our language, a true and honest conversation may in time lead to real and positive change. Telling people what not to say, or indeed what to say, as in compelled speech – a step further into authoritarianism – is only likely to provoke even stronger resistance and entrenchment of views.
The concept of “whitewash”, incidentally, is from the Bible, where Jesus is reported to have given a broadside to the hypocritical elites of the day:
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.” (Gospel according to St. Matthew, ch. XXIII, v. 27-28)
Let’s not be like the Pharisees; let’s reject Political Correctness and all its works!
Andrew Doyle, the comedian with a serious side and a doctorate from the University of Oxford, has a new book out, and it’s certainly his most important and serious contribution to the public discourse so far: The New Puritans; How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World.
Andrew Doyle – a serious comedian
Doyle is the creator of the hilarious persona Titania McGrath, originally created as a Twitter account to satirise Wokeness and the excesses of the Social Justice Warriors online. He was a writer for the Jonathan Pie persona and is currently hosting the TV show Free Speech Nation on GB News. Apart from two satirical books under the McGrath persona, and one under the Jonathan Pie persona, Doyle has also writtenFree Speech and Why it Matters (2021).
His new book, on the “religion” of social justice, is a well-written and thoroughly researched critique of the key tenets of the world-view we often call “woke” – a slightly tabloid catch-all phrase – that has influenced so many people in the US but also increasingly here in Britain and Europe, within academia, in our institutions (even the august National Trust and the police) and increasingly politics and the laws.
Doyle is not the first to compare the current woke social justice movement with a religion. John McWorther in his recent bookWoke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, calls wokeness literally a religion, because, he explains, they have certain core beliefs that you have to accept on faith without evidence, and these you need to state and restate (as a Credo) in order not to be excommunicated from the fold; the movement has certain holy writs which you must read and accept uncritically and certain prophets whose words you must take to heart. Questions are not encouraged but taken as evidence of the “original sin” of White Privilege. But there is no Pope nor a formal hierarchy of accountability, and so the teachings of this “religion” may shift from day to day. As O’Brian says in Orwell’s 1984, “Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth.”, but in this case, even who the party is may shift and change. Dr. McWorther calls it a “catechism of contradiction”.
These contradictions and lack of basis in empirical data and logic are the main weaknesses in a broad cultural movement that contains fourth wave Feminism, intersectionalism, transgender ideology, Critical Race Theory and more, all of which tends to be referred to as “woke” ideology. The great value of Andrew Doyle’s book is to tackle the foundational texts of this “religion” head on and thus “call out” the nakedness of this many-headed Emperor.
Er…yes, it is, actually
The Sources
The book firstly provides an excellent overview of the sources of this approach from the Marxist dialecticism of intersectionalism, through postmodernist thinkers and the Frankfurt school, including Michel Foucault’s notion of language as power and Herbert Marcuse’s idea of “repressive tolerance”, and concludes that there is a direct line from these ideas and today’s “hate speech” laws, which over the past five years have seen 120,000 people getting “non-crime hate incidents” records, which will show up in an enhanced CRB check and bar them from certain jobs, and 3000 people per year arrested for “offensive remarks posted online” (P. 36).
Thought Crime
Although the College of Policing’s guidelines have been amended recently following the Miller vs. College of Policing case, the wording still betrays the subjective nature of these “crimes” – they are quite literally thought crimes, but worse than that, there are no objective criteria for these so-called crimes as they are defined as (my bolding): “A hate crime is any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice […], and a non-crime hate incident is defined as “Any incident where a crime has not been committed, but where it is perceived by the reporting person or any other person that the incident was motivated by hostility or prejudice“.
This means that something is a crime if someone claims it is a crime; there need not even be a victim, because if “any other person” perceives the words or actions to be “motivated by a hostility or prejudice” that is enough to make it a “hate crime” or indeed a “non-crime hate incident”, but even the use of the wording “perceived by the victim” presupposes there is a victim before there has even been an investigation. Whatever happened to the presumption of innocence? This level of subjectivity as part of legislation and law-enforcement, undermines the Rule of Law and is a direct consequence of accepting ideas from Post-Modernist philosophy into our political and legal discourse.
This is why Doyle’s book is important: his overview, drawing the lines of inspiration and demonstrating where these ideas have gained real influence – including the unintended consequences that are harming real people and society as a whole.
The Holy Texts
It’s worth looking at Doyle’s criticism of some of the key texts that have brought Critical Race Theory to general public attention. As he points out, this “theory” is not a scientific theory in the way this term is commonly understood.
You may be familiar with Karl Popper’s falsification principle, which essentially says that if any theory might be incompatible with one or more possible empirical observations, then it is scientific (it CAN be proven wrong); but a theory which is compatible with all possible observations, either because, as in the case of Marxism, it has been modified to accommodate such observations, or because, as in the case of psychoanalytic theories, it is consistent with all possible observations, is unscientific.
Let’s consider Critical Race Theory on that basis. Doyle refers to data from 2014 to 2019 which show that across all higher education institutions in Britain, 996 formal complaints of racism were made, 367 of which were upheld. That is an average of 1.5 formal complaints per year per institution. But rather than rejoice in the low numbers, Priyamvada Gopal, an academic at Cambridge and proponent of CRT, took the low numbers as proof of a failure by universities in defining racism properly and claimed that students were so “exhausted” from all the racism they face that they just gave up on reporting.
Indeed, as Doyle says, “Through the lens of Critical Race Theory, any challenges to claims of institutional racism may be taken as proof of the structural problems they describe.” (P. 189)
Any disparity of outcome between “race” categories is seen by proponents of CRT as proof of systemic racism.
A recent report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities actually found that in the UK “pupils from ethnic minority groups consistently outperformed their white peers” with some minority categories doing better than others. (P. 203). Again, rather than celebrating the fact that there was no evidence of racism in the system, the fact of not finding it was taken as proof that it was there by the CRT devotees, such as The Runnymede Trust, who in response to this report published their own saying that society is “deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities”, but produced no empirical evidence to support this claim.
This ran rather counter to their own report from 2000 by professor Bhikhu Parekh, which concluded that race relations in the UK were the best in Europe. Has racism become worse over the intervening 20 years?
The EU’s 2019 report on Discrimination in the European Union “…found that citizens of the United Kingdom are among the least racist in the world”. Similar conclusions were found in a report published in Frontiers in Sociology in 2018, and the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (“the UK had one of the lowest reported levels of race-related harassment and violence in the 12-country study”).
One of the High Priestesses of CRT, Robin DiAngelo, whose 2018 book White Fragility is one of the sacred texts that has acted as a superspreader for these ideas, dismisses the institutional power of black people such as Colin Powel, Clarence Thomas, Marco Rubio and Barack Obama, because, she claims, they merely support the current system, and any black success is merely seen as proof that the whites are “allowing” some black success in order to protect the status quo.
At the time of writing this, Britain has just seen her first Prime Minister of Indian heritage take the office. An instance of the neo-racialism that CRT/intersectionalism encourages, the Labour MP Nadia Whittome wrote in a since deleted Tweet that this was “not a win for Asian representation” apparently because Mr. Sunak was a successful businessman before becoming a politician. Is it not typically Asian to succeed in business, perhaps?
In other words, as Doyle puts it, “When perceived in this way, no outcome can conceivably exist that would cause the proponents of Critical Race Theory to doubt their own precepts.”
Now, if we hold that up against Popper’s test, that a theory that can be true in any and all circumstances cannot be scientific, it is clear that CRT is not a scientific theory.
That in itself does not mean that it is useless in all circumstances. But it does mean that it must be viewed as a theoretical and/or ideological approach that offers one possible interpretation of reality, rather than a scientific theory that helps us understand reality.
DiAngelo’s racism
The widespread influence of DiAngelo’s book is troubling, especially as Doyle says, she makes assertions without offering any evidence for them. He praises her for her honesty in admitting to her own racism (such as feeling deeply uncomfortable that a picnic she’s invited to may consist of mostly black people) but takes issue with the automatic assumption she makes in her book, namely that her own racism is proof of racism in others.
“[DiAngelo] is projecting her own racism onto the racial demographic to which she belongs.” (P193).
So we are in the deeply ironic situation that a book by a self-confessed racist, in which she accuses other people of being as racist as she is, without any evidence offered, is being used as a foundational text in anti-racism.
More troubling is that this text, as well as texts by others peddling the same non-scientific ideology, such as Ibram X. Kendi and Reni Eddo-Lodge, and a slew of books that Doyle lists, have gained such widespread traction amongst people who ought to know better. Is it fear of being on the “outside” that drives this?
Kneeling in submission is part of most religions, so also this one.
Social Justice
I do have a couple of quibbles with Doyle’d book, firstly on his insistence that all good people are in favour of Social Justice as he defines it. I for one am not; then again, perhaps I am not a good person. He claims the term has been co-opted and misused by the Woke, in a way that lends them legitimacy. His solution is to distinguish between “Liberal Social Justice” and “Critical Social Justice”.
But there is a slight logical discrepancy when he says “…we inadvertently support their cause by adopting their preferred branding” (P. 26), then goes on to say that we should call their version of it “critical social justice” to show that it is connected to Critical Race Theory.
However, a little further down he quotes aforementioned DiAngelo from the 2017 book Is Everyone Really Equal, co-written with Özlem Sensoy, where they make the distinction between “social justice” as commonly understood (which they don’t see as their goal) but instead favour “a ‘critical approach to social justice …’”.
In other words, calling it “Critical Social Justice” may be more accurate, but it is also adopting their preferred branding, which Doyle counselled against.
What is “justice”?
To be fair to Doyle, he very much impressed me when he brought in F.A. Hayek, the Austrian born philosopher and Nobel Prize winning economist, who criticised the concept of social justice in his seminal work Law, Legislation and Liberty.
But I feel Doyle evaded the fundamental point that Hayek brought against social justice as a concept:
“Strictly speaking, only human conduct can be called just or unjust. If we apply the term to a state of affairs, they have meaning only insofar as we hold someone responsible for bringing it about or allowing it to come about. A bare fact, or a state of affairs which nobody can change, may be good or bad, but not just or unjust.” (Law, Legislation and Liberty, Hayek, p. 198).
He goes on to explain that in a free society that is not designed and commanded from above, it makes no sense to talk about “justice” to describe the set of circumstances that result from the otherwise just actions of individuals.
“…since their wholly just actions will have consequences for others which were neither intended nor foreseen, these effects do not thereby become just or unjust.” (Hayek, p. 234).
To call a set of circumstances socially “unjust” and to have a goal for society that is “just”, you have to first agree what these “just” circumstances are; that can, as Hayek points out, only lead us in a more centralised and authoritarian direction.
But what is clear is that the proponents of social justice – whether in the common “liberal” understanding of it that Doyle favours, or in the more “critical” version that DiAngelo puts forward – do indeed “hold someone responsible”, as Hayek puts it, for the inequity between various categories of people in society.
White people are responsible that non-whites are not as wealthy and powerful in white-majority countries, men are responsible for women’s perceived lack of power and influenced, wealthy people are responsible for poor people’s poverty, straight people are responsible for gay people’s lack of perceived normality, non-trans people are responsible for trans people’s marginalisation in society, etc., etc.
And importantly, when someone is responsible, they can be punished for it. This, as Kendi and other argue, can be done through what Americans tend to all “affirmative action”, what in Britain is called “positive discrimination”. I.e. to racially discriminate against whites. As Doyle rightly points out, “In order to oppose racism one mst be opposed to anti-racism.” (P. 201).
The problem is that holding on to a logically inconsistent concept, such as “social justice”, can only help those who wish to spread this peculiar ideology; Doyle would have done better in my view to reject it altogether.
EC Publishing, who provides teaching materials for schools, has produced these completely neutral and objective teaching slides for indoctrinating, sorry, teaching our children.
Political correctness
The second slight objection I have is to what Doyle says about political correctness. He claims that the change in social attitudes to things such as gay marriage and minorities has shifted over time due to the political correctness of the 80s and 90s (P. 88). He goes on to say that whereas a prospective member of Parliament in 1964 could use a racial slur in his campaign material, “…this would be unimaginable thirty years later [and that this is] surely testimony to the success of political correctness.”
Doyle fails to clearly define what he means by “political correctness”, other than to refer to how it tended to manifest itself in the 90s and thereabouts. Various dictionary definitions exist, but the article in Encyclopædia Britannica gives the most thorough exposition of the concept in my view. It’s worth looking at a couple of quotes:
“The term first appeared in Marxist-Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time it was used to describe adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (that is, the party line).”
It then goes on to explain that the concept developed into meaning that language actively shaped people’s thoughts, a notion that George Orwell so darky satirised in 1984.
“According to the Sapir-Whorf, or Whorfian, hypothesis, our perception of reality is determined by our thought processes, which are influenced by the language we use. In this way language shapes our reality and tells us how to think about and respond to that reality. Language also reveals and promotes our biases. Therefore, according to the hypothesis, using sexist language promotes sexism and using racial language promotes racism.”
Doyle seems to have implicitly accepted this understanding by saying that the pressure to use politically correct language changed attitudes. He does not, however, entertain the possibility that it was perhaps the changing social attitudes that caused language to follow suit.
In other words, I believe he is committing a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy of assuming that because two things occurred at the same time, one thing is caused by the other.
My guess is that social attitudes changed from one generation to the next for a number of different reasons and this attitudinal change in turn changed language. With those changes in attitudes certain words, expressions and utterances became unpalatable and this then created a certain social pressure to avoid them.
Political correctness therefore is not about being polite or considerate, it is about trying to change people’s minds by controlling what one is allowed to say, as Orwell said about Newspeak,
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” (Orwell, 1984).
I will deal with Political Correctness more thoroughly in another article, but for now it is enough to recall how it was impossible in the 90s and early 2000s to argue against multiculturalism, immigration and EU membership without automatically being branded a “racist” and “xenophobe”. This stifled the political debate to such a degree that it gave rise to the BNP and UKIP, the former of which were not representative of many Brits in most aspects, but gained a considerable following because they took people’s worries seriously, something mainstream politicians couldn’t do due to political correctness. The same is true of UKIP, who gained such a following that they threatened the Tory vote, and so were finally successful in achieving a referendum on the matter in 2016, something that had been promised by Labour’s Tony Blair and successive Liberal Democrat leaders for many years, but never delivered on.
As Jonathan Rauch points out, it was once politically incorrect to defend gay marriange and lifestyles, and only the right to free speech gave those who wished to campain for it the opportunity to do so. Political correctness would have seen that debate closed down, not opened up, as Doyle seems to suggest when he refers to a friend laughing at the idea of gay marriage in 2003.
I remember as a young, politically active guy in my native Norway in the early 90s, that gay marriage was discussed and it was not political correctness that caused it to become widely acceptable, but the fact that the younger generation saw marriage mostly as a legal contract between two people, and not primarily as a sacrament. Andrew Sullivan wrote his book about same-sex marriage in 1997, not because it was politically correct at the time – quite the opposite in fact – but his book helped to shift the conversation.
Political correctness is the bleach of societal discourse; it doesn’t open up new intellectual avenues nor does it give a space for discussing difficult and sensitives issues, it simply tries to clean those away from polite society altogether, so that those who dare raise them are ostracised, marginalised and generally put on the naughty step.
It therefore feels too convenient when Doyle says that “…we need to draw a clear distinction between the PC era of the 1990s and the opposition to free speech that has since been enshrined in “hate speech” laws, often now abused by the state to clamp down on controversial opinions.” (P. 90).
That clampdown is exactly what happened back then and it should be remember that the Public Order Act goes back as far as 1986; an act that with its various amendments includes more and more utterances that in a free society should be allowed, such as “Jesus Gives Peace, Jesus is Alive, Stop Immorality, Stop Homosexuality, Stop Lesbianism, Jesus is Lord“. Yet in October 2001 Harry Hammond, a Christian, was arrested and charged under section 5 of said Public Order Act because he had displayed to people in Bournemouth a large sign bearing these words. These WORDS! He had done nothing to no-one. He had not assaulted anyone, nor followed them about shouting it in their ears, he had merely peacefully stood about displaying his opinion in written form. He was fined £300 and ordered to pay costs of £395, for expressing these politically incorrect opinions.
That is punishing thought crime, rather than actual crime, and it is what comes of accepting the premise behind political correctness, namely that by controlling people’s words we control what they are allowed to think and therefore do.
Doyle is closer to the truth when he says “The age of political correctness is over, and we are left struggling with its ugly offspring.” I would say that the age of political correctness is not by any means over, but that its ugly offspring has intensified it and we are living with the logical and necessary consequences of our capitulation to Political Correctness.
More completely neural and objective teaching slides for indoctrination, sorry, teaching our children from EC Publishing, who provides teaching materials for schools in Britain.
Cancelled culture
One way Political Correctness expresses itself these days is in the way people are sometimes successfully “cancelled”, either from certain events, but also their jobs, positions, or as commentators in the media, or dropped by publishers, etc.
Doyle spends a good part of the book discussing “cancel culture” and its chilling effect on the general public discourse as well as academia. As Jonathan Rauch, and Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt point out in their respective books, The Constitution of Truth and The Coddling of the American Mind, the number of people reporting that they are afraid to speak their mind, and afraid to declare where they stand politically, has increased dramatically on campus, to currently around 60% in America! At the same time the number of conservative leaning academics and professors have gone down significantly both there and over here in Britain.
To those who say that cancel culture isn’t real because look at all these famous people who have been attempted cancelled but who are still around, it is worth remembering what Steven Pinker said about the attempt to have him cancelled; they won’t succeed with people who are well-established or who has tenured positions, but the process will send a signal to those further down the pecking order. Toe the line or you’re next. (Watch video interview with Dr. Pinker here)
Doyle puts it well when he says, “Cancel culture works pre-emptively by fostering a climate in which most people are wary of speaking their minds for fear of misrepresentation, wilful or otherwise.” (Doyle, p. 219).
Crucial contribution
Andrew Doyle’s book is an extremely useful contribution in the on-going “culture war”, not least because he’s able to give an overview of some of the salient issues at hand, in a cogent, knowledgeable and extremely well-written manner.
The book is uncomfortable in what it lays bare, but so beautifully written and scattered with Doyle’s witticisms, drawing on his enormous comic talent, that a topic that could have been overly heavy and depressing, becomes engaging and as light as such a read can be, without compromising the academic quality.
On Saturday 15th October I attended The Battle of Ideas Festival, founded by the independent peer, Baroness Claire Fox, in Westminster, London. The festival has been running since 2006 and the motto is: “FREE SPEECH ALLOWED” (yes, in capitals). It’s organised by the Academy of Ideas and the purpose is to create a space (perhaps even a safe space) for the free and frank exchange of views, not least those that may be deemed politically incorrect, as two of the co-organisers say on the website, “We aim to make all our events an antidote to intellectual silos and closed-off echo chambers.”
Baroness Claire Fox (third from left) chaired the first discussion, on the Culture Wars
The first event I attended was a panel discussion on the Culture Wars, chaired by Baroness Fox herself. Professor Doug Stokes, a self-identifying East-Ender, said that some of the “Woke” movement represented a post-modernist attack on the values of the Enlightenment and that it was quasi-religious.
Aquil Ahmed from Channel 4 believed the Culture Wars were a number of individual issues that often get lumped together without necessarily being connected, rather than one great conflict, and that it was in many cases connected to the fear of change. He emphasised the importance of nuance instead of the grand narratives.
Inaya Falarin Iman, co-founder of the Equiano Project, asked what kind of citizens we get if one side is allowed to impose its views on the rest of us. She wondered why some religions could be criticised whilst others seemed beyond criticism.
With only time to draw breath and get a coffee it was back in the same hall for the next discussion: The Road to Ukraine. Opening speaker was Emeritus Professor Frank Furedi, a sociologist and social commentator, who recently published a book on the Ukraine situation. His argument was that the West has suffered from historical amnesia since the end of the Cold War and that we became complacent about the importance of borders and culture as we succumbed to the Siren Song of Globalism.
Mary Dejevsky, an Independent columnist on foreign affairs who has written extensively on Russia, was first responder, and talked about the lack of understanding of Russia in the West, and how many of the most recent states to join the EU actually joined it to protect their sovereignty and borders. She believed Putin does acknowledge the importance of borders but that the border with the Ukraine is complicated; a bit like our current situation with Northern Ireland, she said
Next responder was comedian, commentator and author Konstantin Kissin, himself of Russian heritage. He agreed that the West tends to misunderstand Russia – the Russian mentality on political leadership, he asserted, could be summed up as “chaos bad, order good”, and if a strong leader provides order, then this is seen as a good thing. He pointed out that the notion that Putin could be toppled and someone better take over was a dangerous delusion. He rhetorically asked, “who do you think would take over, Nick Clegg?”, making the point that the alternatives to Putin are almost certainly even worse.
It was then time for a quick lunch, and on my way I ran into columnist Rod Liddle from the Spectator, who believed that in the current political malaise, it was a great opportunity for the Social Democratic Party, but he acknowledge they need a charismatic leader, a social democratic Nigel Farage, in order to sell their message to the public.
Back at Church House after a liquid lunch it was time to discuss the so-called Online Safety Bill.
Charles Colville, an independent hereditary peer, argued that the bill, with certain safeguards for free speech, could work, if objective psychological tests were put in place to measure the bill’s concept of “extreme psychological harm”. Two of the audience members, a psychiatrist and a psychologist, both challenged him on this, saying they do not know how this could be measured objectively.
Toby Young, the Chairman of the Free Speech Union (of which I am now a member) spoke about the concept creep of terms such as “safety” and “harm”. The bill, he argued, is not about protecting children from exploitation or actual harmful content, but to protect adults from words they may not like. It’s an instance of what Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff call “safetyism”.
The legal expert, Graham Smith, said that one of the many dangerous aspect of the bill is that it will apply to small platforms as well as big tech, and that the “duty of care” principle with understandably cause these various platforms to err on the side of caution and close down far more speech than what the law may strictly speaking require them to. “Free speech is not a tripping hazard,” he said.
Another danger is that as the bill stands, the laws in Scotland, where they have clamped down heavily on free speech recently, will have to be applied on all online platforms across the United Kingdom, giving the Scottish Nationalist leader Nicola Sturgeon the de-facto power to regulate freedom of expression across the entire country.
The final conference event I made it to was a live recording of Free Speech Nation with the brilliant comedian, author and free speech activist, Andrew Doyle.
Among his guests were the feminist choreographer Rosie Kay (who was cancelled by her own theatre group), the actor James Dreyfus (whose picture was literally erased from the cover of work where he had contributed, after he publicly supported J.K. Rowling), and the biologist and science writer Matt Ridley, who has written a book about the origin of the coronavirus, presenting the arguments both for the theory that it originated in a market place and the theory that it came out of a lab.
Afterwards I got Andrew’s signature on my copies of his books, Woke, Free Speech and The New Puritans. All worth-while reading, but especially the last one.
In the corridor I ran into Yaron Brook, leader of the Ayn Rand Institute (read more on Rand here) who had been participating in a panel discussion on the US midterm elections.
Then it was off to the drinks reception where a couple of hundred people from the conference were treated to free wine and live Irish music. I even got sucked into an Irish jig, but was quickly shunted back out again, so I don’t think I was particularly impressive on that front.
I am glad to report that I am now a member of the Free Speech Union. I have cancelled my account with PayPal (boo-hiss), and will never use their services again.
For anyone who wishes to support the fundamental principle of free speech and/or may have reason to worry that they could be targeted by the “thought police” (more on that here), I would strongly urge you to consider becoming a member of the Free Speech Union.
M.W. Hagerup – Words Matter 
