Cornel West (above) and Douglas Murray (below) will go head to head in a potential explosion of arguments. Photo (main) / Getty Images
COMMENT:
As it is for Celine Dion and Bob Dylan, so it is for the talkers. New Zealand is now on the celebrity speaker circuit and no, I am not talking about Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux.
Tonight in the Aotea Centre, Harvard professor Cornel West goes nose-to-nose with Douglas Murray, associate editor of the Spectator. We had Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay here in the Writers Festival this year and we're getting the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson soon too. Peterson's book 12 Rules for Life has made him, by some counts, the most popular public intellectual in the world.
Oh, and Nigel Farage and Pauline Hanson will be stopping by. The speakers' pulpit is truly open for business. What's going on?
An explosion of arguments, that's what. It's like somebody looked at the culture wars raging through the US and elsewhere and went, it's all got a bit predictable. Let's drop a bomb on it.
Black vs white? Poor white folk against liberal elites? Men vs women? Forget all that. Now, there are jagged ideologues all over the place. Most claim to speak the very essence of reason and justice. Many also rip everyone else to shreds, as if the world will end if they don't get that done right now. You can blame the internet for the tone, but there's more to it than that.
We're confused. The old ways of divining the world don't equip us well to deal with the rise of Donald Trump or adopt strategies for climate change. And we're furious. On the left, because after 60-plus years of unbroken prosperity, ugly old oppressions still prevail. On the right, because with the world turning upside down, cherished values are being trashed. So we are fractious, but also very thirsty for ideas.
Cornel West is an African-American socialist who calls Donald Trump "a gangster". He's an uncompromising advocate for Black Lives Matter and believes Barack Obama was a neoliberal in the pocket of Wall St. But strangely, he is not an ally of the very famous Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Atlantic correspondent and leading commentator on what it means to be black in America.
Coates and West probably see eye to eye on most things, but West is almost as vitriolic about Coates as he is about Trump – because Coates isn't critical enough of Obama. That's how splintered the world now is.
Douglas Murray, meanwhile, like Jordan Peterson, argues that the big division in the world is between those who primarily identify as a member of a group, and those who prefer to say they belong to society as a whole.
So feminists, people of colour, gays, transgender people, class activists and more are all lined up on one side. Also on that side, the angry, poor, white folk who voted for Trump, many of whom, especially among the men, believe they belong to the most marginalised group of all. They are all "identitarians".
And on the other side? Rational, broad-minded, decent people, that's who. Otherwise known, on the whole, as middle-class white men. I kid you not. Peterson and Murray are both part of what is sometimes called the "intellectual dark web", and that is how they break down the world.
Peterson goes so far as to argue that the mindset which produces identity politics is the same mindset that produces totalitarianism. The mindset that led, in the last century, to the slaughter of millions. He says it out loud.
Murray is proudly on the right. Peterson claims to be neither left nor right. He suggests we were all better off in the good old days of civilised discourse.
It's a tempting view for anyone who doesn't know how those good old days marginalised and victimised so many people. On the left, they've pegged him as a conservative, whatever he might say.
Murray is a leading Brexiter. His big thing is immigration, although he's more than happy to wade into other things, like feminism and the #MeToo movement. Feminists are obsessed with victimhood, he says, and pretty soon we'll all be so frightened of each other no one will have sex at all.
He does seem a bit weird. A bit touched with English eccentricity. One of his proofs of how Muslims in Britain "don't want to integrate" is that they don't go to the pub. Why don't they "drink lukewarm beer like everybody else"?
He's not like Lauren Southern, though, which is to say he hasn't literally tried to turn boat refugees back from Europe so they risk drowning in the Mediterranean. At the Spectator they're all far more respectable than that.
In his book The Strange Death of Europe Murray argues that the rise of the far right does not pose a fascist threat, because the real threat is from the "lunatic" immigration policy forced on Europe by the centre-left. He says, rightly, that Islamic extremism is intolerant, and concludes that tolerating it is "stupid and suicidal". But who would disagree? Is allowing Muslim customs to be practised in Britain the same as tolerating extremism?
In a review in the Times, Melanie Phillips called The Strange Death of Europe a "tremendous and shattering book", but she would say that. She's the author of Londonistan, the book that gave a name to British Islamophobic fears in 2006.
On the face of it, Douglas Murray and Cornel West don't have a lot to talk about. Black Lives Matter vs the end of European civilisation? And what will they make of the chair of their debate, Mihingarangi Forbes, who will doubtless mihi to them and introduce the uniquely bicultural, treaty-informed framework of the race-relations debate in this country.
There are other differences. Unlike in Europe, immigration here is not driven by refugees from war and climate change. Our biggest migrant groups are from China, India and Britain, and mainly they're middle class.
We do have institutional racism, in our police force and elsewhere, but unlike in the US our cops don't shoot black people – or anyone – because they seem suspicious or are running away. We don't have the NRA, or the Trump base, or university campuses riven with dissent over what it's acceptable to say and do.
We do have, from our perspective of distance, a lot of people who fear for the world, not because of immigration or "PC gone mad", but because of what might be done to it by oil barons, oligarchs, tyrants, arms dealers, morals-free finance traders and all their friends.
We've got protagonists in some of the world's great debates, coming to us. It's great. And while I don't much care if Celine Dion and Bob Dylan learn precisely nothing from, say, Ladi6 or the Phoenix Foundation, it would be nice to think it was different for Cornel West and Douglas Murray, and the others. Will they take away some understanding about how and why things are a little different, a little more hopeful, here?