Latest / Thinking Class / #025 - Eric Kaufmann - The Taboos That Produced A Woke Cultural Revolution

Transcript

#025 - Eric Kaufmann - The Taboos That Produced A Woke Cultural Revolution · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome back to the show.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Eric Kaufman.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Eric is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: He is the author of White Shift, Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth, Taboo, How Making Race Sake Could Produced a Cultural Revolution, and numerous academic books and papers.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: He is an editor of the journal Nations and Nationalism and has written for the New York Times, The Times of London, Financial Times, Newsweek International, Foreign Policy, and Prospect Magazines.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, Eric and I talk about why the spread of woke ideas contributed to him leaving his long-held post at Birkbeck College, University of London, for the University of Buckingham, how we can define woke in academic terms, whether universities can be reformed, how public and private leaders have become more culturally aligned to the left over the years, the natures of cultural conservatism, cultural liberalism, and cultural socialism, and why cultural socialism doesn't lead to human flourishing, whether diversity, equity, and inclusion can be reformed, how we came to be governed by the anti-racism taboo, whether there is a link between woke and mental health, and the impact of cultural leftism on the ability to have public discussions about salient political topics like immigration.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: As you can hear, we cover loads of ground on this episode, and Eric clearly shows the benefits of taking a focused analysis to popular ideologies that have spread.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: I have nothing but admiration for Eric for standing up to the mob over the years and for forging a respectful path for the rest of us to follow in being able to talk about the issues of the day without being governed solely by raw emotion.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Before we dive in, you'd be really helping me out if you click subscribe on whatever platform you are listening to or watching the show on.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: The more subscribers we have, the more guests we can attract, and the faster Thinking Class grows.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Great to be here.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Eric, I suspect people tuning in will know who you are because most people don't know who I am, so that means they've searched for you on the internet and they found you and gone, brilliant, there's some Eric.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Let's let's let's see what he's who he's up to these days.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: But for the few that aren't so familiar with you, uh I'll I'll start with you forged a very successful career, I would say, uh the University of Birkbeck.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is where you made your public profile initially through lots of papers, looking at interesting things like demographics, religious inheriting the earth, and then you you finished off, I suppose, or one of the final things you ended up doing at Birkbeck was, or independently of it, was producing a book called White Shift, which shot you to, I would say, public prominence, and it's certainly where I learned of you, and it was a a really interesting book.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: And and then you ended up moving, and you ended up at the University of Buckingham.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: So how did you and why did you end up moving from an organization where you had effectively created your career, your public profile, to the University of Buckingham?
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: What happened there?
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, well, so first of all, to say that I was at Berkbeck for 20 years.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you know, I think we were just talking before the show that, you know, I'd always leaned kind of culturally to the rights, not on every issue, but on certain issues.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I'd always kept that to myself, and it became a habit.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: I just never even thought about it because academia is is uh is a very left-wing, really culturally, culturally very left-wing place uh in the social sciences and humanities, especially where I was.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um But you know, I had been a full professor since 2011 at Birkbeck, and by the time we get to like 2017, 2018, you know, you've got the the rise of populism.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: I was feeling a lot more secure in a way, and I just sort of decided, well, you know what, we're just gonna sort of nail our colors to the mast a little bit.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: Not not in any unprofessional way.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um now, what I'd say is that the book White Shift itself really isn't what landed me in any hot water because a lot of social justice activists, I mean, almost all of them never read, uh, and certainly not a book.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um they'll read a tweet, but not a book.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: So um, what what happens in this case is that I had become more active on social media, on Twitter, since about 2016.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it was really around 2018 that the first offense archaeologists were sort of trying to rummage back and find any.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't really find anything, but they were trying to spin, spin up tweets that they thought were offside.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Basically anything critical of uh the social justice movement, be that Black Lives Matter or LGBTQ.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, um Justin Trudeau, I'm Canadian Trudeau, who you know made this speech and he couldn't pronounce LGT LGBTQ.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: I can't pronounce it now.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um but uh so yeah, he tried about three or four times and he couldn't get through it.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that that was kind of a joke.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so we you know, I retweeted that video and just you know, making fun of him.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: And all of these things kind of were accumulated into the first of several Twitter mobbings and uh internal investigations that were prompted by complaints generally by radical students or staff members.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that's kind of like the beginning of the troubles that I was having.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: I had one open letter.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: I went along to a debate in 2018 that Matt Goodwin was hosting with David Aronovich and Trevor Phillips, and it initially was entitled Is Ethnic Diversity a Threat to the West?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: Question mark, you know.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Is somebody like Trevor Phillips and David Aronovich going to be saying yes to that?
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: Probably not.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: And none of us really were, but that was enough to sort of, you know, they were forced to change the title of that.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: I was kind of a very woke staff member, was kind of giving me the gears for going and participating in this.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: But that kind of gives you a sense of the kinds of things that were landing me in hot water.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: Now, none of that meant that they were gonna fire me necessarily, but they certainly would put you through the kangaroo court and make you think that some terrible punishment, and they certainly wouldn't say we're never gonna fire you.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: So it's sort of left hanging in the air, and these things usually come to some kind of conclusion where, well, you know, you've done wrong and you've broken these policies and you you've been found guilty, but you know, and but and so it's never made clear because they know legally there's just really no easy way for them to get rid of you.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: But but that's the kind of, you know, just being under that, receiving that email, being under the sort of hammer like that really gets your mind racing, and they know that that that puts the pressure on, and so you'll next time you'll shut up.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um of course I didn't shut up, but most people would.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's kind of an example of one of the pressures.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't the, you know, it was it was a pressure, and then University of Buckingham, which is the only one out of 181 UK higher education institutions that strictly prioritizes academic freedom over social justice, you know, overtly.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um the VC James Tully is, you know, he's a champion of free speech, and and that's exceedingly rare in Britain.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: And there are a few conservative academics there.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: Still a majority, I would say, lean to the left, but you have more viewpoint diversity.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so I had been just you know interested in in Buckingham talking to them over a number of years, and and then I decided to leave at Birkbeck and I thought, yeah, we'll go to Buckingham and we'll set up um something new.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I wanted to try and set up something.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so for example, I teach a course on woke that is open online.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I wanted to set up a research center where we could look into all those problems that had been neglected, or where only one viewpoint was allowed in the social sciences.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's that became uh this new Center for Heterox Social Science, which um I launched in February.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, we had Neil Ferguson give a keynote speech along with Matt Goodwin, trying to sort of just say, well, we want to try and do an alternative countercultural social science and go against the grain in a way.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because in media you have a lot of people going against the grain in the new media.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's much harder in academia because there's so many startup costs and it's very hard to start new institutions.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: But I thought Buckingham is a place maybe we can do it, or at least we can maybe get enough of a beachhead that we can start uh, you know, introducing new kinds of knowledge production that go against the um orthodoxy.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's remarkable that it feels very like that Robert Conquest, you know, the three that I can't remember what is the three laws of Conquest Three Laws it's called, and and the third one is any organization that is not set up as being explicitly right wing will just become left-wing over time.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what you're setting up isn't necessarily a right-wing organization, but I wonder if there's a cut across there.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh anything that is not set up explicitly to um promote a kind of academic freedom, a freedom of thought, a freedom of expression, articulation will slide down the authoritarian route.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think there's anything in that considering that's one university out of 181?
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think there is.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, I was I know uh John O'Sullivan, um, who who's uh now based in Budapest, but he's a wrote for National Review and other places.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: And he I think this is O'Sullivan's law that conquest is borrowed from.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I just wanted to sort of put that in there.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah, I think there's a lot to that.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um and this leftward drift in institutions is something you can see very clearly in uh public opinion data in the US, for example.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um why is that the case?
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think one of the reasons is that the drift of modern culture is towards the cultural left.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that's been going on for decades and it's just been accelerating in many ways.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and and part of the reason is also because of cultural realignment.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: So politics is now left now means cultural left, whereas maybe in 1950 it meant economic left.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um so part of this is that cultural left is a good fit with a lot of where um avant-garde intellectuals and professionals are.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um and yeah, I also think the other part of this is that after 1965 in America and after, you know, slightly later in Britain, you have this anti-racism taboo, which then is, in my view, the fulcrum.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of the sun or North Star around which our entire moral order revolves.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a point I make in my new book, uh, Taboo, which is that once you had that new race taboo come in in the mid-60s, everything changed and people wrote about it.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Paul Krugman did a piece in the New York Times remembering the one summer where all of a sudden it became forbidden to, you know, have a black coachman on your gate, which probably I think we might agree is not a great idea, but there was this suddenness of this introduction.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, it was reasonable to have a norm against racism, um, but very quickly that doesn't have a bound, so it sort of moves out and expands.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: So 1965, you suddenly had this um report on the black family by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan saying, well, you know, we've got a fatherlessness rate of 25%, which sounds very low nowadays.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: The white rate has exceeded that, certainly.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: But at the time it was seen, oh well, this could be a problem.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: That was a report that was shelved because it was seen as upsetting the black community.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: That was the first time that kind of thing had happened.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: It was the beginning of where we are now.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I think I put a lot of emphasis on that critical juncture of the rise of the anti-racism taboo.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's a bit of sacredness.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: Once that sacredness is there around race, you can stretch it around, you can borrow it if you are a feminist movement, if you are gay, trans, etc., you can borrow that magic and suddenly you can shut down debates in a whole bunch of different areas.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, I put a lot of emphasis on that as a key development.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: And that's one of the reasons why I also don't think that what we're living through is so dramatically new.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's just that the scale has expanded.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder where we go from here in the university world, because it's quite adrift from the reasons why they were set up.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: So a thousand years ago, set up separate two, but by the church.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And whilst people could say, well, it doesn't need to go back to that, where it's overseen by the established churches, what does it all mean?
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, university Latin is I'm a bit rusty on Latin, but it's something like something like it means a whole, it's like the body.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the idea is that you're all geared toward one truth through multiple disciplines.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the people who used to go to a university, you weren't even allowed to study something like theology, seen as the queen of the sciences, until you'd done all of the underpinning subjects.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: So you had to have this really wide ranging view, but it had this idea that there was a truth there, but there were many different ways to it, and you weren't just prepared for it straight away.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: You had to be trained.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: And now we seem to be in an era where truth doesn't even exist.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: Truth's all relative.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: So how do you pick up those pieces again?
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: And and um what does that what does a a reform um uh a kind of renaissance of the university system look like?
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um boy, that's a really that's a good question.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I guess the first thing I'd stress, and I think Neil Ferguson has mentioned this, is through most of the university's existence, and they started up in the Renaissance.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if we take the modern university, I think in Bologna was the first, and then Oxford and Cambridge.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: For most of their history there was orthodoxy, and they were they were partly about passing on a tradition rather than free inquiry.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it is worth noting that, you know, there has long been some orthodoxy or other at university.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh now there was a kind of golden age, maybe in the 20th century, up until we hit uh the 19, oh, I don't know, let's say let's say speech codes come in in the late 1980s, that there was a heyday where we had the freedom of expression, and truth was number one, and it was really dynamic and exciting.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so, but I think that those days are over, and I think truth is no longer the telos or the driving force of universities, because so so-called social justice is is now number one.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what what do what are we talking about?
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's important to define terms.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: So the term woke, I think, actually has a scientifically valid meaning.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I define woke in one sentence as the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual minorities.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that is what woke is, and it's a fixation on historically marginalized race, gender, sexual minorities, out of which kind of comes a set of moral intuitions, somewhat loose but broad moral intuitions, which is that we want equal outcomes by race, gender, and sexuality, and we we want to make sure that we have emotional harm protection.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot offend even the most hypothetically sensitive member of one of these groups.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so if you say, you know, um anyone can make it in Britain, uh, that could be interpreted as being insensitive to members of historically disadvantaged groups.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: Stretching again, or if you say uh Latino instead of Latinx, maybe that's kind of anti-feminist.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: Just giving you examples of how this works.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: So you have this ideology which is kind of crystallized, and we can talk about if you want, the intellectual lineage really comes together in the late 60s, actually.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was already pretty much in place in the late 60s.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's just that it hadn't scaled in the way that it has now, and it certainly hadn't left the campus in as strong a way as it has now.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: It had actually left the campus in a few spots, and maybe the Greater London Council in the mid-80s was an example.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: Radical school boards, Toronto, New York, San Francisco, it was already there, but uh it didn't have that kind of ubiquitous penetration that it's achieved.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: So we have this ideology which is number one about equal outcomes and emotional horror protection.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: If you pursue truths that uh violate any one of those tenets, any one of those two tenets, then the truth has to be suppressed.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it could be something like um, oh, you know, maybe differences in crime, differences in achievement between racial groups isn't just a matter of discrimination.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe there are cultural factors to do with attitudes towards maybe saving and book learning and other things, which are quite important.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: Now, they can change over time, but maybe we ought to look at those.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that may be true and actually may have very strong evidence in favor of it, but it violates this idea of not offending a totemic minority group.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: And for that reason, that truth has to be suppressed.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then we can go to other areas.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we can talk about gender-affirming care, so-called uh puberty blockers, always, you know, you know, we must affirm that they are a successful uh way to improve people's well-being.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, but the data isn't there.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um are you sure you want to go ahead with this?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh well, you know, because to actually say no to that would be uh transphobic, and therefore we we can't upset one of these totemic groups, and therefore that truth has to be suppressed.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: So you see where this is going is the truth has to go under the bus whenever it collides with the sensibilities of one of the sacred groups in this belief system.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: And and I kind of want to focus on that holy trinity of race, gender, sexuality.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I think it's really driven by sort of empathy and attachment and um a kind of fixation on those particular sacred entities.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's not so much a principle, a set of principles like classical liberalism or even classical Marxism.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: This is really a very emotional, emotion-led.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's driven by myths, symbols, narratives, uh, emotional attachments.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: So picking up on your offer to get into that intellectual lineage, how did we get to a point where the cultural left became ultimately the dominant um strain of thought?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that at least so many um people who were on on paper, they're high achievers, that's the reason why they're getting into university, etc.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, how is it that they've ended up particularly taken with this ideology?
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, that's really yeah, they're two kind of separate questions, I suppose.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, one is the intellectual lineage.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: And you can see strands of three long-held uh ideas.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, one is egalitarianism, this idea of pursuing equality, however, we want to define that.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now, of course, there's equal treatment and equal outcome, but in this haze called egalitarianism, people who are in favor of that often don't make that distinction, even though it's a very important distinction.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got egalitarianism, which goes back, you know, well, back to the French Revolution, back even further, ultimately, perhaps to strands of Christianity.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you have humanitarianism, again, with that sort of Christian and Enlightenment lineage.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so humanitarianism, you know, being nice and kind to the weak.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, if you actually push that logic further and further and further, oh, well, we don't want to speak a truth that might be unkind to the emotional sensibilities of a group that we're designating as a weak group.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: You see where this is going.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: So there are sort of some long strands to this ideology, but I think the key juncture is really the mid-1960s when you have the this new anti-racism taboo suddenly emerging in the US.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: And the cultural power of that, as Shelby Steele in his book White Guild talks about that, that you had this dramatic shift in cultural power from where blacks had to defer to whites to where whites had to defer to blacks because they'd admitted some sin, and they wanted to be the good whites, so they have to virtue signal by adopting the right policies, in Bruce's words.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then, and that is what drives the system, is this idea that to sort of burnish your bona fide as a as one of the good, not one of the fallen whites, and therefore retain your cultural power and moral authority as an institution or as an individual.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that really is the key to this.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: And what the left does is it really wants to lean into and borrow that cultural power, that kryptonite that surrounds race.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then and other groups, feminists and gain lesbian and trans, also want to borrow some of that cultural power as well of that.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that is sort of the identity politics paradigm, which comes into place in the late 60s, at least intellectually now.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: However, okay, so you know, Chris Rufo and Fukuyama and Yasha Munk and all these people are talking about these intellectual innovations like you know, critical legal studies, the ancestor of critical race theory, um, Black Panther ideology, which is saying, oh, you know, the American Constitution is a smokestream for slavery and racism.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: All these sorts of ideas are there in the late 60s, ferment radical feminism is also talking about patriarchy.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um you can Focus on those ideas, but I actually, and those are very important.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: But I place a lot more emphasis in my book anyway on the liberals.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: And when I say the liberals, I don't mean classical liberals, but I do mean modern liberals and the big swath of liberalism as we enter the 20th, particularly later in the 20th, but even to some degree earlier in the 20th century, there's a lot of egalitarianism that gets imported into mainstream liberalism.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: So what we call modern liberalism is not the same as 19th century John Stuart Mill or Jeremy Bentham, John Locke-style liberalism.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's much less about freedom and it's much more about equality and it's oriented against majorities in society.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: So this new liberalism is really, I think, the main reason that woke is so successful.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: Because you don't, it's not just enough to say, oh, well, you had uh Eldridge Cleaver and Angela Davis and the Weather Underground being, you know, these people being hired into prestigious universities.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the question is why were they hired by universities dominated by liberals, you know, who leaned left, but they were not Marxist and they didn't believe in Marxism?
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: What is it that was so appealing about these radicals?
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and I uh you can ask another question, why did 51% of Seattle voters vote to defund the police initially?
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, these are not Marxists.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: Why did Lyndon Johnson support affirmative action which came to mean quotas?
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, again, this is somebody who's a tough anti-communist.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and so it is that liberal group, that sort of group that I would say have a number of features.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: So they're not about a revolution, they're not about overthrowing society, um, and oh, we failed on class, so now we're gonna move to race.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's not what these people are about.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: What they are about instead is guilt, right?
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: That post-65 white guilt, uh the anti-racism taboo, they want to stay, you know, they don't want to, they want to be on the right side of that.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and compassion towards this newly sacred group.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: So that guilt and compassion bleeding heart liberal complex, I think is really important.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um and what that means is that any new innovation like uh quotas, like speech codes, and later on talk about systemic race, some of the critical race theory stuff, white privilege, systemic racism, all of that stuff finds a very strong resonance amongst these left liberals who are, you know, they have their own innovations.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: Political correctness comes out of left liberalism, affirmative action comes out of left liberalism.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: And the new innovations from the cultural Marxists around critical race theory, radical gender ideology, actually mesh pretty well with a pre-existing sensibility.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_01: Not entirely.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, some of the left liberals don't like people being fired for speech, for example.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_01: So they have a few boundaries to some degree.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: But it's a nice marriage.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I just think that sort of left liberal part of the equation has really been neglected, even though that left liberal group, like in a university, that's 50 to 60 percent, whereas the hardcore, hardcore cultural left might be 20%.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's more important to explain the 50 to 60 than the 20.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, if you want to explain why, as you say, the conquest law, why do these institutions drift, I think it's because of that core left liberal group.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: And that left liberal group is actually much more influential in the mass culture, in the youth culture as well.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: What they say kind of goes in the mainstream media, for example.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so I think they have kind of they have pushed the culture in the direction of radical egalitarianism and uh radical hypersensitivity around offense uh incrementally, step by step, by step by step, in a ratcheting way.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: Not this sudden march through the institutions revolution.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I know I don't buy that argument from as much from Rufo and Lindsay.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's there's something to it, but I don't think it's the main story.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: You've you've uh effectively defined cultural socialism through a whole bunch of different um case studies there.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh what's the what's the counterweight?
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_00: You you've spoken about there being these two different strands which organizations can can choose to promote cultural socialism, and we've gone through a bunch of examples now, and cultural liberalism.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh how one, what is that?
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: And two, why should people want it?
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, cultural okay, so cultural socialism is just in a way the moral intuitions that arise out of woke.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: So woke is about sacrilizing these groups.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: Cultural socialism is um you know, equal outcomes, so no gap, no race, no gender gaps, so equal outcomes and emotional harm protection through speech codes.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: So the equal outcomes is equity and diversity, the speech codes is inclusion.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: So EDI is really the policy that emerges out of this philosophy, and that is opposed to you know what I would call human flourishing.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: Now I've called, I've talked about two strands to this human flourishing ideology, which I'd say is, or cultural wealth ideology, which is different from cultural socialism.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_01: Very similar to if the way we think about economic socialism as something that makes an economy stagnate.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: So you have a command and control or even a very high-tax economy will be, will have very low rates of economic growth, but will be more equal.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you have so economic socialism versus you know economic freedom or economic wealth.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: Similarly, I think if you go cultural socialism, then you also strangle the cultural wealth production of a society.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and and you can just see that very clearly if an author wants to write from the perspective of a young black man and they're white, if they want to play a black person in a stage production, you know, that you can clearly see where that's out of bounds.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: So that's gonna restrict the creativity of a society.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh all kinds of forms of expression are frowned upon, uh, and and people have to sort of mind their Ps and Q's more.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: You're not gonna have as much cultural uh creativity in society.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: So there's this kind of uh social, you know, equity and wealth trade-off in the culture as there is in the economy.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and there's two strands to that human flourishing or cultural wealth perspective.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, one is uh this cultural liberalism, which is um freedom of speech, scientific truth, you know, objective truth, due process, equal treatment.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's the Enlightenment classical liberalism that's uh in trouble uh because it goes against a number of things.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: It goes against this idea of equal outcomes and it goes against the idea of not um offending any one of the totemic groups if you speak a truth that they don't want to hear, or or that the most sensitive member amongst them doesn't want to hear.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then in the other side you have cultural conservatism, which is the other part of the equation of who's against cultural socialism.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: And they these are people who want who are attached to their nation, uh, you know, if they're a member of the ethnic majority, if they are a man or a woman, uh, you know, and they are into the that that traditional gender binary, uh, if they uh want to keep Spanish, you know, having different genders, uh, you know, all of these sorts of attachments to existing traditions and identities.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's sort of your conservatism.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: So if someone wants to rewrite books and knock down statues, you know, that's going to offend, or that's gonna run up against those who for whom these are very important attachments and traditions.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um so you've kind of got these two things, this cultural liberalism and cultural conservatism, which I put under this umbrella of uh, you know, this human flourishing cultural wealth perspective colliding with cultural socialism.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where we're seeing increasing political divisions starting to build on top of this.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: Dear classmate John here.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't an advert, so you don't need to reach for the skip button.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: If you're enjoying the show, then show your support by liking, subscribing, and sharing on whichever device or platform you are watching or listening to Thinking Class on.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: You can find me in the show on YouTube at Thinking Class.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: You can also subscribe to me on Substack, searching for the at Thinking Class handle, or by entering thinkingclass.substack.com in your browser, and you can receive reflections, blog series, and recommended reading to your inbox.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: You can also follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening, thanks for sharing, thanks for showing your support.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: The political division seemed to be happening within those who've typically been on the side of cultural socialism.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: So looking at Subsakistan, of which I am I am I am part of, um uh I I've noticed a few um proponents of DEI writing articles um following what we've seen at the Ivor League universities, Claudine Gay and the testimony in front of Congress, and people going, hmm, maybe DEI um has this um ideological baggage which is having these um negative effects on people.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so they're basically asking the question DEI ought to be reformed, or should they say, they're proposing that DEI needs to be reformed because it's it's picked up some some bad traits.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um I suppose listening to you is actually DEI is is founded on priors that are contrary to things like cultural liberalism.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I guess my question to you, Eric, is can DEI be reformed?
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because Roger Scruton, someone who did a similar, a similar tracking as you, University of Birkbeck to University of Buckingham, he he wrote, I can't remember in which book he said, um, the thing is ideological spasms, they always happen and they affect everything.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: And they but they always recede.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, they leave bureaucratic slime behind them.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, um that's the the paraphrasing.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: You know, can DEI be reformed?
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: What does it look like?
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: Or is it the Christopher Ruffo, you know, the only way that you could ever possibly get rid of these things is by getting rid of them?
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: Boy.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I mean, in theory, you know, it's a bit like a mixed capitalist economy.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: You can have a bit of redistribution, a bit of egalitarianism there.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: And and that may even be a good thing if you're spreading, you know, decent education to people who can't afford it.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: That may be good even for wealth creation.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I I wouldn't say no to any egalitarianism.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: However, the problem is how do you restrain this thing when the entire moral order of our society revolves around these taboos, which are unbounded.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: And part of the problem is modern liberalism, it has bounds on economics, so it's not, you know, it's suspicious of communism.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's not going to go full communist.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: It recognizes that communism is a problem and you need property rights and so on.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: On the cultural side, it doesn't recognize any real limits to egalitarianism and hypersensitivity, um, sort of, and because of the lack of any bounds on modern liberalism, um, I think DEI is always going to be a problem.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: Now, in theory, we could have countervailing, a countervailing force.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: So if somebody said, oh, in order to be inclusive, um, we have to have these speech codes, and somebody else was able to say, well, in our society, actually, freedom of speech and academic freedom is a higher value than sensitivity.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that made it that is made clear in law and in bureaucratic guidance, then actually, okay, you can you can do your DEI as long as it is totally respecting freedom of speech.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_01: So if you think there's some demographic that isn't being reached properly, you can try to broaden the pipeline.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's great, no problem.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: Or you can have interviews that are blind or CVs that are blind, no problem.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's a way of trying to expand the pool, maybe get a bit more representation from underrepresented groups.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: Now, what I would say is, you know, the kind of groups that the DEI bureaucrats and the ideologues are interested in.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: Again, are the woke the sac the sacred woke groups race, gender, sexuality.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: There's no interest, for example, oh, in in underrepresented, let's say, white working class, underrepresented conservatives, that would be of no interest.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_01: So there is not actually a genuine interest in diversity and equity in a way.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: There's an interest in the politicized categories that matter to progressives.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: But what I would say is that if you had sufficient counterweights, then you could in theory have uh a DEI regime that was content neutral between left and right, between various different groups, and in theory did not infringe upon truth seeking and um academic freedom.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_01: But that's very hypothetical and theoretical.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I kind of one of the ideas I've had is to have something that I would call equivalent action, which is you know, anything you're gonna do on race and gender, you have to match on politics and ideology.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: So if you want to monitor people's race, you can monitor their voting and their ideology.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to try and get better representation for race or gender, you can do exactly the same for politics.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_01: So you'd have, oh, there aren't enough conservatives in academia.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we're gonna have to rebalance that.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd say fine.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that means that you're actually taking seriously a range of different characteristics, not just your favored sacrilised characteristics.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: Now, do I think that's ever going to happen in a million years?
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh universities, if you just look at the affirmative action decision in the US, they will do anything in their power to evade anything in their power to maintain their focus on the sacred totems.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and so therefore, I have to reluctantly say that at this point, um, probably uh abolishing DEI is probably the only practical solution for actually getting back to those kind of classical liberal values and getting away from where we've been.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_01: Without ruling out the possibility that we can go to this equivalent action scenario, where I mean the way I would put it is, you know, if you don't want to do DEI for conservatives in your university, then you don't have to, but then you can't do the race and gender stuff.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: So you do whatever you want, and I would leave it up to them.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I think they'll dial it back to zero if that's the choice they're given.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_00: We mentioned the the congressional hearings with the the Ivy League presidents and CEOs um in the wake of October 7th uh earlier, and brief recap of that is ultimately most of them ended up falling on their swords in some way or another.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the press of all sides jumped on them for what they saw as inadequate responses to how they were dealing with rising incidents of anti-Semitism and um uh physical threats being made to um Jewish students on on campus.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it had lots of people in the commentary asking the question, is this is this the beginning of the end?
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's shown an ugly face.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: And people have have said, well, perhaps we've reached an inflection point now, um, and it's and it's on its way out.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think?
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think cultural socialism is uh and and DEI and all of that worldview is is here to stay?
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: Do you expect there to be a rollback?
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um I don't expect much of a rollback, actually.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I I would say the the peak woke hypothesis, yes, it's true.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: We have reached peak woke, and I think we've drifted down on a number of different indicators.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has a sort of uh index of professors that are targeted for firing, and it has an index of no platforming.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the no-platforming stuff is back up high and around this question of Israel-Palestine, but I think the firing numbers have gone down, and I think in terms of the media, media's fixation on things like white privilege and white supremacy has also gone down.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: We'll see what happens once Trump is running and looks likely to get the presidency again.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: But at least for now, there seems to have been a peak of just, you know, the sort of racial reckoning, George Floyd period.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: 2020, 21 was kind of the peak, it then came down.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: 2022, 2023.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_01: Now, where it's gonna go next, I don't know.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: But what I would say is this um you might have older, senior uh New York Times liberals uh who still have power over the New York Times moderating and saying, actually, you know what, we need to be have an editorial against cancel culture.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: We need to sort of uh allow people to express uh support for the cast review and and criticism of EDI and gender ideology.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: So they I would say those sort of senior established left liberals have rowed back a little bit.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, cut back on DEI and the major corporations.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: All of that's true and it's happened, but and there's a big butt.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: The reason that I am not optimistic is there's a huge age skew in all this data, that the Zoomers and millennials are twice as intolerant, especially if we take left-wing Zoomers and millennials and we compare them to left-wing boomers, they're twice as intolerant on speech.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a trend which you can track back in the day.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not because of age.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: So an 18-year-old in 2000 was just a lot more pro-free speech than an 18-year-old in 2016.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's not about their age.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: And what I think is gonna happen is as they become the median voter, the median CEO, they are gonna change our culture in a very dramatic way.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: So, yes, there is a small victory that has been won, and there's criticism from Fareza Karai of CNN, you know, about DEI.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: There's all this stuff that's occurring at the elite level in the mainstream institutions, but but that's the top layer of senior people.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the young staffers and their beliefs that I'm really worried about.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, the big question then is will will it filter down?
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_00: Will those people even look to those senior elites as uh worthwhile role models?
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_00: Will they change their views?
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I I don't know what to take from all this, Eric, other than uh hope I'm retired by the time they they're running any institutions that I'm in, because I I'm not too sure things are are looking too favorable for me at the moment.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe maybe we all just need to find a little readout like you have over at the University of Buckingham.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I uh earlier in my life, I mean, I I've taken the typical arc, I suppose, with regards to my outlook on the world.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh people often talk about how you start off a lot more left-wing and you become a bit more conservative the older that you you grow.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I certainly remember earlier in my life, I was prone to the kind of cultural socialist thinking, which I think was probably um just starting to come of age.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I remember uh feeling at that point I was quite defeatist.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: There were various things going on in my life.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'd I'd left school under a cloud, um, no, no A levels.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: I felt a little bit resentful of the world um and and the people in it, I suppose.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: And and I distinctly remember having a conversation with a colleague in a warehouse in the Arndale Center in Manchester, where I was working in this retail uh company, and I was just so angry at everything at that point, and I remember saying we needed a revolution.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Yeah, I agree.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but really what it was is I I I kind of hated the station that I had in in life.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I felt like I was doing not that interesting things.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: I made a bunch of bad decisions and was repeating those.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um and also there was a whole bunch of other things that I felt like I had no community, you know, I wasn't really um formed by any strong cultural norms myself.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I and I suppose many people brought up by um boomers who've cut themselves away from the traditional things in the past, um, you know, a more rebellious spirit was there.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so I kind of had all these things going on, and it persisted for a few years until um mid-20s.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: I kind of put myself up by my bootstraps.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: I realized that having made a couple of missteps, that there's no one coming to save me.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was I just had to start making right decisions and focusing on the right stuff.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember um jumping into a degree at the open university, and on the opening module, there was some stuff about philosophy, and it introduced me to virtue ethics, and it was at that point that it brought me onto this idea of habituating good virtues ultimately, actual virtues, understanding what vices were and where you could go wrong.
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: And this routine, this sense of responsibility, this sense of trying to habituate some kind of excellence, it saw me get some positive feedback.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_00: I realized, oh, things are changing in my life.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it was once I took control of my life that I guess I realized that oh yeah, we're just naturally quite fallen creatures.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: We we we there are there are just so many ways that we can go wrong, but really it's only you that can bring yourself back up.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, I guess why did I go through all that to get to this question is I think in modern parlance you could say in those earlier years, I was probably prone to not great mental health.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I know you've done a uh and I know you've done a a a report recently about whether there are links between mental health and woke or cultural socialism.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh What's that about?
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: What did you find?
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, I mean, and of course, in the context of a number of books recently, um, you know, with Jonathan Heights' uh new book and I think Abigail Schreier, Bad Therapy, was Heights cult cult something I I can't remember his, I should remember his.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_01: The Anxious Generation, that's right, yeah.
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, earlier you had the coddling of the American Marin, but yeah, there is a connection, of course.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, how does it work?
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_01: He kind of works through this sort of um affirmative humanitarian psychotherapy of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow and people like that, really going back to the 60s and this idea that, you know, whatever you feel is right, you know, instead of actually your brain plays tricks on you, and emotions are not necessarily the best guide to clear thinking, uh, it's more, you know, so you actually shouldn't just uncritically affirm whatever you're feeling.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: But that that sort of type of psychotherapy leads to this kind of affirming.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you're always going to affirm victimhood and fragility, and that the world, you know, if you feel that you have no control over your life, then then yeah, you don't have any, it's it's some other person victimizing you.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: I I think so there is this connection between that.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'd say that school of psychotherapy influences both woke ideology, so that new left cultural socialism is shaped a little bit by this new psychotherapy.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: So this whole emphasis on bullying and trauma and emotional safety, and all of that comes out of this self-esteem.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: Initially it's called self-esteem, it comes out of that strand.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that also, I think, feeds what Luki Idov and Haidt would call the three great untruths, you know, that that catastrophizing about what people think about you and thinking you're fragile and have to run to the authorities.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: So there is a kind of connection that way.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_01: What I would say, however, is this is that if we're to look now at which American students, this is because this is where I have very good data, 55,000 in the fire surveys, uh, which American students are going to be in favor of shouting down speakers that offend trans people, offend, you know, somebody who says Black Lives Matter is a hate group or all abortion should be banned.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, who's the kind of person that would say this kind of speaker should be kept out or shouted down?
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um is it somebody with poor mental health?
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the answer is to some degree yes, but actually, when you control for whether someone identifies as very left or very right, whether they're somewhat worse or better mental health doesn't make a big, big difference.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: So nowadays I would say mental health is somewhat independent of ideology.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_01: If we really want to explain woke, we've got to explain the ideology and the bad ideas, which are relatively independent of things like poor mental health, which is to some degree linked perhaps to social media and smartphones and these other things that Height talks about.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that the real, the nub of the issue is ideological.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a set of ideas, it's like a virus, like a mind virus people have caught over time.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I wouldn't say that, you know, you talked about your experiences, you know, things weren't going well for you.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that's the main reason why we're seeing problems amongst young people in terms of woke attitudes.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, why it's mainly young, young women in particular.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_01: Why did why are young women so in favor of, you know, trans people accessing women's sports and women's shelters and women's bathrooms?
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know, why would women be in favor of that?
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: Just and that that that is very difficult to explain from a purely self-interested feminist perspective.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, shouldn't you defend your spaces?
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you really are tribal about being a woman.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so I think to actually understand this, you have to understand that there's been a brainwashing that's taken place.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_01: Through the media, through the school system, this has sort of shaped this generation.
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: Young people in the past were maybe more rebellious, maybe more morally relativist and not morally absolutist.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: So we've seen now that young people, to the young educated people, are much more likely to say there's absolute right or wrong.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas in the past, not so long ago, they would have been much less likely to say there's absolute right or wrong than other ages or people who didn't go to university.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_01: So there's been uh I and I think young people are also very conformist and they want to signal that they're going with the flow.
• 48:43
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think there are that many people who are really rebelling and want to revolt against.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't think that's the main motivation.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's just I want to be thought of as a virtuous person amongst my peers.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and this is these values have prestige.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, I also think they they do emulate or at least take some cue from adults.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_01: So if the adults in their environment are green lighting all of these values around emotional harm protection and equity, then to some extent they want to actually one up those adults and say, you know, no, we're gonna do an encampment here uh because we're so anti-the settler colonial systemic racism of the Israeli state.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna we're gonna one up you guys.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but actually, and I think uh David French, who I don't always agree with, did a piece in the New York Times recently where he said, what's been happening is the adults have been feeding signals to the students that these are the values to have.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_01: And now the students are saying, yeah, we're exemplifying those values.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm not sure this is rebellion.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's actually just taking the existing values and supercharging them.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_00: That activist mindset, which we've we've we're infer, we're implying here, which has been, I don't know, brewing within academia and out in the corporate world.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_00: Can you uh can you ever see a a switch where somehow it becomes more high status to be a steward of the things worth preserving from the old order, or is it just a perpetual state of let's just churn and change?
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you you sometimes get young people who who say, well, no, you you adults have drifted from the true tradition.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: And you get neo-traditionalists.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_01: So, I mean, a couple of examples.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, the Islamic revival uh was led by young people and students who were chastising their elders for not covering up, um, and therefore seemed to be moral innovators and more virtuous.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_01: You also see, in some cases, young people being more extreme in terms of their nationalism.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Northern Ireland, certainly support for Sinn Fein.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: I'm talking about the earlier days in Northern Ireland in this sort of, God, maybe in the 90s, 2000s, where Sinn Fein and the DUP, which were the kind of more hard-line parties, got disproportionately young support.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_01: And you see some of that even now.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there is, to some degree, young people are more likely to back the populist right.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, young men in particular, uh, than old people in Europe.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we're seeing that now.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I think it can go in different directions.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: So you could have a, it's not inconceivable that you could have a neo-traditionalist movement.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think what's what seems to be going on now is a fragmentation.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so there are pockets of young people who really are kind of deviating, and maybe that's more amongst young men, but who are really kind of deviating from these values.
• 51:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think we're kind of entering an interesting phase.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if I were to predict, I would say by the time the Zoomers are the median voter, we're going to see big, big cultural divides in the electorate along these culture war issues.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, if I were to predict, that's where I think it's going.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, these issues, which are not so important for voters right now.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they're a bit more important in the US, but certainly in Canada and Britain, where I've looked at it, it's quite low salience, these culture war issues.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_01: I actually think they're going to rise in salience in deciding elections more and more.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: If I were to project going forward, just because young people are more divided on these issues, I would say.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_00: The So you're a scholar of national populism as well.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: And some of the things we've spoken about today with regards to institutional drift towards the cultural left, it's clearly something that irks most people who would be categorized as populists, whether it's in the UK, the US, or across Europe, where they look at their institutions and say, you've moved away from sense, and I don't really recognise this within my country or the reality that it is that you're you're putting toward me.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um do you uh uh I suppose on top of that, we're we've we're seeing mass immigration, uh particularly in the UK, which is become a huge salient point, which is what's what's going on with our demographics and people feeling under threat in some way.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um putting all of these things together and including that Gen Z potential uh divergence when they get older, is do the populists ever cut through?
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh what does it what does it what does it look like?
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_00: Do you do you think cultural left here to stay, or does that pendulum swing back at some point?
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we have the I think there's two in political science, there's these two ideas.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_01: There's the attitudes.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_01: So your your attitude to immigration, let's say, do you want, should immigration rise, stay the same, or be reduced, reduced a lot?
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: That that would be an attitude question.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: The second is the what we call salience, which is what priority, where do you place immigration as an issue?
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what's the most important issue facing your country, you know, facing Britain?
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's the economy and there's health care and there's you know, environment, foreign policy, all kinds of things.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_01: There's immigration as well, there's culture wars, whatever.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um and what's been happening, what was happening prior to the Brexit vote, and what's happening again is that immigration's rising up that priority list.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_01: When immigration rises, that's when populism, national populist parties start to do well.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's been the pattern.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and so um what's happening now is because of increasing levels of immigration, the salience of immigration is rising.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_01: Someone who said, Yeah, I want less immigration, but immigration is my number five issue after healthcare and the economy and the pandemic, now, oh no, immigration is my number one issue.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_01: Now, that suddenly that voter is biddable for a populist movement.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that's what's been happening.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um now, where this intersects with woke and the culture war.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_01: So, culture war issues generally, if we take Britain having much lower profile for voters, they don't pay that much attention, they don't understand that well.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they do understand something like has political correctness gone too far, 80% will say yes.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: I don't feel as free to say my views about immigration and trans, you know, 50, 60 percent will say yes.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_01: But in terms of, if you ask, you know, what's the most important problem facing Britain, that'll rank pretty low.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, however, the the issue is that those, that issue is connected to, for example, immigration and crime and homelessness and education.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's connected to all those issues because woke shuts down conversations.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_01: It narrows what you're allowed to talk about.
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're not allowed to talk about immigration being reduced to 100,000 a year, let's say, uh, because you're going to be accused of being a racist, that's woke in operation.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_01: So woke's downstream effects, the second-order effects of woke, are to increase immigration, to make it harder to control the southern border in the U.S.
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_01: because you don't want to be deporting anyone or uh cutting out their asylum claim or making them remain in Mexico because you'll be accused by the left wing of your party, if you're Joe Biden, uh, of being a racist or of not being, you know, upholding social justice.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_01: So essentially, woke is interconnected to all of these other issues, but most voters don't understand that.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_01: Now, one of the things that remains to be seen is whether a politician can come onto the scene to try and shed light and make that connection more strongly and say if you care about immigration and you care about reducing crime and education outcomes in schools, you have to care about critical race and gender ideology in schools.
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_01: You have to care about what's happening in the civil service with DEI.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: That is the reason that we can't pursue these policies.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_01: Now that's going to take a couple, you know, the right political communicator to actually make that link, but the link, I think, will eventually be made, just the way the link between, let's say, being a member of the European Union and wanting to control immigration, people in Britain eventually started to make a link between, oh, in order to get control of our border, we need to leave the EU.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_01: Likewise, it could eventually become the case that people will say, oh, in order to control immigration, we're going to have to control and deal with woke and EDI and critical race and all these other things if we want to.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: Or in order to be able to stop and search, in order to be able to isolate, you know, badly behaved kids in school who may be disproportionately, let's say, of a certain race, you know, in order to actually improve it, the outcomes for that race, actually, because they're the ones that are damaged by these uh people who are acting up in class.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: All of those things are going to have to be connected more effectively by politicians in order to raise the salience of culture wars issues.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_00: So we're grappling with when are we seeing the taboo break?
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it's only once that to do taboo breaks that the dam bursts and progress can be made on all of these other issues of salience and people's attitudes feel like they're being listened to.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, so that the taboo is really at the heart.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that was the Big Bang that created our moral order.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's the center, the sun around which our moral order revolves.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we we need a norm against racism as against sexism and transphobia and other things, but it needs to be more like jurisprudence in the law, where there's proportionality, proportional punishment, not sudden death.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_01: There's a second chance, there's you know, learning from your mistakes, there's a whole bunch of things which the law recognizes.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's just much more subtle, whereas taboos are just, oh, we we need to sort of plug into your disgust reflex and you cross the line and you're canceled.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's the way taboos work.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_01: And and maybe that's fine for urinating at the table, but it's not fine for, you know, what's that?
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_01: It's not fine for something as subtle and as kind of protein as as as racism where, okay, it's one thing if it's easily, you know, if it's calling somebody the N-word to their face, that's one thing.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_01: But wanting to reduce immigration, uh, you know, wanting to have a stop and search policy, wanting to exclude badly behaved people.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, once you if you don't have a bound around this thing, uh, and I don't think you can have a taboo and have a boundary, because by definition, it's a sacred value.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and it's that fixation and that sacrilization which is really the problem.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_01: And we're until we unpick that, I don't think we're fully going to get out of the woods.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't want you to spoil all of your upcoming book, which is coming out midway, it's mid-May.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's called Taboo in the United Kingdom.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_00: And what's it called in the United States?
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's mid-May in the in the US, it's coming out first in mid-May.
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_01: May 14th, it's called The Third Awokening, a 12-point plan for rolling back progressive extremism.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_01: In Britain, it's June 20th, called Taboo, uh, How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, well, Eric, thanks so much for joining me.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_00: Before I let you go, you're active on Twitter, Substack, a whole bunch of places.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_00: Where can people search your handles as they were?
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so uh my Twitter handles at EPKA U F M and on the web at www.snamps.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's sn-e-ps.net.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_01: And also check out my course I woke if you go to my uh Twitter.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's the pinned tweet, at least for now.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um until May 14th, it's the pinned tweet.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_01: So um you can you can sort of find the link to to join.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_01: And so we've got an online version, which is 80 quid, you know.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, 15 weeks.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, people seem to be giving me good feedback, so it's been a lot of fun to teach.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_00: Eric, it's been an utter pleasure being able to cover so much ground with you.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_00: And hopefully you'll be able to come back on the show in the future.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_00: But in the meantime, all the best with your book launch.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure it'll go down very well, at least in some quarters.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_00: And um we'll speak again.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, John.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks a lot.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_00: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_00: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_00: Engage with me on YouTube or X, or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.