May 15, 2025 • 27 mins
The ‘war on wokeness’ may feel like a new phenomenon, but in fact, it’s been around for centuries.
People have been ‘cancelled’, in one way or another, since the beginning of time – it's human nature to form tribes, create an ‘us’ and ‘them’, and serve as judge, jury, and sometimes literally, executioner.
But in recent years, the ‘culture wars’ have erupted between the left and right, progressive and conservative, the woke and anti-woke over everything from gender and sexuality to race and equal rights.
Discriminations – Making Peace in the Culture Wars is the latest work by British philosopher A. C. Grayling, where he delves into some of the biggest issues of our time.
He joins us today on The Front Page to discuss wokeness, who decides who gets to be ‘cancelled’, and understanding mankind’s inherent need to be right.
A.C. Grayling will be appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival from May 13–18. For more information and tickets, visit www.writersfestival.co.nz.
Follow The Front Page on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can read more about this and other stories in the New Zealand Herald, online at nzherald.co.nz, or tune in to news bulletins across the NZME network.
Host: Chelsea Daniels
Sound Engineer/Producer: Richard Martin
Producer: Ethan Sills
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hilda. I'm Chelsea Daniels and This is the Front Page,
a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. The
War on Wokeness may feel like a new phenomenon, but
in fact it's been around for centuries. People have been
canceled in one way or another since the beginning of time.
(00:26):
It's human nature to form tribes, create in us and them,
and serve as judge, jury, and sometimes literally executioner. But
in recent years, the cultural wars have erupted between the
left and the right, progressive and conservative, the woken anti
woke over everything from gender and sexuality to race and
(00:47):
equal rights discriminations. Making Peace in the Cultural Wars is
the latest work by British philosopher ac Grayling, where he
delves into some of the biggest issues of our time.
He joins us to day on the Front Page to
discuss wokeness, who decides who gets to be canceled and
understanding mankind's inherent need to be right. So I want
(01:15):
to start by getting your definition of two terms, wokeness
and canceled right.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Wokeness is a term that applies to a state of
mind about fighting against discrimination, against racism, against sexism, against homophobia,
against ageism, disabledism, you know, against transphobia, because it indicates
a phase in this last eight to ten years. Maybe
(01:45):
is exemplifies it a phase in a continuing effort which
really got going after the Second World War. If you
cast your mind back to the nineteen sixties and seventies
with the civil rights movement in the US, second wave
of feminism against all forms of rumination, because prior to
that time, women, people of color, gays, and others didn't
(02:05):
really really even have the right to assert their rights.
So this current thing, wocism, when you go back to
the nineteen nineties, the PC, the political correctness thing, go
back to the sixties civil rights feminism, they're all part
of the same story. And it's a great story about
getting a reckoning with history because before that time, so
(02:27):
many marginalized groups, so many people were given second or
third class status, didn't have a voice, many of them,
and discrimination was just taken for granted. So workism is
a great thing, a good thing. It's about getting people's rights,
about making society a fair place. So that's what that
word means. And by the way, people use the word
(02:49):
woke as a kind of term of abuse.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Yeah, it's like derogatories and naughty, very disparaging and very contemptuous.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
But it has an honorable ancestry actually because it comes
from the African American patois. You know, talking about the
fact that although the very obvious forms of discrimination can't
get more obvious than stavery, obviously, but there are also
lots of hidden forms of racism. And so to be alert,
to be awake, to be woke to the fact that
(03:18):
you are going to be encountering all sorts of resistance
to your chance just to be accepted and to have
a fair place. That is something that they quite rightly
said they needed to notice. And of course that's been
picked up by gays, by women, by others who have
said enough of discrimination. Anti workism, by the way, is
about protecting interests, not about protecting rights, because if you're
(03:42):
in a privileged position in society, you have a privileged
access to all the top quality social goods of health, education,
of opportunities in economics. You know, want other people getting
into your club, do you, so you push back against it,
And a lot of anti workist endeavor is really about
underneath old the metrics. It's about denying the rights of
(04:04):
people to that fair pace.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
People that talk about cancel culture never seem to shut
the like. There's more speech now than ever before. The
Internet has democratized criticism. What do we do for a living.
We talk, we criticize, we postulate, we opine, we make jokes,
(04:32):
and now other people are having their say.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
And that's not cancel culture.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
That's relentlessness.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
We live in relentless culture, and the system of the
Internet and all those other things are incentivized to find
the pressure points of that and exacerbate it.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
And to be canceled. And it's peppered throughout history and
different kind of iterations, isn't it, from things like banishment
and to the more extreme of course death. The war
on woke is just the latest iteration. Tell me a
little bit more about that, right.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Well, the whole of history is really about canceling. You know,
war is one group trying to cancel another group, and
society is canceled. So, for example, we cancel criminals by
locking them up in prison. Canceling can be positive and negative.
So positive canceling is what happens when you're trying to
protect people from harm, so you cancel the harm doers.
(05:36):
You cancel the criminal by locking them away in order
to protect society, but also importantly to try to get
them to think again and reform and perhaps even make
some reparations. The thing about the cancel culture, which is
practiced by people on the more active wing of Wokism,
is that it can be undiscriminating. One has to be
(05:57):
awfully careful always to try to be fair and to
use a due process, you know, because these social media
pyons are really mob linchings, aren't they. The people who
do it are judge, jury prosecutor, and sometimes they catch
in their net people who are therefore unjustly treated. So
although one can understand the frustration and the anger of
(06:19):
people who get involved in canceling endeavors, and although there
are certainly cases of people who need to be canceled
I'll give you Harvey Weinstein as an egregious example, it's
also the case that in all these great struggles in
society to get things right, they will be over each
on both sides. But I do have to point something out,
which is that if you look at the sort of
(06:41):
extremes of workism and anti workism, on the kind of
extreme of workism, you get people who you know, talk
about pronouns or they go in for canceling of people
that they're really angry with. But on the other side
of the story, on the far right, what have you got.
You've got neo Nazis, white supremacist, misogynists, masculist influences, you know,
(07:03):
dreadful people. There's no symmetry here. It's not as though
there's a kind of moral equivalence that the anti workers
who are defending their interests and who don't like people
of color or women or gays or something. I mean,
they are vile, whereas you know, somebody says to you
call me them or they. It's hardly the same thing,
is it. But the point is to get beneath the
(07:24):
kind of rhetorical battle, because the rhetorical battle is very distracting.
The real issues are issues about human rights. They're the
issues about people just having a fair place in society
and be accepted no matter what their color or sexuality
or whatever. That's the really key issue.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
And I'm really recognizing the difference between discrimination and being offended.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Hey, well yeah, I mean, look, the factor of the
matter is that nobody has a right not to be offended.
We're all offended by something, okay, and we can be
mutually offended by something that a person does or say
will offend somebody else. That person might be offended that
the person is taking offense. So I'm afraid there are
(08:06):
going to be lots of things that one has to do.
There's hard work that has to be done to make
society a more inclusive and tolerant place, and one of
them is to recognize that being offended is a kind
of inevitability. You've got to suck it up, and you've
got to recognize that as best we can anyway not
to offend people.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Be polite.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
It's easy enough to be polite, but that you're not
going to be able to please everybody all the time.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
When it comes to cancel culture, do you think some
individuals or groups can be too quick to label people
as extremists or racists or homophobes and shut down those
conversations rather than having a debate or a discussion.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Yes, I mean that there's always the potential for overreach,
there's no question. And when you consider the the frustration
that people feel that progress is not enough, progress is
being made, and it's quite interesting, you know, because if
you think about that whole story, which has been unfolding
since the nineteen sixties, a huge amount of progress has
(09:15):
been made by people of color and women and gays
and so on to get more accepted in society and
a better chance that journey is not yet over, that
the destination is still some way away. You can prove
it easily enough by just looking at the fact that
fifty six percent of university graduates in the US are women.
The proportion of women who are right in the top
levels of business and government and society in the US
(09:37):
is much much lower than fifty six percent. So something
is going on between the two, which is the systemic
sexism that still prevents real opportunities for equal treatment. But
even though a huge amount of progress has been made,
still to find doors barred against you, or find people
clumbniating you because you're saying we want our rights, or
(09:58):
you're an ally of people to see their rights, I
can make people angry, and so you get as a
result over each It happens on both sides. Again, I
iterate the point that the rhetorical battle, the noise, the smoke,
the things that people say and do which are very
distracting should not distract us. We should look down at
what's really an issue and see that this is just
(10:19):
you know, the kind of what we philosophers call the epiphenomenon,
which means that the kind of glow that's given off
by the situation, because there are really important, serious matters
that underlie the whole woke endeavor.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
And in speaking of human rights in your book, you
refer to the killing of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.
Tell me about that.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
But I use this as an example to kind of
surprise people. All right, now, some of it, I was, Well,
the thing is some have bin Laden is an extremely
unappealing candidate for being treated, you know, in accordance with
human rights ideas, because human rights says everybody has right
to a fair trial, everybody has a right to a
defense to be hurt. Everybody has a right when arrested
(11:05):
and charged with a crime, to be treated with a
degree of respect and deference, and not to be treated
to arbitrary punishment. Now, as have been lod was shot
dead and dropped into the Arabian Gulf, and for good
pragmatic reasons, because had he been arrested and taken to
Guantanamo Bay, he might have continued to be a focus
of attention on the part of supporters of his So
(11:27):
from a pragmatic, short term point of view, there was
a justification that could be offered by the US government.
But from a long term point of view, from the
point of view of trying to respect due process and
individual human rights, it would have served the world better
if the United States, which after all sets it's used
to set itself up before as a place of law
(11:49):
and civil liberties and human rights, would have been better
if they had respected those constraints. It's harder to do,
it's hard work to do that, it's disgusting to have
to do it with somebody like Osama bin Laden, But
in the end, it would have been better than to
engage in an extra judicial killing or to say that
he was an enemy compatent or something. So I use
(12:11):
that as an example to sort of joke people into
thinking that if you're going to take the idea of
human rights seriously, and they should be taking seriously, because
in the end, if the world is going to be
a better place and a fairer place, more inclusive place,
and every single one of us is going to have
a chance to make for ourselves lives worth living, good lives,
meaningful lives. We have to have our rights respected. That
(12:34):
means you misrespect other people's rights, and so the whole
idea of human rights is absolutely fundamental.
Speaker 4 (12:42):
Last week I determined that we had enough intelligence to
take action and authorized an operation to get Osama bin
Laden and bring him to justice. After a firefight, they
killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.
For over two decades, Laden has been al Qaeda's leader
and symbol, and it's continued to plot attacks against our
(13:04):
country and our friends and allies. The death have been
Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our
nation's effort to defeat al Qaeda. It death does not
mark the end of our effort.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Do you think that if Osama bin Laden was taken
in alive and chucked in Guantanamo Bay that his views
could have been changed with debate, discussion, education.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Probably not. I mean, you know that there are going
to be people who are pretty hardline in their views
objection and are not going to be persuaded and suddenly
become a fuzzy liberal democrat types agreed, But just because
the Issama bin Laden's might not change doesn't mean that
there aren't possibilities for other people to change. After all,
it's evident if you think about, say the last couple
(13:53):
of hundred years, let's say, just think about human treatment
of animals, think about how people treated horses and dogs
and so on, that kind of treatment of animal is unacceptable. Now,
the shows that moral progress is possible, and it's possible
because we do a number of things. We argue, discuss, debate,
we set an example, We even introduce laws to protect
(14:14):
vulnerable creatures, and bit by bit we managed to shift society.
So even though there were always going to be people
who can't be shifted, we've got a hope that we
can shift other people. And the empirical evidence suggests that
we can shift people. So, you know, a lot of
people to go to prison and you don't like it
in prison or were brought to consider their what they
did in the harm they caused to other people. You know,
(14:36):
we can hope of them that they can reform and
do better later, and some do so. Anyway, what's the
alternative to being optimistic about these things?
Speaker 1 (14:45):
If examples of cancelations throughout history and whatever form or
anything to go by. And I'm talking about the ones
in your book as well. There seems to be a
huge amount of hypocrisy at play, you know, like someone
who's committed a adultery chastising someone who identifies as homosexual. Now,
do you have to be a perfect person and to
(15:07):
have committed quote unquote no sins to be able to
or allowed to cancel someone?
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Look outside the readership and listenership of the Herald here
in Auckland. There are no perfect people. Okay, So we're
all an alloy. We've all got faults and failings, and
the fact that we have, the fact that nobody is
squeaky clean cannot be allowed to be a barrier to
trying to make ourselves and other people better by argument
(15:36):
or by example, or by setting up a social conversation,
a public conversation about what's going to be acceptable and
right and try to shift things in the right direction. So, yes,
I'm in. You know, hypocrisy is a feature of human
nature to some extent. Of course, it makes human nature
kind of interesting. I mean, there'll be no movies and
books about love affairs and things like that, and has
(15:57):
that with the case, But it would be ad hominem
to say to somebody, you know, I if smoker said
to you, don't smoke, it's bad for your health, and
you say, oh, but you're a smoker. That's a classic
ad hominem argument, failing to recognize that what that person
has just said is right. So, you know, hypocrites can
sometimes amazingly tell the truth and say things that are right.
(16:19):
So we've just got to go for the best here.
We've got to try to look at what is persuasive
because it stands up, because a good case can be
made for it. That's the thing that should matter, not
individual people, but ideas, movements in society. The destination that
we're trying to reach, which is for a good, peaceful, constructive, cooperative,
(16:42):
happy society. I say at the end of the book
that if everybody respected everybody else's human rights, the world
would really be a very, very much better place. And
what we would achieve is convivencia. Now, this beautiful word
is a word that was used to describe the situation
in Spain during the medieval period when Christians and Jews
(17:04):
and Muslims all lived together, were got on together, corporated
work together, learned from one another, and of course the
historians over idealized it. I'm sure there were some frictions
and so no doubt, but that period of time is
known as the period of convivens here of being able
to live together in a mutually tolerant and accepting way,
(17:26):
and that should be our aim. And in fact, you know,
the woke endeavor is really an endeavor to get there
and endeavor to say, every one of us, no matter
what our skin color, what our sexuality, you know, how
we feel about ourselves, we should have our place. We
should have a fair place and be accepted by others.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
In June twenty twenty, JK. Rowlinging tweeted, and I'm sure
that you've heard a lot about JK rowling in your research.
She said, I respect every trans person's right to live
in any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them.
I'd march with you if you were discriminated against on
the basis of being trans. Now, five years later, it
(18:14):
feels like her entire online existence is about trans people,
none of it positive, by the way, and none of
it seeming to fit with that earlier sentiment. How has
someone like her gone down this path within the space
of five years, have we pushed her to go there
or those similar down there by making fun of them
or immediately labeling them as transphobic or something.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Yeah, it's a really interesting example of something in fact
of a deliberate phenomenon. Really, if you go back to
twenty fifteen, the Supreme Court in the United States gave
the final sign off on same sex marriage. Now, for
years and years before then, there was an organization, hugely
well funded organization called the American Principles Project the APP,
(18:59):
and they've been campaigning against same sex marriage. But when
they lost that when it got to the Supreme Court,
they pivoted in public it's in the public domain here.
They pivoted and said, so we're going to tackle another issue,
and this issue is trans trans women, mainly across trans men.
No problem to men, but trans women and women's spaces
(19:20):
and the fugitive invasion of women's spaces by people who
want to present as women but who may pre full
transition still be male in some respect. So they transitioned
to that. And this just shows you how a very
well funded and well focused campaign can really become the issue.
Think about this. The number of people who have gender
(19:42):
dysphoria in the world as a whole is less than
one percent. Climate change is a huge problem, but you
would think that the trans issue was equally a big
problem because of the fact that the right have focused
on it and dramatized it as a big issue. By
choosing the most vulnerable group of people and really focusing
(20:02):
on them, they've achieved two things. First, they can make
the whole woke endeavors. I mean, it's very difficult to
tackle sexism or gay rights or something, but if you
tackle trans and call it woke and the things that
pro trans people say, you can demonize the whole woke thing. Okay,
so that's part of the strategy there. But the other
thing is that that they've succeeded in turning feminists against
(20:26):
one another, pro trans and trans skeptical feminists. And this
is perfect if you can get your enemy to start
fighting among themselves, which is exactly what the right wing
wanted to happen, and you've seen it happen in the
feminist movement over the trans issue. And if you really
think about the trans issue, firstly, people who are unhappy
with the assigned sexual gender that they had it at birth.
(20:48):
You know, a lot of them really, I mean, it's
a really serious thing for them, and it's very difficult
for them to live in a way that feels really false,
and if they do adopt the gender expression that feels
more natural, it's pretty hard to be accepted in society.
The proof that they're serious is that they're prepared to
do the work of putting up with lack of acceptance
(21:09):
and you know, people scorning them and so on, so
you know, for them it's a really key issue. But
all the issue about women's spaces, women's toilets, women's prisons,
women's sports and so on, there are solutions. You know,
if only there was a calm, rational discussion about this,
it could be sorted out instead of lumping it all
into one thing, which is you know, biological males invading
(21:33):
women's toilets and so on. That there are ways of
sorting it out, which would you know, bring peace to
this whole issue. But it's used as a tool to
have a go at the whole cause by picking on
the most vulnerable group. And when you talk about JK. Rowling,
you see what happens. She was not against individual trans people,
(21:55):
but she was raising concerns about women's spaces, which some
feminists feel very strongly about. You know, there are very
sincere views and boothsades here. But if you can get
people quarreling with one another, and it gets more and
more and more as Herbic people get driven into a
more and more polarized position, and then they're all start
hating one another and they forget that actually they are
victims of an attempt to discredit everything to do with
(22:18):
wuke and to attack this very vulnerable group.
Speaker 5 (22:23):
What all of these principles have in common is that
they afford Mardi different rights from other New Zealanders, seeing
the treaty is a quote partnership between races, as the
Court of Appeal once said, does not work as a
constitutional foundation for our country. The lawyers will defend their
logic to the helps, but there is one question they
(22:44):
cannot answer. Where in the world is it a good
idea to give citizens different rights based on ancestry. Where
in the world has that approach been a success?
Speaker 1 (23:00):
And the Coalition government at the moment has disestablished something
called the Maori Health Authority, which was focused on bettering
health outcomes for Maori. Given those outcomes are different from
paquiha or white people. There's also a controversial bill, the
Treaty Principles Bill, that essentially sought to make it so
there were equal rights for all New Zealanders. So this
(23:24):
line stuck out to me from your book, and I
thought of this, this line. To treat people equally is
not always to treat them fairly. Can you tak me
through an example of.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
This, right, Well, if you had an Olympic athlete who
needed five thousand calories a day and you had a
little old lady who needed fifteen hundred calories a day,
and you forced them to eat the same number of
calories let's say three thousand calories a day each, you're
unfair to both. You're treating them equally, but you're unfair
to both. Equity or fairness is the goal, not just
(23:58):
crude equality. However, equality matters when it comes to what
are sometimes called equality of concern. So people should be
treated equally before the law, they should be treated equally
by government provision, welfare provision. They should have an equal
opportunity to gain access to what gives you a chance
(24:20):
in life, which is health and education. So their equality
matters in many other respects. It can be unfair because
that's where equity matters, where fairness matters. And so again
it's a question of thinking a bit about it, you know,
just a question of going below the surface and just
trying to work things out in a discriminating way. Where
(24:40):
we mean by discriminating this time something positive, discriminating, separating
things out, seeing things clearly, defining things properly, and then
you see how these things work.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
If the work to understand though different points of view
cannot be one sided, then how can you make the
side that benefits from injustice and discrimination actually do the
work right.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Well, you've got to keep hammering away at them on
a number of different fronts. So of course the best
way because you know, one of the things which is
an issue in the current wars is so called the
freedom of expression issue.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
All right.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Of course, people forget that freedom of expression used only
to be the possession of the right because they own
the means of expression and other people didn't even have
a voice. Now, people on the work side of the
argument need freedom of expression to make their case and
to put their point. Freedom of expression is incredibly precious.
You can't have law without you can't have accusation and defense.
(25:37):
You can't have political process putting forward public policy proposals
and criticizing them kind of education worth the name. If
you can't discuss ideas, can't have creativity. Freedom of expression
is absolutely fundamental, but it is not unqualified. There are
occasions famous one of course, is shouting fire and a
crowded theater. You know, there are occasions when the use
(25:58):
of your right to free expression can be irresponsible. So
the big question is what counts as responsible use of
free expression, and that is something that can only be
decided on a case by case basis. That ifether there's
going to be a qualification on freedom of expression, like
in time of war, you want to limit what newspapers
can report so the enemy don't get information. That's a
(26:19):
justified limitation on free expression. But it has to be
case by case. It has to be term limited, it
can't be forever. And that the remedies against abuse of
free expression can't be prior constraint or censorship. There must
be post factor remedies. I mean, you have to see
how important freedom of expression is and then think of
ways of managing abuses of it. And I always say,
(26:42):
I say to my students, for example, the way to
deal with bad expression like hate speech and racist speech
and sexist speech and so on. The way to deal
with it is not by canceling or not by censoring,
not by no platforming, but by better free expression, by
having good arguments, and by standing up and challenge. So
the answer to your question is that the response that
(27:02):
we must give must be organized endeavor to try to
say and do things which are better than the bad
things that are said and done by the people we oppose.
Thank you for joining us, Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You
can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage
at enzdherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is
produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is also
our sound engineer. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to the Front
Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and
(27:42):
tune in on Monday for another look behind the headlines.
Hilda. I'm Chelsea Daniels and This is the Front Page,
a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. The
War on Wokeness may feel like a new phenomenon, but
in fact it's been around for centuries. People have been
canceled in one way or another since the beginning of time.
(00:26):
It's human nature to form tribes, create in us and them,
and serve as judge, jury, and sometimes literally executioner. But
in recent years, the cultural wars have erupted between the
left and the right, progressive and conservative, the woken anti
woke over everything from gender and sexuality to race and
(00:47):
equal rights discriminations. Making Peace in the Cultural Wars is
the latest work by British philosopher ac Grayling, where he
delves into some of the biggest issues of our time.
He joins us to day on the Front Page to
discuss wokeness, who decides who gets to be canceled and
understanding mankind's inherent need to be right. So I want
(01:15):
to start by getting your definition of two terms, wokeness
and canceled right.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Wokeness is a term that applies to a state of
mind about fighting against discrimination, against racism, against sexism, against homophobia,
against ageism, disabledism, you know, against transphobia, because it indicates
a phase in this last eight to ten years. Maybe
(01:45):
is exemplifies it a phase in a continuing effort which
really got going after the Second World War. If you
cast your mind back to the nineteen sixties and seventies
with the civil rights movement in the US, second wave
of feminism against all forms of rumination, because prior to
that time, women, people of color, gays, and others didn't
(02:05):
really really even have the right to assert their rights.
So this current thing, wocism, when you go back to
the nineteen nineties, the PC, the political correctness thing, go
back to the sixties civil rights feminism, they're all part
of the same story. And it's a great story about
getting a reckoning with history because before that time, so
(02:27):
many marginalized groups, so many people were given second or
third class status, didn't have a voice, many of them,
and discrimination was just taken for granted. So workism is
a great thing, a good thing. It's about getting people's rights,
about making society a fair place. So that's what that
word means. And by the way, people use the word
(02:49):
woke as a kind of term of abuse.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Yeah, it's like derogatories and naughty, very disparaging and very contemptuous.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
But it has an honorable ancestry actually because it comes
from the African American patois. You know, talking about the
fact that although the very obvious forms of discrimination can't
get more obvious than stavery, obviously, but there are also
lots of hidden forms of racism. And so to be alert,
to be awake, to be woke to the fact that
(03:18):
you are going to be encountering all sorts of resistance
to your chance just to be accepted and to have
a fair place. That is something that they quite rightly
said they needed to notice. And of course that's been
picked up by gays, by women, by others who have
said enough of discrimination. Anti workism, by the way, is
about protecting interests, not about protecting rights, because if you're
(03:42):
in a privileged position in society, you have a privileged
access to all the top quality social goods of health, education,
of opportunities in economics. You know, want other people getting
into your club, do you, so you push back against it,
And a lot of anti workist endeavor is really about
underneath old the metrics. It's about denying the rights of
(04:04):
people to that fair pace.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
People that talk about cancel culture never seem to shut
the like. There's more speech now than ever before. The
Internet has democratized criticism. What do we do for a living.
We talk, we criticize, we postulate, we opine, we make jokes,
(04:32):
and now other people are having their say.
Speaker 4 (04:36):
And that's not cancel culture.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
That's relentlessness.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
We live in relentless culture, and the system of the
Internet and all those other things are incentivized to find
the pressure points of that and exacerbate it.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
And to be canceled. And it's peppered throughout history and
different kind of iterations, isn't it, from things like banishment
and to the more extreme of course death. The war
on woke is just the latest iteration. Tell me a
little bit more about that, right.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Well, the whole of history is really about canceling. You know,
war is one group trying to cancel another group, and
society is canceled. So, for example, we cancel criminals by
locking them up in prison. Canceling can be positive and negative.
So positive canceling is what happens when you're trying to
protect people from harm, so you cancel the harm doers.
(05:36):
You cancel the criminal by locking them away in order
to protect society, but also importantly to try to get
them to think again and reform and perhaps even make
some reparations. The thing about the cancel culture, which is
practiced by people on the more active wing of Wokism,
is that it can be undiscriminating. One has to be
(05:57):
awfully careful always to try to be fair and to
use a due process, you know, because these social media
pyons are really mob linchings, aren't they. The people who
do it are judge, jury prosecutor, and sometimes they catch
in their net people who are therefore unjustly treated. So
although one can understand the frustration and the anger of
(06:19):
people who get involved in canceling endeavors, and although there
are certainly cases of people who need to be canceled
I'll give you Harvey Weinstein as an egregious example, it's
also the case that in all these great struggles in
society to get things right, they will be over each
on both sides. But I do have to point something out,
which is that if you look at the sort of
(06:41):
extremes of workism and anti workism, on the kind of
extreme of workism, you get people who you know, talk
about pronouns or they go in for canceling of people
that they're really angry with. But on the other side
of the story, on the far right, what have you got.
You've got neo Nazis, white supremacist, misogynists, masculist influences, you know,
(07:03):
dreadful people. There's no symmetry here. It's not as though
there's a kind of moral equivalence that the anti workers
who are defending their interests and who don't like people
of color or women or gays or something. I mean,
they are vile, whereas you know, somebody says to you
call me them or they. It's hardly the same thing,
is it. But the point is to get beneath the
(07:24):
kind of rhetorical battle, because the rhetorical battle is very distracting.
The real issues are issues about human rights. They're the
issues about people just having a fair place in society
and be accepted no matter what their color or sexuality
or whatever. That's the really key issue.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
And I'm really recognizing the difference between discrimination and being offended.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Hey, well yeah, I mean, look, the factor of the
matter is that nobody has a right not to be offended.
We're all offended by something, okay, and we can be
mutually offended by something that a person does or say
will offend somebody else. That person might be offended that
the person is taking offense. So I'm afraid there are
(08:06):
going to be lots of things that one has to do.
There's hard work that has to be done to make
society a more inclusive and tolerant place, and one of
them is to recognize that being offended is a kind
of inevitability. You've got to suck it up, and you've
got to recognize that as best we can anyway not
to offend people.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Be polite.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
It's easy enough to be polite, but that you're not
going to be able to please everybody all the time.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
When it comes to cancel culture, do you think some
individuals or groups can be too quick to label people
as extremists or racists or homophobes and shut down those
conversations rather than having a debate or a discussion.
Speaker 2 (08:54):
Yes, I mean that there's always the potential for overreach,
there's no question. And when you consider the the frustration
that people feel that progress is not enough, progress is
being made, and it's quite interesting, you know, because if
you think about that whole story, which has been unfolding
since the nineteen sixties, a huge amount of progress has
(09:15):
been made by people of color and women and gays
and so on to get more accepted in society and
a better chance that journey is not yet over, that
the destination is still some way away. You can prove
it easily enough by just looking at the fact that
fifty six percent of university graduates in the US are women.
The proportion of women who are right in the top
levels of business and government and society in the US
(09:37):
is much much lower than fifty six percent. So something
is going on between the two, which is the systemic
sexism that still prevents real opportunities for equal treatment. But
even though a huge amount of progress has been made,
still to find doors barred against you, or find people
clumbniating you because you're saying we want our rights, or
(09:58):
you're an ally of people to see their rights, I
can make people angry, and so you get as a
result over each It happens on both sides. Again, I
iterate the point that the rhetorical battle, the noise, the smoke,
the things that people say and do which are very
distracting should not distract us. We should look down at
what's really an issue and see that this is just
(10:19):
you know, the kind of what we philosophers call the epiphenomenon,
which means that the kind of glow that's given off
by the situation, because there are really important, serious matters
that underlie the whole woke endeavor.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
And in speaking of human rights in your book, you
refer to the killing of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.
Tell me about that.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
But I use this as an example to kind of
surprise people. All right, now, some of it, I was, Well,
the thing is some have bin Laden is an extremely
unappealing candidate for being treated, you know, in accordance with
human rights ideas, because human rights says everybody has right
to a fair trial, everybody has a right to a
defense to be hurt. Everybody has a right when arrested
(11:05):
and charged with a crime, to be treated with a
degree of respect and deference, and not to be treated
to arbitrary punishment. Now, as have been lod was shot
dead and dropped into the Arabian Gulf, and for good
pragmatic reasons, because had he been arrested and taken to
Guantanamo Bay, he might have continued to be a focus
of attention on the part of supporters of his So
(11:27):
from a pragmatic, short term point of view, there was
a justification that could be offered by the US government.
But from a long term point of view, from the
point of view of trying to respect due process and
individual human rights, it would have served the world better
if the United States, which after all sets it's used
to set itself up before as a place of law
(11:49):
and civil liberties and human rights, would have been better
if they had respected those constraints. It's harder to do,
it's hard work to do that, it's disgusting to have
to do it with somebody like Osama bin Laden, But
in the end, it would have been better than to
engage in an extra judicial killing or to say that
he was an enemy compatent or something. So I use
(12:11):
that as an example to sort of joke people into
thinking that if you're going to take the idea of
human rights seriously, and they should be taking seriously, because
in the end, if the world is going to be
a better place and a fairer place, more inclusive place,
and every single one of us is going to have
a chance to make for ourselves lives worth living, good lives,
meaningful lives. We have to have our rights respected. That
(12:34):
means you misrespect other people's rights, and so the whole
idea of human rights is absolutely fundamental.
Speaker 4 (12:42):
Last week I determined that we had enough intelligence to
take action and authorized an operation to get Osama bin
Laden and bring him to justice. After a firefight, they
killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.
For over two decades, Laden has been al Qaeda's leader
and symbol, and it's continued to plot attacks against our
(13:04):
country and our friends and allies. The death have been
Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our
nation's effort to defeat al Qaeda. It death does not
mark the end of our effort.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
Do you think that if Osama bin Laden was taken
in alive and chucked in Guantanamo Bay that his views
could have been changed with debate, discussion, education.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Probably not. I mean, you know that there are going
to be people who are pretty hardline in their views
objection and are not going to be persuaded and suddenly
become a fuzzy liberal democrat types agreed, But just because
the Issama bin Laden's might not change doesn't mean that
there aren't possibilities for other people to change. After all,
it's evident if you think about, say the last couple
(13:53):
of hundred years, let's say, just think about human treatment
of animals, think about how people treated horses and dogs
and so on, that kind of treatment of animal is unacceptable. Now,
the shows that moral progress is possible, and it's possible
because we do a number of things. We argue, discuss, debate,
we set an example, We even introduce laws to protect
(14:14):
vulnerable creatures, and bit by bit we managed to shift society.
So even though there were always going to be people
who can't be shifted, we've got a hope that we
can shift other people. And the empirical evidence suggests that
we can shift people. So, you know, a lot of
people to go to prison and you don't like it
in prison or were brought to consider their what they
did in the harm they caused to other people. You know,
(14:36):
we can hope of them that they can reform and
do better later, and some do so. Anyway, what's the
alternative to being optimistic about these things?
Speaker 1 (14:45):
If examples of cancelations throughout history and whatever form or
anything to go by. And I'm talking about the ones
in your book as well. There seems to be a
huge amount of hypocrisy at play, you know, like someone
who's committed a adultery chastising someone who identifies as homosexual. Now,
do you have to be a perfect person and to
(15:07):
have committed quote unquote no sins to be able to
or allowed to cancel someone?
Speaker 2 (15:14):
Look outside the readership and listenership of the Herald here
in Auckland. There are no perfect people. Okay, So we're
all an alloy. We've all got faults and failings, and
the fact that we have, the fact that nobody is
squeaky clean cannot be allowed to be a barrier to
trying to make ourselves and other people better by argument
(15:36):
or by example, or by setting up a social conversation,
a public conversation about what's going to be acceptable and
right and try to shift things in the right direction. So, yes,
I'm in. You know, hypocrisy is a feature of human
nature to some extent. Of course, it makes human nature
kind of interesting. I mean, there'll be no movies and
books about love affairs and things like that, and has
(15:57):
that with the case, But it would be ad hominem
to say to somebody, you know, I if smoker said
to you, don't smoke, it's bad for your health, and
you say, oh, but you're a smoker. That's a classic
ad hominem argument, failing to recognize that what that person
has just said is right. So, you know, hypocrites can
sometimes amazingly tell the truth and say things that are right.
(16:19):
So we've just got to go for the best here.
We've got to try to look at what is persuasive
because it stands up, because a good case can be
made for it. That's the thing that should matter, not
individual people, but ideas, movements in society. The destination that
we're trying to reach, which is for a good, peaceful, constructive, cooperative,
(16:42):
happy society. I say at the end of the book
that if everybody respected everybody else's human rights, the world
would really be a very, very much better place. And
what we would achieve is convivencia. Now, this beautiful word
is a word that was used to describe the situation
in Spain during the medieval period when Christians and Jews
(17:04):
and Muslims all lived together, were got on together, corporated
work together, learned from one another, and of course the
historians over idealized it. I'm sure there were some frictions
and so no doubt, but that period of time is
known as the period of convivens here of being able
to live together in a mutually tolerant and accepting way,
(17:26):
and that should be our aim. And in fact, you know,
the woke endeavor is really an endeavor to get there
and endeavor to say, every one of us, no matter
what our skin color, what our sexuality, you know, how
we feel about ourselves, we should have our place. We
should have a fair place and be accepted by others.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
In June twenty twenty, JK. Rowlinging tweeted, and I'm sure
that you've heard a lot about JK rowling in your research.
She said, I respect every trans person's right to live
in any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them.
I'd march with you if you were discriminated against on
the basis of being trans. Now, five years later, it
(18:14):
feels like her entire online existence is about trans people,
none of it positive, by the way, and none of
it seeming to fit with that earlier sentiment. How has
someone like her gone down this path within the space
of five years, have we pushed her to go there
or those similar down there by making fun of them
or immediately labeling them as transphobic or something.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Yeah, it's a really interesting example of something in fact
of a deliberate phenomenon. Really, if you go back to
twenty fifteen, the Supreme Court in the United States gave
the final sign off on same sex marriage. Now, for
years and years before then, there was an organization, hugely
well funded organization called the American Principles Project the APP,
(18:59):
and they've been campaigning against same sex marriage. But when
they lost that when it got to the Supreme Court,
they pivoted in public it's in the public domain here.
They pivoted and said, so we're going to tackle another issue,
and this issue is trans trans women, mainly across trans men.
No problem to men, but trans women and women's spaces
(19:20):
and the fugitive invasion of women's spaces by people who
want to present as women but who may pre full
transition still be male in some respect. So they transitioned
to that. And this just shows you how a very
well funded and well focused campaign can really become the issue.
Think about this. The number of people who have gender
(19:42):
dysphoria in the world as a whole is less than
one percent. Climate change is a huge problem, but you
would think that the trans issue was equally a big
problem because of the fact that the right have focused
on it and dramatized it as a big issue. By
choosing the most vulnerable group of people and really focusing
(20:02):
on them, they've achieved two things. First, they can make
the whole woke endeavors. I mean, it's very difficult to
tackle sexism or gay rights or something, but if you
tackle trans and call it woke and the things that
pro trans people say, you can demonize the whole woke thing. Okay,
so that's part of the strategy there. But the other
thing is that that they've succeeded in turning feminists against
(20:26):
one another, pro trans and trans skeptical feminists. And this
is perfect if you can get your enemy to start
fighting among themselves, which is exactly what the right wing
wanted to happen, and you've seen it happen in the
feminist movement over the trans issue. And if you really
think about the trans issue, firstly, people who are unhappy
with the assigned sexual gender that they had it at birth.
(20:48):
You know, a lot of them really, I mean, it's
a really serious thing for them, and it's very difficult
for them to live in a way that feels really false,
and if they do adopt the gender expression that feels
more natural, it's pretty hard to be accepted in society.
The proof that they're serious is that they're prepared to
do the work of putting up with lack of acceptance
(21:09):
and you know, people scorning them and so on, so
you know, for them it's a really key issue. But
all the issue about women's spaces, women's toilets, women's prisons,
women's sports and so on, there are solutions. You know,
if only there was a calm, rational discussion about this,
it could be sorted out instead of lumping it all
into one thing, which is you know, biological males invading
(21:33):
women's toilets and so on. That there are ways of
sorting it out, which would you know, bring peace to
this whole issue. But it's used as a tool to
have a go at the whole cause by picking on
the most vulnerable group. And when you talk about JK. Rowling,
you see what happens. She was not against individual trans people,
(21:55):
but she was raising concerns about women's spaces, which some
feminists feel very strongly about. You know, there are very
sincere views and boothsades here. But if you can get
people quarreling with one another, and it gets more and
more and more as Herbic people get driven into a
more and more polarized position, and then they're all start
hating one another and they forget that actually they are
victims of an attempt to discredit everything to do with
(22:18):
wuke and to attack this very vulnerable group.
Speaker 5 (22:23):
What all of these principles have in common is that
they afford Mardi different rights from other New Zealanders, seeing
the treaty is a quote partnership between races, as the
Court of Appeal once said, does not work as a
constitutional foundation for our country. The lawyers will defend their
logic to the helps, but there is one question they
(22:44):
cannot answer. Where in the world is it a good
idea to give citizens different rights based on ancestry. Where
in the world has that approach been a success?
Speaker 1 (23:00):
And the Coalition government at the moment has disestablished something
called the Maori Health Authority, which was focused on bettering
health outcomes for Maori. Given those outcomes are different from
paquiha or white people. There's also a controversial bill, the
Treaty Principles Bill, that essentially sought to make it so
there were equal rights for all New Zealanders. So this
(23:24):
line stuck out to me from your book, and I
thought of this, this line. To treat people equally is
not always to treat them fairly. Can you tak me
through an example of.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
This, right, Well, if you had an Olympic athlete who
needed five thousand calories a day and you had a
little old lady who needed fifteen hundred calories a day,
and you forced them to eat the same number of
calories let's say three thousand calories a day each, you're
unfair to both. You're treating them equally, but you're unfair
to both. Equity or fairness is the goal, not just
(23:58):
crude equality. However, equality matters when it comes to what
are sometimes called equality of concern. So people should be
treated equally before the law, they should be treated equally
by government provision, welfare provision. They should have an equal
opportunity to gain access to what gives you a chance
(24:20):
in life, which is health and education. So their equality
matters in many other respects. It can be unfair because
that's where equity matters, where fairness matters. And so again
it's a question of thinking a bit about it, you know,
just a question of going below the surface and just
trying to work things out in a discriminating way. Where
(24:40):
we mean by discriminating this time something positive, discriminating, separating
things out, seeing things clearly, defining things properly, and then
you see how these things work.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
If the work to understand though different points of view
cannot be one sided, then how can you make the
side that benefits from injustice and discrimination actually do the
work right.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
Well, you've got to keep hammering away at them on
a number of different fronts. So of course the best
way because you know, one of the things which is
an issue in the current wars is so called the
freedom of expression issue.
Speaker 1 (25:14):
All right.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Of course, people forget that freedom of expression used only
to be the possession of the right because they own
the means of expression and other people didn't even have
a voice. Now, people on the work side of the
argument need freedom of expression to make their case and
to put their point. Freedom of expression is incredibly precious.
You can't have law without you can't have accusation and defense.
(25:37):
You can't have political process putting forward public policy proposals
and criticizing them kind of education worth the name. If
you can't discuss ideas, can't have creativity. Freedom of expression
is absolutely fundamental, but it is not unqualified. There are
occasions famous one of course, is shouting fire and a
crowded theater. You know, there are occasions when the use
(25:58):
of your right to free expression can be irresponsible. So
the big question is what counts as responsible use of
free expression, and that is something that can only be
decided on a case by case basis. That ifether there's
going to be a qualification on freedom of expression, like
in time of war, you want to limit what newspapers
can report so the enemy don't get information. That's a
(26:19):
justified limitation on free expression. But it has to be
case by case. It has to be term limited, it
can't be forever. And that the remedies against abuse of
free expression can't be prior constraint or censorship. There must
be post factor remedies. I mean, you have to see
how important freedom of expression is and then think of
ways of managing abuses of it. And I always say,
(26:42):
I say to my students, for example, the way to
deal with bad expression like hate speech and racist speech
and sexist speech and so on. The way to deal
with it is not by canceling or not by censoring,
not by no platforming, but by better free expression, by
having good arguments, and by standing up and challenge. So
the answer to your question is that the response that
(27:02):
we must give must be organized endeavor to try to
say and do things which are better than the bad
things that are said and done by the people we oppose.
Thank you for joining us, Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You
can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage
at enzdherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is
produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is also
our sound engineer. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to the Front
Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and
(27:42):
tune in on Monday for another look behind the headlines.
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