A.C. Grayling on culture wars and the age-old cycle of ‘cancellation’

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 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 to start by getting your definition of two terms, wokeness and canceled right.

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 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 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 woke as a kind of term of abuse.

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 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 people to that fair pace.

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 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 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 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,

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 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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 means you misrespect other people's rights, and so the whole idea of human rights is absolutely fundamental.

nation's effort to defeat al Qaeda. It death does not mark the end of our effort.

there aren't possibilities for other people to change. After all, it's evident if you think about, say the last couple 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 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, 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?

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 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. 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, 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 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, 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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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

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, 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 wuke and to attack this very vulnerable group.

idea to give citizens different rights based on ancestry. Where in the world has that approach been a success?

not always to treat them fairly. Can you tak me through an example of.

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 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 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.

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 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 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, 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 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.