Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Yascha Mounk: The Identity Trap

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Yascha Mounk: The Identity Trap · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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• 2:00
  G'day, humans.
• 2:04
  Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 2:06
  What is going on here in our culture and society and politics at the moment?
• 2:11
  Is cancel culture a thing?
• 2:13
  Is workness a thing anymore?
• 2:15
  Or are these just punchlines that the right and the people who are grumpy
• 2:20
  use to denigrate cultural and social progress?
• 2:24
  I've been a bit confused lately because it's a little bit difficult
• 2:27
  to get your arms around what's right and what's wrong and what's true and what's not
• 2:31
  and make sure that you're not falling into the trap of just looking at cherry-picked
• 2:34
  outrages in tabloids and on social media
• 2:38
  and having your view of what's really going on in the world somewhat warped.
• 2:42
  Enter Yasha Monk, who has been on the show before, talking about one of his
• 2:47
  previous books, he has a new book that I absolutely loved.
• 2:52
  I would go so far as to say it's sort of one of the definitive texts about what's going
• 2:57
  on in the battle between small L liberalism and identitarianism on the left
• 3:03
  and as a result also on the right and for all of us.
• 3:07
  He's an expert on liberal democracy.
• 3:09
  He's an expert on the rise of populism.
• 3:11
  He's an academic.
• 3:12
  He's a professor of the practice of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University.
• 3:18
  He's a contributing editor at the Atlantic.
• 3:19
  He's a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
• 3:22
  He has his bona fides in other words.
• 3:24
  He also has a podcast called The Good Fight and quite apart from the fact that he's a
• 3:29
  genius who speaks English and German and French and Italian and English and is irritatingly
• 3:36
  well-read and erudite.
• 3:38
  He has turned his attention now to what he calls the identity trap or the identity synthesis
• 3:43
  in some ways.
• 3:46
  His book is called The Identity Trap, a story of ideas and power in our time.
• 3:51
  It's like drinking from a cool fountain hearing someone make very lucid criticisms of the
• 3:56
  moment that we're in without resorting to ad hominem, without resorting to hysteria,
• 4:01
  whilst giving all due credit and credibility to the good ideas of the other side that
• 4:09
  he disagrees with.
• 4:10
  I hope you enjoy as much as I did.
• 4:12
  Yasha Muck.
• 4:13
  So good to talk to you because I find your book is very much needed at the moment in so
• 4:28
  many of the conversations about workness and cancel culture and the identity wars.
• 4:35
  We're talking about ineffable undefined phenomena to such an extent that I'm not quite sure
• 4:40
  whether or not we're actually talking about anything real or whether we're just jumping
• 4:44
  at shadows.
• 4:46
  And your book starts with a handful of actual anecdotes to pinpoint specifically what
• 4:50
  you're talking about.
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  One of them is the mother of a child who's in school who wants to request a particular
• 4:57
  teacher for her daughter's class.
• 5:00
  Is that right?
• 5:01
  Can you tell us what happened?
• 5:02
  Yeah.
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  And first of all, I love being back on the show and thank you for framing the conversation
• 5:07
  that way because I am concerned about some of the things that have happened on the left,
• 5:12
  some of the ways in which we've become obsessed with a particular kind of set of conceptions
• 5:17
  of identity and what supposedly follows from it.
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  But a lot of the critiques of that space are, I think, as unhelpful as they are helpful.
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  And so a lot of what I'm trying to do in this new book is to actually shed light, to
• 5:28
  help people understand what is this tradition, where does it come from, what is it trying
• 5:32
  to do.
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  I end up being quite critical of it, but I think even people who are sympathetic to it
• 5:37
  have a lot to learn from that, hopefully, about what it actually is.
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  So my starting point is the story.
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  I was really shocked to come across, which is a woman called Kyle Opposi who is self black.
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  Who lives in the suburbs of Atlanta, and she's invited by the principal of her school
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  to suggest a particular teacher, because she does some stuff in the school that's kind
• 5:58
  of a standard operating procedure there.
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  And at first, she says, yeah, of course, no worries, some of the teacher's name, no problem.
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  But when Posi emails in her request, the principal keeps deflecting in strange ways and
• 6:10
  say, perhaps this other teacher would be a better fit.
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  And eventually, Posi demand to know why her daughter couldn't have the first choice.
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  And the principal told her, well, the class is suggesting that's not the black class.
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  Now, that sounds like a sort of depressing, familiar story of racial discrimination and
• 6:30
  segregation, which of course existed in the history of the American South for a very
• 6:36
  long time.
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  But here's the strange twist, the principal was a self black.
• 6:42
  And what she was motivated by was not the sort of old prejudices of white parents who
• 6:47
  don't want their kids mixing with black kids or anything like that.
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  It was a new progressive ideology.
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  I call it progressive separatism and education, though it's saying, it's really important
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  for black kids to have a peer group of other black kids.
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  And so if there's not enough black students in a class, that's really a problem.
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  And so, you know, Kyle Opposi couldn't have a favorite teacher for her kids because according
• 7:10
  to this very progressive black principal, you know, we need to put the black kids into
• 7:15
  the same class, so that they're among each other in order to build the right kind of positive
• 7:19
  racial identity.
• 7:20
  And does that mean that the teacher that had been suggested wasn't black and the principal
• 7:24
  was saying you need to have a black teacher?
• 7:27
  I think it was in part about the teacher being black, but it was a lot about making sure
• 7:32
  that the black kids are all in school, if you'd like to say it.
• 7:38
  You know, one of the powerful things that Kyle Opposi told me when I interviewed her about
• 7:42
  it is, you know, she was telling me about watching the inauguration of Kamala Harris as
• 7:48
  vice president of the United States with her kids and saying, you know, my children, they're
• 7:51
  going to have all the opportunity in the world.
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  And I want them to be comfortable in any room.
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  And she felt that the principal was telling her, your kids have to have black friends.
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  That's what they need in order to be socialized in a right way.
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  And she was saying, of course, I want them to have black friends.
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  I want them to have friends from every other racial group as well.
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  And they're going to go and do great things and they're going to have to be comfortable
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  in every room.
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  And so the idea that it would be to the benefit of them to be in this group that is predominantly
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  black, where at least, you know, a lot of the peer group is black, you know, that's the
• 8:22
  principal trying to impose some kind of ideology on her that she was an advocate of herself
• 8:28
  just felt was wrong.
• 8:29
  And you say that you were shocked by this, but you shouldn't be really because in private
• 8:35
  schools around America, this has become something of the norm.
• 8:38
  I mean, you talk about a private school in Rhode Island, Gordon, you talk about a school
• 8:42
  on the upper side of New York, Dalton, at places of privilege, traditionally white privilege,
• 8:49
  I suppose, that have lent very heavily into dividing children into affinity groups.
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  And as young as kindergarteners are being divided up by race to help conceptualize themselves
• 9:03
  about the history of racial struggle and the comedy of racial unity within racial groups,
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  but not between them in the United States, is that right?
• 9:13
  Yeah, that's right.
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  So, you know, there's many more restrictions in the United States on the extent to which
• 9:20
  public schools can engage in those kinds of explicit forms of, you know, racial separation.
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  And a lot of public schools are doing it anyway, there's, you know, race-based affinity groups
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  at many high schools now, but are public high schools, but private schools have considerably
• 9:42
  more leeway in doing this.
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  And it's becoming quite common.
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  So a lot of the most prestigious schools in the country, really the schools that are most
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  likely to educate the future elite, but the kind of schools that presence of the United
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  States sent the kids to, or that, you know, very rich people in Manhattan sent the kids
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  to all have this very explicit attempt to affirm racial identity, to make sure that, you
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  know, as one quote on the website of Dalton School says, you know, kids end up having the
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  right kind of racial identity.
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  And, you know, I believe in freedom of association.
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  So, you know, if we were talking here about 15, 16-year-olds saying, you know, I want to
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  be a part of a group that meets after school that emphasizes certain form of cultural origin,
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  or even a certain politically salient ethnicity within the United States, I would have somewhat
• 10:49
  mixed feelings about that, but that is one of the freedoms that people should have.
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  And by the time that you're 15 or 16 or 17, I think you have some amount of agency, and
• 10:59
  if you want to go and hang out with those people who are alike to you in some kind of salient
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  characteristic, I understand why a free society should allow for that, and why a school should
• 11:10
  allow for that.
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  What we're talking about here is 80 or 70 or 60-olds in which the teacher comes into the
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  classroom and tells kids, hey, you are white, you go over there, you are Latino, you go over
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  there, you are African American, you go over there.
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  And that is the set of people who are like you, that is the set of people with whom you
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  should identify.
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  Go ahead.
• 11:35
  Well, it's just going to say, I mean, it's not just, you know, if it was just education,
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  then I suppose we'd be able to limit this conversation to why our silly rich schools
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  doing silly rich, playing silly rich games with each other.
• 11:48
  But you also point to public health during the pandemic as being an example of where it's
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  not about freedom of association, it's actually about the allocation of scarce public health
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  resources like the vaccines when they were first developed or like the antivirals when
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  they were first developed.
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  And there was this push that was successful in many parts of the United States to direct
• 12:08
  care rather than being triaged to the neediest, to direct it in a, you know, I suppose a
• 12:15
  social engineering way to make sure that historically disadvantaged minorities were at the front
• 12:19
  of the line, even if the individual human beings were less at risk than other, for example,
• 12:25
  old white people who might need the antivirals more.
• 12:28
  Yeah.
• 12:29
  So I think to me the most shocking example of that was that virtually every country around
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  the world, when vaccines were being rolled out, and unfortunately we only had a limited
• 12:39
  supply of them in the first months, huge priority, mostly elderly people, you know, medical
• 12:47
  workers to some extent and so on, but mostly we were, you know, driven by the fact that
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  older people were vastly more likely to die from COVID than younger people.
• 12:59
  And the fact that it's quite easy to communicate with a public who's eligible when you have an
• 13:03
  age cut off.
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  Most countries basically said, look, when you're over 80, you're now eligible, you're
• 13:08
  75, you're eligible a few months later, you're over 70, you're eligible later, I mean, eventually,
• 13:12
  of course, everybody was eligible because we had enough vaccines in supply.
• 13:17
  The key committee that advised the CDC and what to do in the United States said that is
• 13:23
  unacceptable because an over proportional number of older Americans are white.
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  And therefore, even for according to the CDC's own models, deviating from prioritizing
• 13:38
  the elderly was going to result in thousands more people dying.
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  The ethical approach was to prioritize the much broader and more morphous group of essential
• 13:49
  workers.
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  Now there's a lot of things about that that were troubling to me.
• 13:56
  One of them was to cover the acceptance that more people are going to die.
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  Another was that it was really hard to actually figure out who should count as an essential
• 14:06
  worker.
• 14:07
  And often we ended up with hugely over inclusive categories, where at one point I was eligible
• 14:13
  because I'm a university professor and even for I wasn't teaching in person, that somehow
• 14:18
  made me an essential worker who should get priority on the vaccine.
• 14:22
  And so often you ended up in situations where too many people were eligible.
• 14:27
  And so there was this fight for appointments and who won that, people who were highly
• 14:32
  educated, who had resources, who could go out of a way in order to get vaccinated and
• 14:36
  run multiple places and so on and so forth.
• 14:38
  And finally, it was a failure even on the supposed grounds that inspired it, namely of equity.
• 14:46
  Having essential workers reduced the racial disparity in the composition of which racial
• 14:55
  group got access to the vaccines arguably.
• 14:58
  But it also quite clearly and quite probably increased the number of members of ethnic minorities
• 15:05
  who died.
• 15:06
  Because if you're giving a vaccine to 225 year old African American uber drivers, rather
• 15:14
  than to a 75 year old African American retiree, you're likely increasing the number of black
• 15:20
  people who will die.
• 15:22
  Right.
• 15:23
  And just a couple of other anecdotes before we get to the political philosophy of this,
• 15:26
  which is really the heart of your book, the city of San Francisco has a program to hand
• 15:35
  out $1,500 to needy residents as long as they are what?
• 15:42
  Trans, I believe.
• 15:43
  They have to be trans, identified.
• 15:45
  That's correct.
• 15:46
  And they can get $1,500.
• 15:47
  There was a similar one that you don't mention in your book, but that came up in Los Angeles
• 15:51
  where the city of West Hollywood was providing funds and benefits to people who identify
• 15:59
  as LGBTQI plus, which tickled me a little bit because that umbrella has become so large
• 16:06
  that if you wanted the money, you could basically just like, what are they going to do?
• 16:09
  Are they going to ask me to blow a guy, you know, like, as long as I can identify as queer
• 16:14
  in some way, which just means I'm sort of an ally, then presumably I'm eligible.
• 16:18
  Well, you don't have to because because because queer in a certain sense, but queer in a
• 16:22
  certain sense has become a political identity, so one of the sort of change of facts of American
• 16:26
  life today is that so many people now identify as LGBTQI plus that actually a majority of
• 16:36
  people who fall under that category are currently in heterosexual relationships.
• 16:41
  Wow.
• 16:42
  Now, obviously, you know, you might be bisexual and, you know, you might genuinely be a member
• 16:49
  of a sexual minority and yet currently be in a heterosexual relationship, but it does
• 16:53
  tell you something about the sort of broadening of this category that, you know, anybody who
• 17:00
  identifies as not, you know, being fully straight or anybody who experiences any form of
• 17:07
  same-sex attraction or anybody who has had any kind of, you know, different kind of sexual
• 17:14
  experience in the past, now identifies themselves as being part of that category, such
• 17:18
  that actually a majority of people who claim to be queer or gay or lesbian or LGBT in that
• 17:25
  kind of way, you know, a currently dating somebody of the opposite sex in a way that makes
• 17:31
  some part of a certain majority.
• 17:32
  I think it sort of tells you a little bit about the stringeness of some of the search
• 17:37
  for falling to these categories.
• 17:39
  It's a lot cooler than being straight, yeah, sure, it's a lot cooler than being straight.
• 17:44
  And the last anecdote that I'll just flag is you talk about this very extremely elite school
• 17:52
  on the Upper West Side Bank Street School for Children, which is a kindergarten through eighth grade
• 17:57
  school, where the way that they articulate the racial segregation of their classes is quite
• 18:05
  instructive.
• 18:06
  They divide students into a kids of color affinity group and then an advocacy group and the advocacy
• 18:14
  group is for all white children and that gives them instruction about raising their awareness
• 18:20
  of the prevalence of whiteness and of privilege and encourages those students to own their
• 18:27
  European ancestry.
• 18:29
  I think that's useful because there'll be some cohort of people who are hearing this
• 18:33
  conversation thinking, well, here are a couple of white guys who are just upset that minorities
• 18:38
  are getting benefits that they've been denied for so long.
• 18:43
  That is not at all the core of your, of what you're worried about, what you're worried about
• 18:47
  and what I found so refreshing about the book, because it's also what I'm worried about,
• 18:51
  is that opening the Pandora's box of encouraging white people to think about themselves as white,
• 18:57
  even if you're doing so in order to help them understand their own white privilege is a dangerous
• 19:05
  game.
• 19:06
  The world has been torn apart by identity, identity and tribal warfare in many places and
• 19:12
  many times throughout history.
• 19:15
  So I can detect in the pages of the book a worry from you that we're playing a game that
• 19:21
  we don't quite know the consequences of and it may not end up going well for minorities.
• 19:27
  Is that fair?
• 19:28
  I mean, you've stolen my fund of a Josh, I mean, look, some people are very worried that
• 19:35
  when you have these affinity groups for various minority groups, you obviously have to have
• 19:41
  some kind of group for white people and so one of the conservative worries, which I understand,
• 19:46
  is to say, are we going to be made to feel bad?
• 19:50
  Are we going to be made to, are we going to be shamed?
• 19:53
  And I certainly don't think that chaining kids is a good pedagogical strategy,
• 19:59
  but I sort of am a little bit less worried because I don't think most people are
• 20:03
  that vulnerable and if you have to sit for someone comfortable lessons, so be it.
• 20:08
  But I think that the assumption about what's going to happen in that group is really naive.
• 20:14
  And if there's one thing that we can learn from group psychology and frankly one thing that
• 20:18
  we can learn from human history is that, you know, who you think of as a member of your own
• 20:23
  group is quite malleable, but once you think of somebody as a member of your group and once
• 20:28
  you strongly identify with one group, you're going to be trying to push towards the interest of
• 20:36
  this group and you're going to become more willing to undermine the interest of those who you
• 20:40
  think of as outsiders or those who you think of as members of other groups. And so, you know,
• 20:46
  the noble intention of Bank Street and so many other schools and institutions in the United States
• 20:52
  and other countries today is to say, we'll take these white kids. We'll tell them about white privilege
• 20:56
  and we'll tell them about their historical shame and all of those things and we'll tell them you
• 21:01
  have to identify as white in order to fight against worse injustices. And that might work for a few of
• 21:06
  them and a few of them might become great committed anti-racist activists, but a lot of them are going to
• 21:11
  say, you know what, if my primary identity is as white, then I'm going to be proud of being
• 21:15
  white and I'm going to fight for the interests of white people. And given that white people retain
• 21:21
  quite a lot of power in the United States and in other countries, there might be quite effective
• 21:26
  at doing that. And to think that this is somehow what's going to lead us towards a more just
• 21:31
  society that is more responsive to the real discrimination that persists against minority groups,
• 21:36
  the real historical flaws that our societies have, I think it's just deeply and thoroughly naive.
• 21:43
  And so, so you're right, but to me, a lot of why I decided to write this book, even for I might not
• 21:49
  make a lot of friends doing so, a lot of the reason why I want to write about this is that
• 21:55
  it's just, I think, is going to make it harder to achieve a kind of society in which I want to
• 22:00
  live, in which I think most of us want to live. There's also only so much denigration that people
• 22:05
  will take. You know, one problem is turning up the volume on our sense of belonging to an identity
• 22:14
  group that's defined by its ethnicity or race. And the second problem is the climate in which
• 22:20
  it's only possible to really talk in negative terms about one group and positive terms about
• 22:25
  another. You can't really make general claims that straight white males are a force for good in
• 22:32
  the world at the moment in contemporary culture. If you do, then you're placed squarely on the
• 22:37
  conservative or far right end of the spectrum. You can't do so from a place of small liberalism.
• 22:43
  And it does worry me that, you know, not to blame the victim, but as the grandchild of Holocaust
• 22:50
  survivors, you know, the Nazis didn't come from nowhere. There was a period in the interwar years
• 22:56
  where regular old white Germans were being told that they were responsible for the First World War
• 23:01
  and that they were the worst people in the world and that they were irredeemable and, you know,
• 23:05
  they were going to have to pay reparations that were going to go down through the generations
• 23:10
  to the people who they'd wronged in the First World War. And that was not explicitly a racial or
• 23:14
  ethnic or religious thing, but they found their scapegoats and they got their revenge in one way or
• 23:20
  another. And I look today at the rise of the right of the new right of Trump of Le Pen of
• 23:27
  alternative for Deutschland in Germany. And you talk about the fact that people on the left seem
• 23:36
  very agitated about those right wing forces, but they don't seem very curious about why they
• 23:40
  have the popularity they have. It's like they, they, it's like we're on the left think that those
• 23:45
  forces have just dropped from the sky somehow, that they're alien forces. But of course they're feeding
• 23:50
  off precisely this phenomenon that you're talking about, which gives sucker to them and becomes
• 23:54
  a self reinforcing sort of feedback loop. How does that operate? Yeah, so there's two points here.
• 24:00
  I mean, the first is just that sort of in ideological terms, you know, that Trump and the
• 24:06
  couldn't would work, right? But far-right populists and the left-winged enteritarians are first,
• 24:12
  but generally first, we don't like each other. They have a different vision of life. They have
• 24:16
  different social customs and so on, right? But I think in terms of the way in which our political
• 24:23
  system, our public sphere operate now, they're actually allies, which is to say that, you know,
• 24:29
  what I say in the book is one is being to the other's yang. The the election of Donald Trump
• 24:35
  tremendously helped the people most obsessed with identity and who are pushing the most extreme
• 24:43
  ideas about identity to gain a foothold and then to come to control a lot of the mainstream
• 24:49
  institutions in the United States, because it became really hard to criticize anybody on the
• 24:54
  left without being seen as somehow giving sucker to his genuinely scary force on the right.
• 25:02
  And of course, one of the things that gives, you know, a lot of emotional power to the sort of
• 25:10
  far-right political space, but that also makes a lot of people who are more moderate,
• 25:14
  tempted to go and vote for the far-right, especially in countries that the United States where
• 25:18
  you only have two choices, is the fact that we look at some of the laughter at the moment and say,
• 25:24
  you all have lost your bearings and you're embracing stuff, but I find to be, you know, really
• 25:29
  quite noxious and and wrong-headed. And so I, you know, I'm going to look to somebody to protect
• 25:34
  me from this stuff. And so my political project is to argue for the basic institutions of liberal
• 25:41
  democracy, the basic institutions of our political system, to argue for our perfect ability, for our
• 25:47
  ability to make genuine progress through reform rather than revolution, for our ability to make
• 25:57
  progress that I think is evident in the fact that our societies today are far from perfect,
• 26:02
  include a lot of genuine injustices, but are much better than there would have been
• 26:06
  100 or 50 or even 25 years ago. And I think it's in making the case for an optimistic vision
• 26:13
  of that broad political middle, whether you're more on the left or more on the right that can
• 26:20
  actually resist those kind of forces. I want to say something else that responds to
• 26:27
  your mention of your biography and of Germany. So, you know, I'm Jewish and I grew up in Germany.
• 26:33
  And my concern is a little bit about what that kind of discourse might do to members of the
• 26:38
  majority. And it's interesting that in one kind of context, as you said earlier, you and I might
• 26:43
  just be seen as sort of, you know, straight white men. Definitely not straight. But in the context
• 26:49
  in which I grew up, oh, I'm so sorry, to assume. But in another context, that's not how I was
• 27:00
  how I was raised, which is to say that in the society in which I grew up, I was part of a victim
• 27:04
  group, right? I was part of the sort of exotic victim of the Jews who were, you know, central to
• 27:12
  how Germans fought about their own identity and their own nation. And so I experienced some
• 27:17
  anti-Semitism, which was unpleasant. But I also experienced a lot of very, very well-meaning
• 27:23
  phylo-Semitism of people who had never really met a Jew in real life. But you were so obsessed with
• 27:29
  the guilt of a country in the Holocaust that when they met me and when we realized I was Jewish,
• 27:34
  they needed to demonstrate to me that they were the good Germans. And they were going to treat me
• 27:39
  in an especially nice way. And they were going to be super careful about every word they said. And
• 27:43
  perhaps they were super nervous in how they talked to me. And look, these were good people who
• 27:48
  are full of good intentions. And I don't think they were evil on the country. I think they were in
• 27:52
  some way some of the best people in the society really trying to make the society better. But you
• 27:58
  know what? That made it more to make me feel alienated and to make me feel patronized and to make
• 28:04
  me feel like I wasn't the equal than even some of the anti-Semitism. If somebody's anti-Semitic,
• 28:10
  you can say you are so I don't feel inferior to you fuck off. If somebody is being super nice,
• 28:18
  but in this slightly creepy way, it's really hard to actually have a friendship of them. It's
• 28:23
  really hard to actually feel like you can be equals. And so one of the things I worry about
• 28:28
  is that some of the kind of social problems. And they know that. They know that as well when they're
• 28:32
  doing it, right? I mean, they can feel it because they can feel the distance. The moment they find
• 28:38
  out you're a Jew, a wall of othering slides down between you. And they all of a sudden have to
• 28:44
  form this role of being, oh my goodness, I hope I don't tread on eggshells. I mean, we've all felt,
• 28:48
  I think we've all felt this happened in the past five to eight years in race and gain us and
• 28:55
  and everything else. I mean, it's the same with, you know, I have the same experience with
• 28:59
  being married to a guy and having children. If I'm at the park, if I'm at the playground and my
• 29:03
  kids are playing and someone else makes a remark about my wife and I say, oh, it's actually my
• 29:07
  husband. You know, I feel like when I was living in New York five or six years ago, there was just
• 29:14
  an unruffled acceptance of that. It wasn't exactly the same with kids, but it was like, it was like,
• 29:20
  okay, wait, when are you going to get you to groove on? Especially if you're in the East Village or
• 29:23
  if you're in Brooklyn, it was like, okay, that's not a big deal. I feel it more here in Sydney because
• 29:29
  I think it's actually strangely more politically correct and more anxious about, because it's less
• 29:35
  diverse. It's actually more, you know, all of a sudden, it's like, oh my goodness, I'm so sorry,
• 29:39
  I didn't mean to make any assumptions. You know, I just think it's wonderful. Isn't it fabulous?
• 29:44
  You know, you can get married now and it's almost like they're saying, you're just almost just
• 29:49
  like a real person. You're behaving like a real person. It's not wonderful that we've let you be a
• 29:53
  real person. It's like, I'd rather there be less fanfare about it, frankly. And I can't imagine
• 30:01
  that that experience is not also shared by a lot of minorities, especially if you're walking around
• 30:07
  with a skin color that makes you an obvious minority in a way where I'm able to not be showing my
• 30:11
  minority status, I'm wearing it on my sleeve all the time. If I was walking around black and
• 30:15
  everyone was constantly going, oh my god, I didn't mean to say that thing about how I liked your
• 30:19
  hair because that could be misinterpreted because I know black people are self-conscious about their
• 30:23
  hair. And you know, I didn't want to ask where you're from. I actually meant whether you're from
• 30:28
  Sydney or Melbourne or Perth, but actually it sounded like I was asking you whether you're from
• 30:31
  Uganda and, you know, in fact, may it be exhausting. And sometimes it doesn't allow you to have the
• 30:40
  experiences you deserve. You know, I'm a professor, I teach, and mostly the kids are all right,
• 30:49
  but they get very nervous on certain topics or certain contexts in a way that I think
• 30:55
  really impedes genuine conversation and sometimes better logical progress. In one example of
• 31:00
  what I had in the classroom is that I was teaching a seminar on political writing, which
• 31:05
  the students had to actually produce an opera, the speech, a kind of think tank report. And one of
• 31:12
  the black girls in the class was a really good student, produced a draft of an Oscar acceptance
• 31:18
  speech for the producer of black panther, which had a kind of social justice theme. You know, nothing
• 31:25
  that she did in the classroom suggested that she was easily offended, that she would try to cancel
• 31:29
  her fellow students for the agreeing with her or anything like that. And part of the seminar,
• 31:34
  of course, was to offer constructive feedback, which we did in every piece of writing, right? It was
• 31:39
  to bring out what's strong in the draft, but also to bring out what could be improved,
• 31:43
  besides students who are writing first draft. And on every other piece of writing that worked really
• 31:48
  well. And in this piece of writing, nobody wanted to say a single critical word. And I ultimately
• 31:55
  got mad with my class. And look, this is a strong draft, right? When it has flaws, it has problems,
• 32:00
  just like every other draft that we've read in the class. And this student deserves the same
• 32:06
  pedagogical experience, but everybody else got, which is to have some of the weaknesses in her
• 32:12
  writing pointed out in a way that allows her to make progress. That's the point of the class.
• 32:16
  And you know, you think you're being, you know, nice to her or somehow valuing her
• 32:23
  by just praising and just saying how wonderful it is. And there was a strong draft,
• 32:27
  but that's actually short-changing, right? It is not giving her the pedagogical experience
• 32:34
  that she deserves every bit as much as the other students in the class.
• 32:38
  It reminds me a little bit of, I think it was Richard Dawkins who said, vis-a-vis religion,
• 32:43
  that I respect you too much to pretend to respect your silly beliefs. And I sort of feel that
• 32:49
  way about, you know, I think that we do well to have a great, if there's something patronizing
• 32:55
  and condescending at the moment about the white university educated elites attitude towards
• 33:01
  minorities, that's even more condescending, well, a lot more condescending than the attitude was
• 33:07
  when I was growing up, I feel, where the light on the hill was egalitarianism and was equality
• 33:13
  and colorblindness and judging people on the content of their character, not the color of their
• 33:18
  their skin. And just to throw one more thing in, but hold that thought, because I can see you're
• 33:23
  going to respond to that as well, because you were saying earlier that you wanted to embolden the
• 33:27
  middle against the sort of Trump and the far left. And I think it's one thing that you do in the book
• 33:32
  is you avoid talking too much about the middle. It's more about, and I am so grateful that you make
• 33:39
  this point because it's the point I keep trying to make. It's not that the left has gone too far.
• 33:45
  You hear a lot from conservatives, the left has gone too far. It's not, the problem is not
• 33:51
  that there are these good ideas, but if we just pulled back on the good ideas a little bit,
• 33:56
  then things would be better because you're being too good. It's actually a different philosophy,
• 34:01
  and this is something that you want to get to your terminology here, the identity synthesis.
• 34:05
  This is a new way of thinking. It's a betrayal of Martin Luther King. It's a betrayal of the
• 34:11
  Barack Obama vision of a race-blind America. It's a betrayal of Gandhi. It's a betrayal of Nelson
• 34:16
  Mandela. Whenever I won, whether I've strayed from the path and think, hang on. Am I just a conservative?
• 34:23
  Am I just like a squishy, white, unconsciously racist person who has lost the plot? I think
• 34:30
  hang on. What would Reverend King say? What would Mandela do and just do what they would do? If
• 34:38
  the current left is doing something different, then they can play those games all they want. Those
• 34:42
  games are what you call the identity synthesis, so you don't have to talk about workness and so on,
• 34:46
  so take all of that where you will. I worry about what I call not too far as there's a kind of
• 34:53
  mode of criticism of the world, or what I would call the identity trap, which is to say, look,
• 35:01
  they want the right things and they stand for the right goals and a lot of their ideas and
• 35:10
  proposals may even be sensible, but aren't they going a little bit too far sometimes? I'm a little
• 35:15
  bit too radical. I'm a little bit too intolerant in a pursuit of a good. I think that makes it very
• 35:23
  hard to understand what a problem is. Shouldn't we be zealous in the pursuit of justice? Shouldn't we
• 35:29
  be full of passion to remedy the injustices in our society and show perhaps it's sometimes possible
• 35:35
  to go too far or to be tactically not very shrewd, but that doesn't seem like a serious failing. Why
• 35:44
  worry about that? What I try to bring out is that actually the vision of a society that advocates
• 35:53
  of what I call the identity synthesis have is fundamentally opposed to the kind of society in which
• 36:01
  I want to live. Derek Bell, one of the founders of critical race theory, perhaps the most important
• 36:07
  found of critical race theory, didn't just argue that the actual process of desegregation in American
• 36:15
  schools ended up disadvantaging African Americans in some important ways and therefore was
• 36:22
  much more troubled than we might have hoped. He made some good observations about that. Some of that
• 36:27
  is true. He concluded that perhaps we should have actually gone for separate but truly equal,
• 36:35
  rather than integrating schools, perhaps we should have just bolstered the quality and the
• 36:39
  resources of black schools in such a way that we would have had good black schools which were
• 36:45
  essentially segregated. That is, in my mind, the wrong consequence to draw from some of his
• 36:52
  smart and interesting observations. I'll give you another example. I have a chapter on cultural
• 36:56
  appropriation and the prosibility of cultural appropriation is something we should worry about,
• 37:02
  comes from the fact that people apply the term to some things that are actually unjust or offensive.
• 37:08
  Clearly it was unjust when in the 1950s and 1960s, in the United States, black singers didn't have
• 37:14
  the same ability as white singers to have a career because certain record labels wouldn't sign
• 37:18
  them with certain concert halls went open to them. When white singers went to talk their songs and
• 37:23
  had huge commercial hits and the black singer didn't get anything from that, that was clearly
• 37:27
  unjust. I don't think that what made that unjust was cultural appropriation. I think in the cases in
• 37:34
  which there's really something bad about cultural appropriation, we can name that in a most
• 37:39
  straightforward way, theft of intellectual property in this kind of case, the kind of discrimination
• 37:44
  which didn't allow black singers to perform a black concert hall. That's a very clear concrete
• 37:49
  injustice that undoubtedly persisted in the United States at that time. The intention to mark or
• 37:54
  to ridicule, which is often really what's at stake in those cases, but why is it important to be
• 38:00
  more specific about that? Because there's a lot of wonderful forms of mutual cultural influence
• 38:05
  because one of the best things about living in a diverse city like Sydney or New York City or
• 38:10
  Paris is the fact that we influence each other, that we learn from each other, that we rub off
• 38:14
  on each other. In fact, nearly all of the greatest artifacts in our human cultural repertoire
• 38:22
  have multiple cultural origins. When we misidentify what makes this particular case of cultural
• 38:28
  appropriation bad, when we put any form of mutual cultural influence under a general
• 38:33
  role of suspicion, we misdiscrypt the kind of society which we want. I don't want to live in a
• 38:39
  society where four or five cultures better dramatically sealed off to each other. I want to live in a
• 38:44
  vibrant society in which there's a persistence of certain cultural traditions, but also there's a
• 38:49
  culture that is shaped by the clash and the influence of and the mixing of all of these different
• 38:56
  kinds of cultures because that's what often has been greatest in human history. So that's one
• 39:01
  example of where the point is not a far as, and the point is with all respect for the sophisticated
• 39:07
  and interesting thinkers that made up a lot of the sort of academic origins of the identity synthesis.
• 39:12
  The vision of the world that they stand for is fundamentally different from the vision that
• 39:17
  I stand for, but I think most people in the United States and Australia and Europe today rightly
• 39:25
  and it's also interesting to note Yasha that the modern right wing also doesn't stand for those
• 39:32
  things. So the conception of protecting one's culture, protecting one's turf from an intrusion
• 39:39
  by other cultures, from other cultures and other races, pilfering your own heritage.
• 39:47
  You could be talking to a neo-Nazi about the values of Western civilization and how
• 39:56
  poor ignorant races who weren't capable of coming up with Western civilization for themselves
• 40:02
  are coming in and contaminating our societies. That would be a fallacious and monstrous point of
• 40:08
  view, but it's not actually that far in terms of its analysis of how the bumping into each other of
• 40:14
  the melting pot works from the point of view of these schools that are segregating children
• 40:20
  on the basis of race. Donald Trump wants to build a wall to keep out the brown people who are coming
• 40:27
  illegally across the border. They're not sending us their best people. They're sending us their
• 40:33
  rapists and so on, he says. That's not as far away from the identitarian left that wants to
• 40:42
  protect dreadlocks is something that only black people can have as either of those points of
• 40:48
  you are from your point of view. I mean, there's a more egalitarian and universalist one.
• 40:53
  Well, I mean, certainly the concern about cultural purity has historically been a right wing
• 41:00
  concern, right? The idea that as all of this scary social change in which our culture is being
• 41:08
  influenced by these outside forces or other cultures are copying elements of our culture and
• 41:14
  this is all punishes because there's a pure culture of our folk where we must protect. That is
• 41:19
  historically a right wing fault. What we have today is not the kind of right wing monoculturalism,
• 41:27
  but what I call a kind of multiple monoculturalism, which is to say, yes, diversity is great. We
• 41:33
  love the idea of having these five or six different cultural groups, but the culture of each of
• 41:38
  those groups must remain pure and unadulterated from the outside and we must be really careful
• 41:44
  about the boundaries between those kinds of groups. That is meaningfully distinct from that right
• 41:49
  and forth and that it says one nation multiple cultures rather than one nation one culture, but the
• 41:56
  heart of a worry about impurity, about mutual influence, about the freedom that people have to
• 42:04
  experiment with art and with cuisine and with music is in my mind strikingly somehow. Why synthesis?
• 42:12
  Why did you settle on the word synthesis as a way of identifying this identitarian moment?
• 42:19
  Yeah, so first of all, look, I just, you know, I don't know of this term. It's going to take over
• 42:23
  the world. I think it probably won't, but just for the sake of a book, I needed a term that clearly
• 42:29
  identifies what we're talking about and the strange thing about this ideology, which has become so
• 42:33
  influential over the last decade, is that it doesn't dare to speak its name. You know, any word that
• 42:40
  people settle on for it immediately becomes used by some polemicists to attack it and then gets
• 42:47
  treated as, well, that is just, you know, a battle term that is meant to make us look ridiculous and
• 42:55
  so on. The word woke was a term of self-description at first, right? It was a members of left wing
• 43:02
  movements very concerned with racial and other forms of identity that coined that as a positive
• 43:08
  term, right? You want to be woke, you want to be awakened to injustice, but it now has become a
• 43:13
  term where if you say, you know, I wrote writing a book about wokeness, you sound like an old man,
• 43:18
  you know, screaming at the clouds. And so I needed just for the sake of having a serious conversation,
• 43:24
  a term that was little orring and neutral so we can actually understand where do these ideas come
• 43:29
  from? How do they become so powerful? Why do they go wrong when you actually think about what
• 43:34
  influence they have and what would be a better alternative? And that is the core of the project
• 43:39
  of the book. Now why identity synthesis? Because I actually in the first part of the book really
• 43:44
  trace the roots of these ideas, you know, where do the ideas that came to be very influential
• 43:51
  in America and Australia and European universities by about 2010 come from? Now one answer to this
• 43:59
  that's given by a lot of people is this is cultural Marxism. It's just taking Marxism which is
• 44:04
  mostly about class and it's plugging in culture instead, but that explains what's going on.
• 44:10
  And I show, you know, I'm trained as an intellectual historian and so I do straightforward intellectual
• 44:15
  history and I explain where these ideas actually come from. I read over text and I find that really
• 44:22
  isn't cultural Marxism, but the starting point in many ways is Michel Foucault and the postmodern
• 44:30
  movement he inspires in France where it later becomes very influential in the United States.
• 44:37
  And for Foucault, the key starting point is the rejection of what he calls grand narratives,
• 44:44
  these grand structures ideas about how the world works, which include liberalism, which is why
• 44:50
  this tradition has from the first moment, been more post-liberism than to a right in some key ways.
• 44:56
  But it also includes Marxism, Foucault thinks of Marxism as just another grand narrative
• 45:01
  though we need to leave behind. But then his thought gets adapted by post-colonialist, like Edward
• 45:09
  Saït and Gayatri Shpíva, who really tried to use the way in which Foucault criticizes contemporary
• 45:18
  political discourses in a more political way to more political effect. The point is not just to
• 45:23
  criticize the world, Saït says, is to show how these discourses really favor one actor over
• 45:28
  another and therefore by inverting it we can actually give power to the underdog. Spívault really
• 45:36
  picks up on Foucault's critique of stable identity groups. The idea that a lot of categories where
• 45:44
  we often invoke, including racial categories, including gender categories, don't really make
• 45:49
  my sense, don't have a lot of philosophical coherence. Spívault says, look, that is right
• 45:54
  at the philosophical level, but I want to speak for the subaltern in the world. I want to speak for
• 45:58
  oppressed people in India and Algeria and other parts of the world. And to do that we actually have
• 46:03
  to organize them and encourage their identity. You can see the roots of some of the beginning of
• 46:09
  a conversation about schools and the way that teachers now think that the goal is to encourage
• 46:15
  people to have those kind of identities. And so Spívault argues for a strategic essentialism in which
• 46:20
  we sort of pretend that this essentialist account of identity is right, for strategic purposes
• 46:25
  to organize people politically, say, yes, we are members of X group and as members of X group,
• 46:30
  we're going to fight for our rights and our collective interests. Then I turn to critical race
• 46:36
  theory and the way in which the deep pessimism of direct bail about the ability to make
• 46:43
  political progress becomes influential. His embrace of a new form of segregationism in which he says,
• 46:50
  as I was talking about earlier, that actually perhaps we should have gone for separate but truly
• 46:54
  equal, that we attempt to integrate as often a mistake and then finally, Kimberly Crenshaw
• 46:59
  who introduces the idea of intersectionality, the idea that we deeply determine by this intersection
• 47:07
  of different identities and perhaps as some of our interpreters go on to think, therefore we
• 47:12
  can't really understand each other and we need to defer to each other in how we prosecute political
• 47:20
  struggles. There was a very, very dense attempt to summarize a lot of interesting intellectual
• 47:26
  history but why synthesis? Because I think that today's social justice movements are popularization,
• 47:33
  a vulgarization of his interesting, sophisticated, if sometimes wrongheaded ideas and there really
• 47:39
  are a synthesis of these different traditions, personal journalism, personal colonialism
• 47:44
  and critical race theory and they give you a lot of what is so central to his movements today.
• 47:53
  They give you the skepticism of objective absolute truth that is derived from Foucault. They give
• 48:00
  you this way of saying, how do you political battle by criticizing discourses and trying to
• 48:06
  reframe public conversations and ways that give power to the oppressed? What do we do in terms
• 48:12
  of identity? We are skeptical of these identities that have historically led to a lot of injustice
• 48:17
  on the country. We try to encourage them in such a way that people who are LGBTQ IQ or people
• 48:24
  who are black or people who are Latino, people who are Asian American, organized in order to fight
• 48:30
  for the rights and so actually we should make people think that identity is the most important
• 48:35
  thing about them. How do we think about what we think but actually it's not really been any
• 48:40
  progress and that therefore we need to really reject the fundamental institutions of our society
• 48:45
  because they're never going to be able to make us progress. The vision of a civil rights
• 48:51
  movement that we want to integrate is wrong. We're only going to make progress if how your
• 48:55
  treatise is explicitly based on the group of which you are apart. This is the synthesis of
• 49:02
  different intellectual influences that can actually help to explain discourse today
• 49:07
  from the newspaper to social media to a lot of what you might hear in a contemporary classroom.
• 49:15
  So how does it leak out of a lab? Yeah, sure. I mean all of that's fascinating as the intellectual
• 49:19
  underpinnings of all this but Foucault successfully managed to be a maligned and fringed-welling
• 49:29
  figure of mainstream philosophy from the time of his death up until a split second ago in cultural
• 49:38
  time. You write in the book about how this makes the transition partly through people graduating
• 49:46
  from university and then growing up into positions of power in institutions but also powerfully
• 49:53
  because of social media as well. What's that dynamic? How does it get out? There's a really
• 49:57
  fascinating paper by Kimberly Crenshaw, one of the key figures in critical race theory which she
• 50:03
  writes on the 30th anniversary of CRT in the early 2010s and she says look, our movement is 30 years
• 50:10
  old. We've had all of this influence in universities and now we have nice positions in universities
• 50:16
  and people listen to us to some extent and that's all great. But you know what? We have zero
• 50:21
  influence on the public and Barack Obama who members of the traditions you very, very critically as
• 50:27
  being exactly the kind of race-bind liberal whom they hate has rejected our kind of ideas
• 50:37
  and there's this moment where American society is hoping to have a kind of optimistic vision of
• 50:46
  how we can reconcile our history under these philosophically liberal egos and so therefore
• 50:53
  we're never going to have an influence on the public and of course what's interesting is that 10
• 50:57
  years later precisely Kimberly Crenshaw and her strain of thought becomes phenomenally influential
• 51:06
  and so the second part of my book after telling me intellectual history of this more academic
• 51:10
  side of this of this ideology ask how does that happen? How do we go from Kimberly Crenshaw
• 51:15
  rightly thinking around 2010 that her ideas are not very influential in the American public?
• 51:20
  How do we go 10 years later to a moment in which actually these ideas are fundamentally influential
• 51:25
  which popularized more simplistic versions of this ideology are dominating the New York Times best
• 51:30
  soloist in which corporations and organizations are pledging the the field to a lot of these ideas
• 51:36
  and I think there are sort of three main things that that happen the first is the rise of
• 51:42
  of social media and that is important in a number of ways. First of all it encourages a
• 51:49
  tremendous amount of experimentation with identity you know when you are a teenager forming your
• 51:55
  identity in the 80s or 90s you're sort of constrained by the size of your high school which is
• 52:01
  to say that to have a viable identity you have to have a couple of other people who share that
• 52:06
  identity and so if it's a relatively small environment you're in you know it's just got to be
• 52:13
  four or five percent of a population that share this identity for to really be meaningful
• 52:18
  in your context you can't get it up a ground otherwise well what happens with platforms like
• 52:23
  is that you have a self-tagging mechanism that allows you to reach people who are really far
• 52:27
  flung and so suddenly you can have an identity with only a few thousand people around the world
• 52:32
  share but that's enough to build a community to find each other to get deeper and deeper into it
• 52:37
  to encourage each other to to to adhere more and more by that form of identity and then you need
• 52:45
  something to hold with different identities together so for the first time you get this kind of like
• 52:50
  overarching ideology about identity and how you should think about it and how should be
• 52:54
  respectful and deferential to it to sort of hold together with different tribes on platforms
• 52:58
  like like Tumblr and when you start to get that in the written form in places like Fort catalog and
• 53:06
  everydaythamonism.com and salon.com eventually and and some of that goes viral in part because on
• 53:13
  social media you're connected to people who share an identity group so you know in 2012 or 2013
• 53:20
  when Vox.com has found it most of its visitors will go to the website and that means that the
• 53:26
  articles that they can publish have to appeal to a lot of average readers because otherwise you'll
• 53:33
  stop coming back to the website if most of the articles are not interested you by 2015-2016
• 53:39
  most of the article traffic comes from social media and that means that you can find nine out of
• 53:45
  10 of the articles to be super boring because they're not relevant to you but if one out of a 10
• 53:49
  of them really resonates and you share it with inverse identity based social networks it's going to
• 53:53
  go super viral and there's going to be lots of readers and so that really shifts what kind of
• 53:59
  articles even new mainstream-ish publications like Vox published and when they become phenomenally
• 54:06
  successful and have lots of young writers who thrive in this way they get scooped up by the
• 54:11
  Washington Post and New York Times and within few years this goes from you know Fort catalog to
• 54:17
  everydaythamonism.com to Vox to the pages of the New York Times. And as this happens I mean part of
• 54:24
  the one of the other liabilities is that the people who are more aligned with the way that you
• 54:29
  look at the world get sloughed off from those institutions because it becomes unbearable so
• 54:34
  manic laceous and as recline and Barry Weiss you know and Andrew Sullivan these are all very
• 54:41
  different people with very different world views but what they share in common is that they had no
• 54:45
  truck with an increasingly rigid world view at the institutions that they were that they were
• 54:52
  employed at and so then those voices are no longer in those outlets at all. That's correct
• 54:58
  and that's connected to to to a second mechanism I talk about which is a short march for the
• 55:02
  institutions so another thing that happens is that by 2010 you go to an elite university in
• 55:08
  the United States and you will encounter the ideas of the identity synthesis in a lot of classrooms
• 55:15
  no matter what your majors because of distribution requirements and other things and you will
• 55:20
  also encounter very very strongly in the trainings of the increasingly powerful class of bureaucrats
• 55:26
  on campus and so when you go out into the work world and especially in industries that lean very
• 55:35
  young that have to compete a lot to recruit smart young people and that have some sort of conception
• 55:44
  of being do good as a serving good good causes it becomes very hard for institutions to resist
• 55:53
  the call to go along with ideology so that's particularly true in tech it's particularly true
• 56:00
  in the nonprofit sector it's particularly true in any form of left-leaning media and so you
• 56:08
  know you have people who are true believers in this ideology interview institution and in part
• 56:13
  because they can shame people on social media so there's a feedback loop of the other stuff
• 56:17
  we've talked about they become very powerful very quickly and quickly if you truly offend the
• 56:22
  sensibilities of some of these young staffers your position becomes untenable even if you're
• 56:28
  much more senior even if you're much more recognizable and you know that starts to get to some of the
• 56:35
  you know stories of cancellation and people being pushed out that you know we've seen play out
• 56:40
  again and again in the last years and then perhaps just very quickly a third element and then
• 56:45
  you really have a transformation then Trump gets elected and what happens is that usually
• 56:49
  humans are actually quite tolerant of in group dissenters in general they actually understand that
• 56:59
  you know if you're historically over left and you have you know a little bit of jobs to show that
• 57:07
  and you're saying hey I'm not you know on the other side I just worry about some of the
• 57:13
  logical changes on our own side and I think that this might become to productive perhaps not
• 57:17
  setting up the kind of world we want people actually might be open to listening unless and
• 57:22
  there's really strong social science research on this unless there's a condition of threat unless
• 57:26
  you feel like our group is under attack and then of those circumstances this tolerance towards
• 57:31
  in group dissenters actually turns into special hostility they're often benzene more negatively
• 57:36
  than even an out group critic because suddenly you're a traitor so the line just dropped out and
• 57:42
  we've had to reconnect but I know that we also share a lot of thoughts about free speech
• 57:48
  talk to me why is free speech important what is free speech yeah so you know the sort of
• 57:54
  traditional arguments about free speech which I think are really interesting and important right so
• 58:01
  when we chance to add mail so on liberty he tells you about all the great things that you get from
• 58:05
  having free speech you know he emphasizes that it's important with pursuit of truth that for
• 58:12
  many millennia you know some of the most important voices that allowed discoveries for humans
• 58:20
  were shut up and some of the points may have gotten lost he says that actually even if somebody's
• 58:27
  arguing something that turns out to be false it's important to let them speak because you
• 58:31
  won't know our own ideas or own case properly if we don't have anybody speaking against them and
• 58:36
  I think those are all right and good but too much of the case for free speech at a moment when
• 58:41
  it's really threatened can I just push back on that for one second from the perspective of the
• 58:47
  the new way of thinking about things in the sense that so that that John Stuart Mill position
• 58:55
  is under seems quaint and a little bit try it and maybe tweed to people on the progressive
• 59:04
  I guess identity synthesis left at the moment in the sense that what I hear is there are certain
• 59:10
  truths that we can just all agree on don't need to be in the public square kill all the Jews
• 59:15
  is is not something is not a point of view that needs that actually needs airing there is no
• 59:20
  there is no the chances of that being an insightful position that needs to be interrogated are so low
• 59:27
  that there is no great harm in ruling it out similarly you know trans people are depraved and
• 59:34
  confused and should not be allowed to access medical care under any circumstances you know we
• 59:39
  can just rule that out and that in every year we have taboos that we rule out of the public square
• 59:45
  and there is a sort of marching vanguard of new norms that redefine the rules and at every point in
• 59:51
  time there are middle aged white guys waving their fists in the air and railing at kids these days
• 59:57
  who who want to do all these crazy things like a ban them from slapping women on the butts in the
• 1:00:02
  workplace and ban them from using the n-word but we just change the rules about what's okay and
• 1:00:07
  what's not okay and we have new contours for the conversation and as long as you don't get too
• 1:00:11
  carried away all you have to do is say this is what hate speech is we don't condone hate speech
• 1:00:17
  and therefore these ideas have ruled out and so what's your response to that I mean you're okay
• 1:00:23
  with that or is there a Jon Stewart million response to that no that's exactly why I think for the
• 1:00:27
  Jon Stewart middle case which I think is important I agree with is not enough because it's not
• 1:00:32
  enough to respond to those kinds of critiques and that's why I actually focus in my case for free
• 1:00:38
  speech not on the great things but we get out of having free speech which I make a real
• 1:00:42
  I focus on the terrible things that happen if you don't have free speech and so my main answer
• 1:00:47
  to a progressive left on the count of free speech is that they sort of suffer and this kind of strange
• 1:00:53
  delusion where you know a lot of the advocacy of safe spaces of limits on free speech of speech
• 1:01:02
  started on these highly progressive college campuses and that's important because the left
• 1:01:07
  rightly assumed that inverse spaces they hold the power they would get to decide what is
• 1:01:13
  sayable and what is not sayable what is allowed and what is not allowed but when you actually
• 1:01:17
  take that out into a broader political context two countries like the United States it's not always
• 1:01:22
  going to be the sort of good bleeding heart liberal or even the sort of you know file left
• 1:01:28
  identityarian who makes decisions a lot of a time it's going to people far right populists and
• 1:01:34
  others who actually mean a lot of ill for those groups and so historically the reason why the left
• 1:01:39
  has actually been an advocate of free speech is because of its recognition but I definition the
• 1:01:44
  people making decisions about this are the powerful who gets to censor the person who is in a
• 1:01:49
  position of power and who needs free speech the abolitionist the member of civil rights movement
• 1:01:55
  the spokesperson for marginalised groups that actually speaks on the behalf of the people who
• 1:02:02
  generally don't held power in society so that's the first terrible thing that happens when you
• 1:02:07
  don't have free speech it actually marginalises people who don't have power and on the second
• 1:02:11
  point is that it really raises the stakes of political competition right I'm very worried I've
• 1:02:17
  been worried for a decade about the threat that populists pose to democracies around the world
• 1:02:22
  and one of the things that I've observed is that when the polarization is so bad and you fear
• 1:02:26
  what it means to be out of office is so bad that the stakes of elections become intolerably high
• 1:02:32
  the incentive to disobey outcomes of elections grows and grows and grows until the system breaks down
• 1:02:39
  and what's one of the things that free speech allows is to say you might lose this election
• 1:02:44
  that might be painful but you can mitigate military for your cause and you can get reelected
• 1:02:50
  at the next election once you fear that once you're out of power you also are not going to be able
• 1:02:55
  to save the things that you believe or to argue for the things you're passionate about it becomes
• 1:03:00
  even more tempting to say I'm going to break with the rules of the democratic game because losing power
• 1:03:05
  is intolerable so these are just two of the bad things that happen if you don't have free speech
• 1:03:09
  and so I think we need a sort of more hard-nosed defensive free speech which isn't just about
• 1:03:13
  the good things we get from having it it's about those bad things that happen when we give up on it
• 1:03:17
  interesting you finish the book by talking about the way out of the identity trap you talk about
• 1:03:24
  three possible futures for the identity trap what are they yeah so you know there's a debate right now
• 1:03:30
  about you know is the identity trap basically victorious is it too late to really resist it is
• 1:03:37
  it clear that it has taken control of mainstream institutions to such an extent that this is just
• 1:03:42
  going to be the ideology of mainstream institutions in the west for the next decades
• 1:03:49
  you know there's a second set of arguments which either claims that it never really had power
• 1:03:53
  or says that you know we're seeing first indications of pushback against it in certain institutions
• 1:03:59
  you know the New York Times opinion page is sort of a little more sensible than it used to be a few
• 1:04:03
  years ago we saw after an attempted silencing and counseling of a judge at Stanford law school
• 1:04:09
  that the dean of Stanford law school wrote a very thoughtful considered 10-page memo to the
• 1:04:15
  community explaining her stance on free speech which defended the importance of academic freedom
• 1:04:21
  and criticized those events so perhaps actually this is already over and the moment is passed
• 1:04:26
  I think that we're likely somewhere in the middle so some of the most extreme
• 1:04:34
  forms of a popularized form of the identity synthesis I'm experiencing pushback you know it used
• 1:04:41
  to be that when somebody quite unsophisticated like Ibrahim X Candy tweeted unfounded statements
• 1:04:48
  everybody would applaud and now you know you often get real pushback we see that some of the
• 1:04:54
  most extreme institutional practices are being wrote back a little bit and that's a good sign
• 1:04:59
  but at the same time we're also seeing that the bottom line assumptions of a lot of our society
• 1:05:06
  are just steeped in the identity synthesis a lot of the students I teach are thoughtful smart people
• 1:05:14
  and once you start having conversations with them and debating with them they're very very open
• 1:05:18
  to thinking about a world in an open mind way but the basic assumptions they have is that cultural
• 1:05:23
  appropriation is under all circumstances suspect that there's something rewiring about
• 1:05:28
  intercultural communication but we really can't understand members of our other identity groups
• 1:05:33
  in a genuine way that you know we need to make sure that certain kinds of offensive speech are
• 1:05:38
  banished from society and people are punished for it those are bottom line assumptions that a lot
• 1:05:43
  of members of the future ruling the lead of our countries now have and so I actually think that
• 1:05:48
  this is going to be a really long fight we're going to be debating the extent of influence of
• 1:05:54
  the identity synthesis for the next 20 or 30 years it's going to be one of the big intellectual
• 1:05:59
  battles of the beginning of the 21st century and that's why I wrote this book that's why I think
• 1:06:04
  that it's so important to actually understand these ideas properly to consider them seriously and to
• 1:06:10
  mount you know not for best babs about from on twitter not the best outrage stories about sort of
• 1:06:14
  the silliest ways which have been implemented but the most serious philosophically profound
• 1:06:20
  persuasive arguments against it because this is a fight that we're going to be in for a long time
• 1:06:26
  how persuasive are they do you think to the common person I go back and forth about this I mean
• 1:06:31
  not just now but over the arc of human history I have a friend of mine one of the smartest guys I
• 1:06:35
  know works for one of the big newspapers in the United States he's a an oxbridge educated British guy
• 1:06:41
  who's spent a lot of time in Berlin understands East Germany well had East German grandparents
• 1:06:47
  has has lived all over the world and his attitude is basically you know what liberalism has never
• 1:06:53
  been very popular if you actually really get down to the bare bones and ask the average person whether
• 1:06:59
  or not they want to abide by Voltae's supposedly apocryphal statement about you know hating what you
• 1:07:07
  say but defending to the death you're right to say it they don't really want that they want to
• 1:07:11
  live around people who kind of think like them and behave like them and they are quite comfortable
• 1:07:17
  with a certain level of authoritarianism as long as it suits their prejudices and we've had a
• 1:07:22
  brief window either in the post war period or since the enlightenment depending on how far you
• 1:07:27
  want to cast back the the calendar in which smaller liberals have been ascendant and they have
• 1:07:32
  created the greatest opulence and the most sophisticated democratic societies that the world has
• 1:07:38
  ever known but there's no reason why that isn't just a blip in the longer term history of humankind
• 1:07:43
  most of our lives have been tribal and hostile and authoritarian and maybe our future is as well
• 1:07:49
  what do you make of that depressing point of view well two thoughts about this I mean the first
• 1:07:53
  is better do worry about the extent to which humans have a tendency to be groupish to you know
• 1:08:01
  form groups favorably in group over the out group and this has again and again let especially
• 1:08:06
  diverse societies into run civil war genocide and things like like the Holocaust and so that is
• 1:08:15
  it you know a perennial fight about we're going to have to wage I think I'm a little bit more
• 1:08:22
  optimistic about the extent to which ordinary citizens today in Australia in the United Kingdom
• 1:08:29
  and Germany and in many other parts of the world in Japan and Taiwan and other places
• 1:08:35
  are liberal and that doesn't mean that they've read John Stuart Mill and they're able to to
• 1:08:40
  recite those principles it doesn't even mean that they might not sometimes be tempted when somebody
• 1:08:45
  says you know really unpleasant awful things are just shut up let's just get this person shut up
• 1:08:51
  but I do think but when we adopt really liberal customs when they see people being punished in
• 1:08:59
  unfair ways when they feel the dominance of a discourse that they are strongly incentivized not
• 1:09:07
  to speak up against on pain of losing their job they they feel really uncomfortable with that
• 1:09:14
  they actually recognize forms of liberalism and and opposed them and so I think what we need to do
• 1:09:21
  in order to win the discourse as it were is to have better and more sophisticated responses one
• 1:09:27
  of the things I tried to do in the book is to say look ultimately this tradition I've been talking
• 1:09:32
  about which really is at its heart and attack on liberalism even boil it down to free basic
• 1:09:38
  propositions the first of it is that you know identity especially race and gender and sexual
• 1:09:43
  orientation is the fundamental prison for understanding the world it second but a lot of the time
• 1:09:49
  is sort of a nice talk with liberals half about the principles of the United States Constitution or
• 1:09:55
  you know the the the great great ideas of equality all men are born equal and so on you know
• 1:10:00
  that's just pulling all over people's eyes because it's always hidden a lot of discrimination
• 1:10:04
  and so on and that's always been its purpose right I mean thirdly we've not made any progress
• 1:10:08
  right as some lectoric bell would say things like any better today on race than were 50 or 25
• 1:10:13
  years ago that is power because it contains the kernel of a truth but what we need is a sophisticated
• 1:10:21
  response which is able to recognize person justices and formulate a much more realistic and by
• 1:10:28
  way upbeat ambitious response about the kind of society we want to build so what I say in response
• 1:10:33
  that is that yes of course one of the prisons we need to understand the world is identity some of
• 1:10:38
  the important facts about the world are about things like race and gender and sexual orientation
• 1:10:43
  but that's not the only prison we also need to think about economic class about religion
• 1:10:48
  about people's convictions you cannot understand the world in a monopausal way there's different
• 1:10:53
  kinds of forces going on secondly but yes of course liberal societies have never fully lived up
• 1:10:59
  to the kind of aspirations they had but we have actually made significant progress we
• 1:11:04
  not today today is much better on race than it was 50 years ago Australia today is much better
• 1:11:09
  on gender than it was 50 years ago and so you know what instead of being cynical and given up
• 1:11:14
  on the idea to live up to these ideals we actually to fight to live up to women build these better
• 1:11:19
  societies and that in the end is the best defense against the kind of tribalism that you talk about
• 1:11:26
  because when people have no hope for the future when they just feel that they're being cast as a
• 1:11:31
  bad guy or that society is always going to be fundamentally you know a zero sum battle between
• 1:11:38
  that different identity groups that is when they're tempted to go back into the kind of tribalism
• 1:11:43
  but as a struggle be most destructive of freedom of prosperity of peace and of over wonderful
• 1:11:50
  things we have today in our society so the ability to be friends with each other across different
• 1:11:55
  lines of identity of engaging with each other of meeting new people of living in a really vibrant
• 1:12:03
  forward-looking society and that brings us to the specific recommendations that you have about
• 1:12:09
  how to argue against the identity trap which is how you basically end the book the first of
• 1:12:14
  which is to claim the moral high ground can you talk us through how we should react to this moment
• 1:12:19
  yeah look I think a lot of what happens when people try to speak up against an ideology that in
• 1:12:26
  many spaces is quite dominant and it can feel scary to speak up against it is one of two things
• 1:12:33
  either they're so apologetic from the first moment that it kind of look and feel guilty you know
• 1:12:39
  like oh I mean I really hate to disagree but you know I feel bad to say this but isn't it true
• 1:12:46
  that you know and that immediately seeds from our high ground where you impersonating somebody
• 1:12:52
  who seems to be shifty and nervous and have sort of bad intentions right you also waste a
• 1:12:57
  lot of people's time it's that it's what I call the throat clearing process of talking about
• 1:13:01
  anything you know if you're if you're if you're talking about whether or not something that might
• 1:13:05
  be tried you know like a let's suppose you think that there's limited utility in having what it
• 1:13:12
  has become the norm in Australia which is an acknowledgement of country before every Zoom meeting
• 1:13:17
  that you have with your colleagues you know a land acknowledgement about the traditional owners
• 1:13:21
  of the land if you know unless you are a First Nations person yourself to question whether or not
• 1:13:29
  the script that people are reading is useful in improving the lives of disadvantaged First Nations
• 1:13:35
  Australians you would have to precede that with 45 seconds of saying look as a non First Nations
• 1:13:41
  Australian as a white person you know I know that you know and as a man obviously and I'm speaking
• 1:13:47
  from a place of privilege but nonetheless do you think that maybe when we conduct these meetings we
• 1:13:51
  could XYZ there's a lot there's a huge there's just an attentional and cultural and time
• 1:14:00
  cost in broaching any subject because of the caveats that you need to put on up front and I
• 1:14:06
  agree with you I think that a more robust and frank and bullshit free diving into the actual
• 1:14:14
  meat of the conversation would probably be bracing and useful for everybody right and you can never
• 1:14:20
  you know the attempt is always to show your bona fide but nothing it'll always ring falls
• 1:14:24
  and nothing you do is gonna have to do of course I care deeply about you know you always feel nervous
• 1:14:28
  and shifty and it just puts you on the wrong foot now what I also don't think works which I also
• 1:14:32
  see is a kind of abrasiveness right like you're gonna hate what I say anyway in some I'm just gonna
• 1:14:36
  say this is a barb and you know like like I'm gonna play the role of a jerk because I know you're
• 1:14:41
  gonna you know try to cancel me whatever I say right and I think that's also starting off from
• 1:14:47
  the wrong foot look I wrote this book I'm talking about this to you because these are my most
• 1:14:52
  fundamental convictions and my most fundamental convictions about how to build a good and just
• 1:14:58
  intolerant society in which we all to the extent possible can live up to to to our potential
• 1:15:05
  and we can have meaningful lives I might be wrong about that I might be wrong in some of the things
• 1:15:09
  I said today perhaps somebody will will will convince me otherwise and that's fine but I have nothing
• 1:15:14
  to be ashamed of I'm speaking from the bottom of my heart for the kind of society in which I
• 1:15:20
  want to live in which I think a lot of us want to live and so I think if you speak with with that
• 1:15:26
  authenticity and if you know you don't try to offend people needlessly you don't try to be a jerk
• 1:15:31
  you also don't you know over apologize you simply have the self-confidence and the courage to say
• 1:15:37
  these are my fundamental convictions and that's why I'm raising my voice that's why I'm speaking
• 1:15:41
  up about it I think it it just signals the right kind of attitude and the other point that you
• 1:15:48
  make on that is that remember that you're always trying to appeal to the reasonable majority and
• 1:15:53
  that people who are currently against you who are currently your adversaries could be your allies
• 1:15:58
  tomorrow so don't become a reactionary as you say don't become a jerk speak in ways that are
• 1:16:03
  as unifying as possible and make common cause with as many people as you can yeah and one of the
• 1:16:09
  things that's striking to me is that some of the most interesting critics of this tradition once
• 1:16:16
  believed in it deeply Ebu Patel a great Muslim community organizer in in the United States who
• 1:16:23
  does a lot of interfaith work describes quite beautifully how when he was college so the early
• 1:16:29
  version of the identity synthesis helped him understand his experience as the child of Indian
• 1:16:34
  immigrants you know to the Midwest and for a while he really became obsessed with it and and he's
• 1:16:39
  sort of intellectual orientation became quite destructive right he looked around just saying you
• 1:16:42
  know this is bad and this is racist and this is sexist and that's sort of the way in which she
• 1:16:47
  was oriented and then a couple of key experiences made him realize I don't want to be a bad person
• 1:16:53
  I actually want to build stuff and slowly he grew to be more critical of the tradition and not today
• 1:16:57
  I think he's one of most convincing people who are genuine concern about social justice you know a
• 1:17:04
  deep commitment to anti-racism but somebody who's really really persuasive in saying you know
• 1:17:10
  these assumptions but we can't understand each other but there's no progress to be made
• 1:17:15
  that we have to be worried about mutual influence no those are a mistake we actually need a more
• 1:17:20
  optimistic a more forward looking way of understanding ourselves and so yeah the fact that somebody
• 1:17:27
  doesn't agree with you today doesn't mean that they might not become one of your most valued allies
• 1:17:30
  tomorrow and as you're saying most people are on the sensible side here you know this is broader
• 1:17:37
  point you know there's so many people are now trying to defend democracy who seem to think but
• 1:17:41
  the majority of citizens are terrible human beings and I think it's very hard to be a democrat if
• 1:17:45
  you believe that I am a deep down democrat and I worry about the state of democracy but I believe
• 1:17:51
  that that most people are decent and sometimes with vote for people that deeply dislike or the
• 1:17:56
  whole positions with which I deeply disagree but you know what they are responsive to moral
• 1:18:01
  arguments and they largely share values that are recognizable to all of us and I think it's true
• 1:18:09
  in this topic as well the number of people who are really just like deep ideologues in this kind of
• 1:18:13
  way is small the very influential at the moment because as a conspiracy of silence and people
• 1:18:19
  don't feel comfortable arguing back against pushing back against it in the professional milieu but
• 1:18:24
  ultimately ultimately the number of people who really believe this is quite small and if you speak
• 1:18:29
  up respectfully but without apology in a self-confident way knowing that you are arguing for
• 1:18:36
  you believe to be right for you believe to be just you're going to be just fine and together we're
• 1:18:42
  going to beat this. Yasha it's terrific to talk to you again the new book is called The Identity
• 1:18:47
  Trap a story of ideas and power in our time thanks so much for telling us about it thank you so
• 1:18:53
  much Yasha.