AC Grayling, British philosopher and indefatigable author, is coming to the Auckland Writers Festival with a new book under his arm. Paul Little asks him about Discriminations – a sortie onto the battlefield of woke – and hears how to combat the haters.
If somebody asked you to explain what Discriminations is about, what would you tell them?
It’s about the current chapter in the great endeavour to try to combat discriminations of all kinds. So, for example, sexism, racism, ageism, ableism, casteism in India, the transgender issue.
Throughout history, these groups were massively cancelled by all those who had their hands on the levers of power and property. The whole woke endeavour since the 1960s has actually been pretty successful. One big chapter was the civil rights movement and second-wave feminism in the 60s and 70s. This success has given people more opportunity to try to do more on their own behalf. But the more successful they are, the more vigorously people push back against it.
The very word woke, meaning alert to injustice, seems to have undergone a transformation in meaning – it’s like a victim of the culture wars itself.
It’s used by anti-wokeists to pour contempt and disdain and hostility on all these different anti-discrimination causes. But really, it’s a word that has a pretty noble ancestry.
To be “woke” to something came out of the African-American experience. African-Americans were being invited to be even more alert to the systematic ways in which racism affected them and was manifested when they went into a bank or tried to rent a flat or to get a job or ride on a bus. There were lots and lots of different ways.
It feels like people are more exercised by these issues than ever, able to find time to be outraged on many fronts at once.
Yes, and it can be blamed almost exclusively on social media. Back in the 90s, in the days of our naivety, we thought, “Ah, this is terrific. Now we’ve got a universal forum, no gatekeepers that can block us from the news, and we can discuss and debate and campaign and this is going to be absolutely wonderful.” And of course, it’s turned out to be an absolute sewer, and it’s undermining our democracies, and it is inflaming everything, aggregating whole constituencies of fury on both sides of the argument.
The anti-woke side can focus on [for instance] the transgender issue and be scathing about it, and use the bad odour they manage to create around it to generalise it to all the other woke causes. Yet, if we invite people to look at the anti-woke side – like Neo Nazis and the manosphere – that stuff is vastly more appalling and horrible than anything on the woke side. Yet [those on the woke side] just say, “Oh, isn’t that horrible,” but we don’t do the same thing.
The way to deal with bad free speech is with good free speech. And this takes work.
For those directly involved in it, the transgender issue is very important, and people need all the support they can get, but it’s a very small number of people. Why has it so much focus and attention when the position of women, racism, income equality and other issues affect many more people?
There are two reasons. One is that the whole transgender community is very small, so it’s a vulnerable group and easy to attack, and made all the easier by the fact that the traditional binaries – male, female – feel so obvious.
The other thing is, the [former Trump adviser Steve] Bannon playbook. One of the most effective ways of undermining a group is to get them to start fighting among themselves.
And with the transgender issue, what’s happened is that feminists have been turned against one another. So there are pro-transgender and anti-transgender feminists. They’re at one another’s throats. And it’s really bad for those people who are desperately unhappy about living in a gender identity that just doesn’t feel right for them.
So what’s to be done about it?
What the hell does it matter if somebody wants to present in society as a man or woman or as neither? It doesn’t bother any of us, except in one respect, and that one respect is women’s spaces: changing rooms, women’s prisons, women’s public lavatories and so on. But in all those cases, if there was calm and rational reflection, there would be some way of coming to a compromise or negotiating how to deal with it. And the people who should come up with ways to deal with it should be the people involved themselves – so, transgender people and women who are concerned about having a person with a penis and wearing a dress in their public lavatory.
You make the distinction between discrimination over things people are born with – ethnicity, sexual orientation – and things they choose or that are imposed on them, like religion. But religion has led to some of the worst behaviour in history.
What is the position of religion if we want to respect people’s right to believe whatever they want to believe?
The positive sense of discrimination has to come into play here. We must discriminate between the right of any individual to hold an opinion, however stupid, on the one hand, and on the other hand the question of whether that person can impose that opinion on others. A religion, a political point of view or any ideology has no right not to be challenged or criticised or ridiculed by people who disagree with it, because they have their right of opinion and they have their right to a freedom of expression. It’s a question of rational consideration. Rational is an important word for me because I think about the first part of the word “ratio” [meaning] proportion, proportionate judgements and attitudes to the evidence that you have. There are some aspects of religion which have been positive in society. I think of the Sistine Chapel, and lonely old people having an imaginary friend for life. But on the whole, religion has been really bad, and religion is not something that has a right to be protected against criticism.
You have said that with the exception of hate speech, silence is not the right way to go. How do we decide which speech to protect and which not?
It’s a very natural tendency to look for a rule that is easy to apply. Freedom of expression is absolutely fundamental to anything worthwhile – to politics, so you can propose policies and challenge them; to education, where you explore ideas. There’s no art and literature worth the name without freedom of expression. But it is not unqualified. So obviously you limit freedom of expression in time of war so the enemy don’t get information. When is use of free expression responsible and when is it not? That is the difficult and ticklish thing. Not everything in life is destined to be easy. We have to go case by case. We have to have proper remedies in place for people who are abused or irresponsible with their freedom of expression. We have to educate ourselves and others about the responsibility of free expression by looking at the damage it can do or the good that it can do. Society in general, politically and sociologically and morally in all other ways, is a continually calculating zone of negotiations about how we do things.
What do we do with, say, the announcement that an anti-trans activist is coming to New Zealand on a public speaking tour?
We don’t want to hear them, we don’t like them, and we don’t want them to spread that horrible ideology. So our natural reaction is to shut them up. But that is not the right [response]. Instead of driving these views underground or making it worse by entrenching people further in their views, we should let them have their say and then defeat it with better arguments, better free speech. The way to deal with bad free speech is with good free speech. And this takes work. Too often in history we’ve seen how groups that have been really marginalised and driven away have got even more rotten.
You finish the book by advocating convivencia (a term that described co-existence between Jews, Christians and Muslims in mediaeval Spain) as a way of handing all these issues to a greater or lesser degree.
If you dig down into right-wing attitudes, they feed off things like the idea of a nation or a people, which is where all this proto-Nazi stuff comes out. “We are a unity.” “We have an identity.” It’s all baloney. Because there’s only one group, and that’s all of us. We’re all more closely related to one another as human beings. Instead of trying to impose unity, we should be seeking something quite different, which is harmony. Accept the diversity and the plurality. Given that there’s going to be a great deal of diversity and difference, what we want to seek is harmony. Accept the fact that the bloke you’ve known all your life next door is now in high heels. Accept it, and then you can get along.