Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Can Liberalism Survive?" with Waleed Aly

Transcript

"Can Liberalism Survive?" with Waleed Aly · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  The introduction you're about to hear was recorded just hours before the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel,
• 0:06
  which is both the clearest and the gravest instance of cancel culture
• 0:12
  anywhere in the free world in my lifetime.
• 0:16
  The emphasis of my comments would be different.
• 0:20
  Had they been recorded a few hours later, but the principles remain the same.
• 0:26
  Enjoy the show.
• 0:30
  Good day, humans.
• 0:32
  Welcome to The Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas.
• 0:36
  There have been a lot of dangerous ideas floating around this week.
• 0:40
  And we're all in need of a safe space and a little tenderness.
• 0:44
  This is an amazing episode.
• 0:46
  A fabulous episode.
• 0:48
  I was just so inspired by this conversation.
• 0:50
  Walid Ali is so thoughtful.
• 0:52
  He's one of the most prominent and famous and celebrated names in Australia.
• 0:58
  He hosted a television host as a radio host and as an academic.
• 1:02
  He hosted the nightly show on Channel 10, which was called The Project,
• 1:06
  which was a news panel show, a little bit tongue-in-cheek for more than 10 years.
• 1:12
  He's also a lecturer in politics at Monash University in Melbourne.
• 1:16
  As a journalist, Walid has won Australian Journalism's most prestigious prize, a Walkley Award,
• 1:22
  as well as being awarded the sort of popularity contest prize of Australian television,
• 1:26
  the Gold Logi for most popular Australian television personality.
• 1:30
  He is also a two-time back-to-back winner of the Silver Logi Award for Best Television Host.
• 1:36
  But the reason he's of particular interest to me at this particular moment
• 1:40
  is that his specialty is working in the Global Terrorism Research Centre at Monash University.
• 1:46
  He wrote a book called People Like Us,
• 1:50
  how arrogance is dividing Islam and the West.
• 1:54
  And he is an academic expert in extremism, free speech, liberalism and democracy.
• 2:00
  I've been wanting to get Walid on the show for a very long time.
• 2:04
  He is a reasonably private person, but an incredibly thoughtful person
• 2:08
  about whether or not we can hold this whole thing together in an era of social media
• 2:12
  and artificial intelligence and the internet and the attempts by many
• 2:16
  to tear away at the fabric of liberalism itself.
• 2:20
  We're speaking, of course, in a week in which President Donald Trump is trying to use the assassination of Charlie Kirk
• 2:26
  as a pretext for cracking down on his political enemies.
• 2:30
  As the New York Times puts it, Trump invokes Kirk's killing and justifying measures to silence opponents.
• 2:36
  In the wake of Charlie Kirk's killing, the Times writes,
• 2:38
  President Trump and his allies have laid out a broad plan to target liberal groups,
• 2:44
  each revoke visas and designate certain groups as domestic terrorists.
• 2:50
  Let me just say this.
• 2:52
  There has never been a moment of political violence in history
• 2:56
  that has been resolved by one side escalating it.
• 3:00
  Let alone both sides escalating it.
• 3:04
  Deescalation is our only option and it's time to be vigilant
• 3:08
  about the current American administration's attempts to overreach and punish their enemies
• 3:12
  and silence speech.
• 3:14
  I mean, I hate to say I told you so to the left,
• 3:18
  but to those who have been saying that people like me who've been banging on about
• 3:22
  liberalism on the left for the past 10 years have had our priorities out of whack
• 3:28
  because the real threat comes from the right.
• 3:30
  I say, why did you ever think that normalizing
• 3:34
  canceling people for their ideas was going to benefit the left
• 3:38
  just because it happened to be culturally ascendant at that particular moment?
• 3:42
  It was always obvious that at some point there would be people you hate in power
• 3:47
  who would use exactly the same pretext against you.
• 3:50
  And look, maybe they would use those pretexts anyway,
• 3:53
  but maybe they wouldn't be in power.
• 3:55
  Had we appeared so unattractive, so noxious, so finger wagging,
• 4:00
  so sanctimonious and so sensorious.
• 4:03
  I'll give you just one example.
• 4:05
  A journalist was fired by the Washington Post this week for her tweets about Charlie Kirk,
• 4:10
  which they found distasteful, which seemed to be blaming the victim,
• 4:13
  which was certainly misrepresenting some of his comments by taking the amount of context.
• 4:17
  Karen Attia is her name. She's now gone to substack and she's trying to recruit supporters
• 4:21
  by saying that she's been a victim of cancellation.
• 4:24
  A phenomenon which she herself has spent the past five years denying exists
• 4:29
  because it was her and her colleagues who were doing it.
• 4:33
  I will read to you a tweet from the fourth of June, 2020.
• 4:39
  Karen tweeted,
• 4:40
  The New York Times put black people and black journalists in danger with that Tom Cotton piece.
• 4:45
  This is not okay.
• 4:47
  That's a reference to an opinion piece that The New York Times published
• 4:51
  during the racial riots of the summer of 2020 by a senator who was saying
• 4:56
  that the Trump administration should deploy the army to quash the protests.
• 5:01
  The op-ed page editor was subsequently fired because of that controversy
• 5:06
  and it was people like Karen who created the meltdown that led to that firing.
• 5:12
  On the 8th of July, 2020, she tweeted,
• 5:15
  What too many folks are afraid of isn't, quote unquote, cancel culture.
• 5:20
  They are afraid of losing power, exhibiting symptoms of status anxiety
• 5:25
  because too many have refused to keep up with the times,
• 5:28
  coddling intellectual laziness and harmful rhetoric is no longer a moral virtue.
• 5:35
  July the 30th, 2020,
• 5:37
  I would like to cancel the myth of cancel culture.
• 5:41
  She tweeted,
• 5:42
  She went on a television show which is posted on YouTube on the 11th of November 2021
• 5:47
  entitled,
• 5:48
  Canceling, quote unquote,
• 5:49
  Is way of speaking truth to power, Karen Attia argues.
• 5:54
  And the description is the term cancel culture is pejorative against those breaking down
• 5:59
  entrenched and often abusive power structures argues Washington Post columnist Karen Attia.
• 6:05
  She tweeted in 2022 on the 19th of March,
• 6:09
  quote unquote, cancel culture anxiety is not about free speech.
• 6:13
  It's about status anxiety.
• 6:15
  It's not a coincidence that quote unquote, cancel culture is now a pejorative
• 6:20
  after me too and Black Lives Matter targeted the existing sexist and racist structures in America.
• 6:27
  We are in a power struggle.
• 6:30
  And then 15th of September 2025,
• 6:34
  she posted on substack,
• 6:36
  The Washington Post fired me,
• 6:38
  but my voice will not be silenced.
• 6:40
  I spoke out against hatred and violence in America and it cost me my job.
• 6:46
  She wrote some news I've been fired from the Washington Post.
• 6:49
  My offense calling out America's acceptance of hatred and political violence,
• 6:53
  gun deaths, especially when the violence is carried out by white men.
• 6:58
  For this, the Washington Post accused me of quote unquote gross misconduct,
• 7:03
  putting its staff in danger and fired me without a conversation or review.
• 7:10
  And she encourages people to subscribe to her substack and give her money there.
• 7:14
  I'm sorry.
• 7:16
  I think the firing is ridiculous.
• 7:19
  I don't think that she did anything worthy of being fired.
• 7:23
  And I understand her skepticism towards the Washington Post's claim that she put anyone in danger.
• 7:28
  It's hard to imagine how she put the staff in danger.
• 7:32
  But she was also saying in the summer of 2020 that Tom Cotton's op-ed was putting staff in danger.
• 7:40
  She literally tweeted and I repeat.
• 7:43
  I quote, the New York Times put black people and black journalists in danger
• 7:48
  with that Tom Cotton piece.
• 7:50
  Well, I'm sad to say you reap what you sow.
• 7:56
  I recorded the interview that you're about to hear with Waleed Ali this Tuesday down in Melbourne.
• 8:02
  On the same day, I had a piece published in the age in Melbourne and the city morning herald in Sydney
• 8:09
  and all of their sister newspapers in other capital cities around the country.
• 8:13
  I want to read it to you now because Waleed and I discuss many of the ideas in that piece
• 8:18
  and he and I disagree about liberalism.
• 8:21
  He's also a practicing Muslim of Egyptian parentage and I've never heard him speak publicly about his faith,
• 8:27
  about his relationship to Islam or to defend it.
• 8:30
  As I said, he's quite a private person but in this two and a half hour chat
• 8:34
  I managed to go there and to many other areas which I think are really stimulating
• 8:38
  at this moment of heightened tensions and fragile nerves.
• 8:42
  The piece is entitled The Dangerous Logic Behind the Killing of Charlie Kirk.
• 8:48
  And I wrote,
• 8:51
  The refrain was predictable as soon as the bullet tore through Charlie Kirk's flesh.
• 8:57
  There is no justification for political violence.
• 9:02
  Well, okay, obviously there's just one itsy-bitsy tinny-weeny problem.
• 9:09
  There is, in fact, a clear justification for political violence
• 9:13
  if you accept the moral premises of how we've been discussing speech, harm and safety
• 9:19
  for the past decade or so, which I don't.
• 9:23
  We've claimed, I wrote, for some time, that our political adversaries pose an existential threat
• 9:31
  that it's noble to defend your tribe, that ideas make us unsafe and that words can be violence.
• 9:40
  From that position, as opposed to a position of traditional liberalism,
• 9:45
  it's tricky to oppose the logic of violence.
• 9:50
  The assassination of one of America's most articulate and influential conservative activists
• 9:54
  is the most dangerous flashpoint yet in a powder keg of American political violence.
• 10:01
  In December, the CEO of the Health Insurance Company United Healthcare was assassinated
• 10:06
  apparently by a 26-year-old protesting the American healthcare system.
• 10:11
  In April, the governor of Pennsylvania suffered a political assassination attempt
• 10:16
  when his house was set on fire while he and his family slept in it.
• 10:20
  The suspect is a Trump supporting pro-Palestinian man.
• 10:24
  The governor is anti-Trump and Jewish.
• 10:28
  In May, a young couple who worked at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C.
• 10:32
  was shot dead outside an event by a protestor who yelled,
• 10:36
  "'Palestine,' and told police, "'I did it for Palestine, I did it for Gaza.'
• 10:41
  The slain couple were about to get engaged.
• 10:45
  In June, the leader of the Minnesota House Democratic Caucus and her husband were murdered in their home.
• 10:51
  The suspect is a right-wing activist seemingly motivated by his opposition to abortion.
• 10:58
  In July, nearly a dozen pro-immigrant activists protesting President Trump's immigration policies
• 11:05
  ambushed a US immigration and customs enforcement immigrant detention facility in Texas,
• 11:11
  armed with tactical gear and weapons, shooting a law enforcement officer."
• 11:17
  And can I just make an aside here? This is me speaking now, not the article.
• 11:21
  Does anyone believe that any of those people were less convinced that their positions were noble or worthy
• 11:29
  than any of the people currently being cancelled by the Trump administration's overreach?
• 11:34
  Do.
• 11:35
  Karinati would probably say, if I had her sitting here right now,
• 11:39
  well, I was only talking about the so-called cancellation of people who were embedding themselves
• 11:46
  in a white supremacist power structure and who were enacting their violence through words
• 11:51
  on traditionally disenfranchised communities, the LGBT community, the Black community, against women.
• 11:57
  These are people who deserve to be cancelled because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 12:00
  And exactly the same rhetorical chess move could be made by any of these people who resorted to violence,
• 12:09
  any of these people who tried to shut their opponents up.
• 12:14
  Back to the article, I wrote, and now Charlie Kirk.
• 12:21
  Charlie and I swam in similar circles, I wrote, as podcast hosts and commentators,
• 12:27
  though we disagreed almost everything.
• 12:30
  He, a Christian conservative, me, a secular lefty.
• 12:35
  Social justice activists called him a fascist, which meant he was a normal Republican.
• 12:41
  He traveled from university to university with a sunny, contrarian cool,
• 12:46
  spreading ideas I find supremely offensive.
• 12:50
  He would have made my same-sex marriage illegal if given the chance for a start.
• 12:56
  But Charlie was doing politics the correct way.
• 13:00
  Talking, debating, persuading.
• 13:04
  As his star rose, American campuses became increasingly dangerous for controversial speakers
• 13:11
  who were silenced by mobs and protesters and rioters.
• 13:15
  Charlie was literally engaging in civil discourse when he was shut down.
• 13:22
  His daughter had just celebrated her third birthday.
• 13:26
  She was at the event, watching, with her one-year-old brother.
• 13:33
  We don't know the assassin's motives.
• 13:36
  He may have been inspired as much by a spectacular shock and gore as by politics.
• 13:43
  But the suspect in custody was at the very least play-acting as an anti-fascist.
• 13:49
  His ammunition casing was engraved with a reference from Hell Divers 2,
• 13:53
  an anti-fascist video game.
• 13:55
  Hey fascist, catch!
• 13:59
  Everyone, understandably, wants to condemn this.
• 14:03
  But we've backed ourselves into a corner.
• 14:07
  If our adversaries inflict violence on us, merely by expressing their ideas,
• 14:15
  on what basis are we prohibited from retaliating with actual violence?
• 14:20
  A former Democratic candidate from Texas Matthew Dowd came closest to saying the quiet part out loud on the American News Network MSNBC.
• 14:28
  Quote,
• 14:29
  See, I wrote in the paper.
• 14:54
  If only Charlie hadn't had the wrong ideas, he wouldn't need to have been eliminated.
• 15:00
  If we want to ground Australian society in principles that discourage violence,
• 15:05
  we need to think about how our conversational norms have shifted in ways that blur the line between bad ideas and bad actions.
• 15:15
  Three recent cultural changes are glaring.
• 15:20
  First, people who disagree with us are said to make us unsafe.
• 15:25
  Second, political disagreements are framed as existential threats.
• 15:31
  Third, group identities are prioritized over individual character, both on the left,
• 15:38
  woke identity politics, and on the right, margar blood and soil nationalism.
• 15:45
  Right-wing groups have reacted to Kirk's killing by compiling lists of enemies,
• 15:50
  including a website devoted to publishing the names, locations, and photos of anyone who seemed to mock or celebrate Charlie's death on social media.
• 16:00
  The left was supposed to respond to such McCarthyite divisiveness by appealing to our universal humanity.
• 16:08
  I have a dream and all that.
• 16:11
  Instead, progressive groups now also publish lists of enemies.
• 16:17
  Since when do the good guys maintain black lists?
• 16:22
  Whether it's the Bendigo Writers Festival controversy, the Antoinette La Tooth saga,
• 16:27
  the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra controversy, the doxing of Jewish creatives,
• 16:31
  the firing of journalists for transgender articles, or any number of culture war flashpoints,
• 16:37
  the message has been clear.
• 16:40
  We need to protect decent people from bad ideas.
• 16:44
  We need to shut people down instead of building the conversation up.
• 16:49
  And why not, I wrote?
• 16:53
  If you really believe your political opponents are destroying you, why would you sit idly by?
• 16:59
  If Islam is destroying Western civilization, then Muslims need to be made to feel unsafe.
• 17:06
  If Zionists are genocidal, then Jews ought to be attacked.
• 17:11
  If the left is trying to destroy the meritocratic system that built America, then leftists need to go.
• 17:19
  If right wing speakers on college campuses need to be silenced, then they need to be silenced.
• 17:28
  When everything is catastrophized, the conclusions are repugnant.
• 17:36
  The idea that you could be peering through the scope of a sniper's rifle at an unarmed podcaster's head
• 17:43
  and think that you're the one who's not the fascist is interesting.
• 17:50
  But how much more delusional is it really than burning down a hotel for asylum seekers
• 17:55
  and thinking you're the one defending good British values or spending your days producing hysterical Instagram videos
• 18:02
  about how Zionists are bloodthirsty, primeval creatures and thinking you're on the civilized side of the debate.
• 18:11
  After Charlie Kirk's assassination, I was talking to an American friend who asked what can we do?
• 18:19
  I don't know what Americans can do, but I know what Australians can do.
• 18:26
  In 1996, we faced a fork in the road on guns.
• 18:32
  We saw the path America had taken and we chose a different one.
• 18:38
  If we want to reject the American model of political violence as definitively as we rejected its gun culture,
• 18:45
  we need to start believing whatever our priorities and beliefs that the supreme value is to fight ideas, not people.
• 18:56
  But this principle comes loaded with a bitter pill.
• 19:01
  If we're serious about debating ideas instead of demonizing people, then we need to be open to hearing more bad ideas.
• 19:09
  In that context, laws against hate speech and religious discrimination are exactly the wrong strategy.
• 19:15
  They risk being abused by radicals and by well-meaning but gullible diversity advocates,
• 19:21
  to stifle legitimate concerns about Islam, jihadism, religious conservatism,
• 19:27
  and the integration of regressive migrant communities into mainstream liberal culture.
• 19:33
  If Australians who feel anxiety about the pace of demographic change have no way to express their concerns in functional ways,
• 19:40
  they'll express them in dysfunctional ways.
• 19:44
  Political extremism isn't caused by other people saying things you don't like.
• 19:50
  It's caused by those people having no constructive way to air their frustrations.
• 19:56
  That's the trade-off.
• 19:59
  To drain the swamp of political violence, you don't get to summarily dismiss someone's opinion by labeling it racist or antisemitic or transphobic or Zionist or fascist.
• 20:10
  You don't get to claim that nasty words are making you unsafe, or that bad ideas are violence.
• 20:18
  You need to do the work of allowing unpopular opinions to be expressed, of figuring out what's wrong with them, and of refuting them.
• 20:29
  You need to keep the game on the battlefield of ideas, not the battlefield of tribes.
• 20:36
  That's the price of admission to a society that uses conversations, not assassinations, to resolve its disputes.
• 20:47
  That was my article. It quickly became the number one most read article in the world section of the most read newspaper group in Australia and racked up hundreds of comments, which were mostly really gratifying.
• 20:59
  You may notice that it does not address one particular elephant in the room because it would have been double the length if it had, and that elephant is social media and the radicalization of especially young males online.
• 21:13
  That is where we begin, Waleed, and I, in this wide-ranging, very frank and thought-provoking conversation about the fate of liberalism in the 21st century.
• 21:22
  I hope you enjoy as much as I did, the one the only Waleed.
• 21:32
  I think liberal democracy might be over.
• 21:34
  You just ruined my day. Sorry.
• 21:37
  Clearly, I'm being a little dramatic there, but only a little.
• 21:42
  I have some concerns with the tools that we now are using for it.
• 21:54
  For guns, for example, one bad tool.
• 21:57
  Guns is obviously, but that's not a new tool, and liberal democracy survived guns before.
• 22:04
  To me, it's the, among other things, but primarily I would say the tech revolution.
• 22:11
  It really just depends how much time you want to spend talking about going over this ground, which I'm sure, if you're anything like me, you spend a lot of your life talking about.
• 22:21
  But there is something about the nature of trying to have a public conversation through the machinery of social media.
• 22:35
  That renders it just dysfunctional.
• 22:40
  And the reason for that to not have public conversations through social media.
• 22:45
  Yeah, but how's that going?
• 22:48
  Well, we're only 10 years in.
• 22:50
  Sure.
• 22:51
  It was a half century.
• 22:52
  So this is how we figure it out.
• 22:53
  Yeah, but it might be too late by then.
• 22:55
  So look, I'm not on social media.
• 23:00
  So you don't have to convince me not to have conversations.
• 23:03
  I've gone off it.
• 23:04
  I mean, I'm not on it either.
• 23:05
  I don't consume it.
• 23:06
  I use it as a publishing platform because I want to reach people where they are and bring them back to the podcast and have instant to get off social media.
• 23:13
  I see what you're doing.
• 23:15
  No, so I see that.
• 23:16
  But I guess my point is that at an aggregate level, we are so addicted to this thing.
• 23:25
  And mainstream media has thrown its lot in with it for so long now.
• 23:36
  It's got its own momentum and is more or less an unstoppable force.
• 23:39
  It would be like trying to factor television out of the public conversation, you know, 30 years ago, 50 years ago.
• 23:50
  And it just that's just not a practical.
• 23:52
  It's not a realistic.
• 23:55
  It's not a realistic scenario to contemplate, right?
• 23:58
  Which then leaves a couple of options.
• 24:00
  One, if you can't persuade people to get off it.
• 24:03
  And I'm not sure you can anymore.
• 24:05
  I don't think you can without reforming it without making it less addicted.
• 24:08
  Right.
• 24:09
  So it's like persuading someone who's addicted to drugs to just stop taking drugs.
• 24:14
  Right.
• 24:15
  Without some more drastic intervention.
• 24:18
  So since that's not going to work, it then comes down to questions of regulation.
• 24:24
  Precisely what that regulation looks like.
• 24:27
  And here I have two fears.
• 24:29
  One is I'm not sure politicians are great at regulating social media just as a matter of policy development
• 24:39
  because I don't know that they can.
• 24:42
  I think they're outmatched in the battle of wits with the people who create the stuff.
• 24:47
  And that's not a criticism of them.
• 24:49
  It is and that's fine.
• 24:50
  A bureaucrat is not going to be as savvy with tech as the Silicon Valley engineers.
• 24:56
  Unless somehow they can hire all the best ones, but they are not going to be able to afford that.
• 25:01
  So possibly you might see some kind of crisis of conscience within the tech world that means all of the best tech engineers decide they can no longer work in there.
• 25:10
  We're seeing some examples of that and then they start working.
• 25:13
  But not at the scale that I can imagine.
• 25:16
  I mean, is this hard enough for governments to regulate business given the whole phenomenon of industry capture?
• 25:24
  You know that thing where people who work in regulation tend to be people who've come from the firms and so it becomes a bit of a close circle.
• 25:32
  And they know that when they leave politics, they also want to be able to step back into a seven figure job.
• 25:37
  So there's that.
• 25:39
  And then there's the other phenomenon of just the influence that tech has.
• 25:45
  That's shown most starkly in the United States.
• 25:48
  The phenomenon that we see, I just think of it as a spectacle because I think that's really what it is where Congress will drag before it.
• 25:56
  The tech barons are ridiculous.
• 25:58
  Are they barons?
• 25:59
  They can be barons.
• 26:00
  Sure.
• 26:01
  I just feel like barons have to have very 19th century.
• 26:03
  Yeah, that's what I think.
• 26:04
  I'm just wondering if you can be a baron when you're not.
• 26:07
  If you're not, if it's not inherited, is what what's the connotation to baron that you?
• 26:12
  Baron to me implies sort of the first phase of modernity, you know, big capital rail road.
• 26:20
  Yeah, yeah, whereas these, these guys, the thing about whatever phase this is, let's call it late modernity.
• 26:27
  I don't know.
• 26:28
  The thing about that is that you don't need to own anything.
• 26:32
  It's the idea or the platform or it's not physical stuff.
• 26:36
  No.
• 26:37
  But it's even more valuable, which is data.
• 26:39
  It's more valuable in the, like, monetarily.
• 26:42
  Yes.
• 26:43
  Yeah, but it's not.
• 26:44
  No, it's not better.
• 26:45
  It's not.
• 26:46
  Yeah.
• 26:47
  So anyway, you mean when they get, when they get called to Congress and they get yelled at.
• 26:50
  Congressmen gets like three minutes to pontificate so that they can create a social viral clip, which is then going to profit those same companies that they're berating by.
• 26:58
  Well, I hadn't even thought of that element of it, but yes, that's true.
• 27:01
  But the thing I'm thinking of is that everyone then goes back to their starting positions and nothing happens.
• 27:06
  Yeah.
• 27:07
  One reason for which seems to me and feel free to contradict me is a lot of these congressmen are receiving donations from these companies.
• 27:16
  And that's true on both sides of the aisle.
• 27:18
  So there's a kind of, like, suppose you could call it an industry capture, if you like.
• 27:21
  It's probably a bit different.
• 27:23
  But anyway, yeah.
• 27:24
  And I would just add to that without necessarily contradicting it, but yes, ending it.
• 27:28
  I think it's probably less crude than, oh, we're getting lots of money from them for my next campaign.
• 27:33
  Therefore, I don't want to cross them.
• 27:35
  And more that the kinds of people who they play golf with, the kinds of people who they eat steaks with at the same houses are the kinds of people who have the same worldview.
• 27:43
  And, you know, those companies are able to pay for a lot of lobbyists to hang out and get access.
• 27:49
  And people who are concerned get one brief meeting a few months.
• 27:54
  But I don't have confidence that we can persuade people to have better conversations publicly.
• 28:03
  Let me phrase it this way.
• 28:05
  Democracy is actually not about debate.
• 28:08
  Democracy is about deliberation.
• 28:10
  And that's an important difference.
• 28:13
  Where debate replaces deliberation.
• 28:17
  And we sort of collapse into spectacle.
• 28:20
  And not really, you're not further, anyone can have a debate.
• 28:26
  But that's not what makes democratic government work.
• 28:30
  It's the ability to learn from each other, the ability to be open to finding solutions in the other, the ability when you're on the losing side of an election, even
• 28:41
  supposing you have a side in an election, you are taking that as an opportunity to learn from those who vanquished you.
• 28:50
  That we can teach each other things.
• 28:54
  That it is governed by an overarching civic bond that is tended to in between the elections.
• 29:02
  I think we have this tendency to think of democracy as a kind of gamified form of government that, you know, where the Olympics happens every three, four, whatever, five years.
• 29:12
  And in between, we don't really pay attention to it.
• 29:14
  That's not actually how it works.
• 29:16
  That is, or not how it should work anyway.
• 29:19
  That's taking us into what I, the term I've been playing with, and I've got to nail down.
• 29:23
  But, you know, what I'm calling a post-democracy.
• 29:26
  It sort of has the trappings of democracy.
• 29:28
  It's emerged from democracy, but it doesn't have the fundamental preconditions of it, right?
• 29:32
  It's a Colosseum democracy.
• 29:34
  Yeah.
• 29:35
  Or, if you will, a reality TV show.
• 29:38
  Yeah, right.
• 29:39
  Which may be the more apt metaphor, actually, in our, in our age.
• 29:43
  Anyway, given it's about deliberation, if we're going to convince people that social media is not a great way to have that deliberation,
• 29:50
  it's a great way to have clashes.
• 29:52
  It's a great way to have spectacle.
• 29:54
  It's a great way to have thrill rides.
• 29:57
  But it's not a great way to have deliberation.
• 30:00
  Then, if we can't persuade people, and we can't regulate, because we don't have the technical prowess in government,
• 30:09
  and we don't have the political will because of a series of forces that are to do with money and influence and so on,
• 30:16
  then I guess what's left?
• 30:18
  Well, you could say we might have the philosophical resources.
• 30:24
  Well, let me, let me inject a couple of what's left to play this on the optimist, maybe.
• 30:30
  There's a universe in which people just become fed up with the feeling of what it's like being online,
• 30:38
  and being nuts around by algorithms, and gradually seek out platforms.
• 30:42
  Not a flood back to legacy media, but I think maybe as artificial intelligence contaminates the trust even further in your ability to believe videos and pictures and even written content.
• 30:56
  There could be a swing back to human editors, a flight back to legacy media.
• 31:03
  At the same time, we're seeing platforms like Substack, where people like me can sell a non-algorithmic deliberative conversation,
• 31:13
  and people can pay for that directly, and fill up more of their time that crowds out the amount of time they spend on social media.
• 31:19
  There could be that. The analogy that you're not going to get people off social media anymore,
• 31:25
  then you would get people off TV 30 or 50 years ago, assumes that you need to get them off social media,
• 31:31
  and that there couldn't be both market incentives, and also, I don't want to call it regulation,
• 31:37
  because I don't like the idea of government bureaucrats writing the policies for tech.
• 31:41
  This is the point I want to get to, by the way.
• 31:43
  Yeah, we can get to that.
• 31:45
  I've had France's Hagen on the show, and I've been on Q&A with her,
• 31:49
  and she's the Facebook whistleblower who leaked a lot of information about what Facebook knew about the impact
• 31:55
  that its algorithms were having on radicalizing young people and addicting them.
• 31:59
  She believes that you could have a collaborative process between open democracy activists,
• 32:07
  academics, and regulators, and the tech industry to just tweak the algorithms in such a way
• 32:15
  that there are lots of ideas out there by activists in this space about what the algorithms could look like
• 32:21
  that would create greater understanding, one that I quite like is you could prioritize,
• 32:27
  instead of merely prioritizing the amount of time that people spend on a site,
• 32:31
  whether they're clicking, gazing, liking, commenting.
• 32:37
  You could also prioritize whether or not they're making connections in unexpected ways,
• 32:43
  or post that gets them to look at something that people like them haven't looked at.
• 32:47
  Yep, for example.
• 32:49
  You could imagine creating clever metrics that try to de-echo-chamber if I like it.
• 32:55
  A situation?
• 32:57
  Imagine the metric.
• 32:59
  What I'm struggling with is the incentive.
• 33:01
  For the tech company?
• 33:03
  Yeah.
• 33:04
  Yeah, there'd have to be a level of coercion and collaboration.
• 33:07
  Or profitability.
• 33:09
  And so...
• 33:11
  Well, it may be that they have to leave a little money on the table in order...
• 33:15
  Okay. Yeah, yeah.
• 33:17
  And this is where I begin to worry, because I'm not...
• 33:21
  I can't think of too many examples off top of my head where barons
• 33:25
  have willingly left money on the table for some kind of greater good.
• 33:31
  In fact, willingly is the word.
• 33:33
  Okay, so then you're in the realm of coercion or regulation or some other thing.
• 33:37
  Now, transparency might get you so far.
• 33:41
  One of the more promising ideas that I've heard in this area is for the algorithms
• 33:47
  and the coding to be made public so that it can be scripted.
• 33:51
  I don't actually know, as a matter of fact, how far that would get you,
• 33:57
  because, okay, the algorithm is public, who exactly can understand that,
• 34:03
  and then what action do we take?
• 34:05
  The philosophical point that I wanted to get to, though,
• 34:09
  I think you've kind of brought up, which is, okay, if we accept this is a problem.
• 34:15
  And we want to do something about it.
• 34:18
  What does liberal democracy within its own canons allow you to do about it?
• 34:26
  And here, I don't think the picture is encouraging,
• 34:30
  because it is very hard to think of a mode of government intervention
• 34:36
  or an extent of government intervention that doesn't veer off into what,
• 34:42
  in traditional liberal democratic thought,
• 34:45
  would become an intolerable political intervention.
• 34:49
  And the people like me were right.
• 34:51
  Opposing on free speech grounds.
• 34:54
  And they wouldn't be entirely species, right?
• 34:56
  That's my point.
• 34:57
  So there would be bad faith criticisms.
• 34:59
  And I think we've seen some of that actually even in Australia,
• 35:02
  where there was the misinformation bill.
• 35:04
  And even in America, so there was this attempt to try to police misinformation.
• 35:08
  And I think there were some bad faith criticisms of that.
• 35:11
  And then there was some perfectly reasonable criticisms of that.
• 35:14
  And there was a lot of misinformation about that as well.
• 35:16
  Of course, yeah.
• 35:17
  It was primarily, it was also stupid talk about bureaucrats and politicians
• 35:21
  not understanding marketing and, like, tech speak and the language of the industry.
• 35:28
  It was called something like the combating misinformation bill or something like that,
• 35:33
  which immediately, even in people like me, raises a red flag and will hang on.
• 35:37
  Who's deciding what this misinformation is?
• 35:39
  What kind of conversation am I not going to be allowed to have with Waleed?
• 35:42
  That some bureaucrats are going to tell me of misinformation.
• 35:44
  What it actually was was a tech transparency.
• 35:47
  They should have called it a technology and algorithm transparency bill.
• 35:51
  Because the main component of it was that they had to open the hood or the bonnet
• 35:55
  as we say in Australia and show people and reveal what the engine was doing
• 36:00
  and provide metrics internally about addiction and stuff like that.
• 36:05
  Yeah, yeah.
• 36:06
  But this is where the rubber hits the road.
• 36:08
  Let's say we do that.
• 36:10
  Then what?
• 36:11
  I mean, one of the points of Francis Hargan's revelations, when was it?
• 36:16
  Five years ago?
• 36:17
  Three years ago?
• 36:18
  Probably long ago.
• 36:19
  Yeah.
• 36:20
  Yeah.
• 36:21
  Exactly.
• 36:22
  We had COVID times.
• 36:23
  Anyway, one of the points of those revelations is it was not an absence of information
• 36:26
  within Facebook that was the problem.
• 36:29
  The information was there.
• 36:31
  It was the imperative.
• 36:33
  Yes, the incentive to do that.
• 36:35
  Because speaking as if, I mean, you're very down on the capacity of liberal democracy,
• 36:38
  of democratic processes to work with industry in ways that industry is uncomfortable with.
• 36:46
  Like we have, we regulated chlorofluorocarbons out of existence with the collaboration of
• 36:52
  refrigerators, manufacturers.
• 36:54
  We, you know, California sets very strict emissions guidelines on car manufacturers and they
• 36:59
  do cop it.
• 37:00
  Like they do, like when industry knows that it has to do something, it doesn't really have
• 37:07
  a choice to do it.
• 37:08
  And I think there's a way.
• 37:09
  Can I put you up there?
• 37:11
  Yeah.
• 37:12
  When they know they don't have a choice to do something.
• 37:16
  Describe for me the circumstances in which this particular industry would recognize it does
• 37:23
  not have a choice.
• 37:24
  Because that's a high bar you've set.
• 37:26
  It doesn't have a choice.
• 37:27
  Okay.
• 37:28
  I mean, the European Union gets together with other liberal democracies, I'm excluding
• 37:31
  the United States at the moment because let's grant your presumption that that political
• 37:36
  system is too broken or beholden to the tech industry to function.
• 37:40
  But Canada and New Zealand and Australia and Japan and South Korea and the European Union
• 37:44
  and Brazil or whatever, get together and create guidelines like the EU already has in
• 37:49
  terms of, you know, tech privacy and the right to be forgotten and stuff like that.
• 37:54
  And it says, as Australia and Canada sort of tried to do with the compensation of news
• 37:58
  organizations for social media clicks, you're not going to be able to operate in our territories
• 38:05
  unless we understand the algorithm and we're going to work together to, and I think the
• 38:09
  critical piece here in order to have a bi-sufficient buy-in from liberal Democrats is going
• 38:15
  to be, we're not going to be policing speech.
• 38:18
  This isn't about cracking down on hate speech.
• 38:22
  This is about the way the incentives that the algorithms are embedded with in terms
• 38:28
  of inducing behavior in the users and addiction, right?
• 38:34
  It's not the content.
• 38:35
  It's about how you are turning the volume up and down on the stickiness of particular
• 38:40
  posts and deciding who, you know, what, whose voice is prioritized and who's is downplayed.
• 38:47
  Yeah.
• 38:48
  Like, they're already doing that.
• 38:50
  They're already, it's already happening.
• 38:52
  Yeah.
• 38:53
  But would you say that the grip of social media on public conversation in places like Europe
• 39:01
  has somehow dissolved or lessened?
• 39:03
  I mean, no.
• 39:04
  No, because they haven't done that yet.
• 39:06
  Yeah.
• 39:07
  They've addressed privacy.
• 39:08
  There's privacy side of things, but they haven't addressed.
• 39:10
  Right.
• 39:11
  But privacy is not the principle issue here.
• 39:13
  No, no, exactly.
• 39:14
  That's what I'm saying.
• 39:15
  But what I'm pointing to privacy as an instance of government's collaborating, government
• 39:18
  's co-operating or a governmental institution in the European Union, cooperating and behaving
• 39:23
  in a way that coerce tech companies are changing, so let's, I'm not saying that states can't
• 39:32
  act in a multilateral way to achieve an outcome ever.
• 39:36
  You're just saying it.
• 39:37
  Doesn't look good, right?
• 39:38
  I'm just saying on this particular, so the reason I think this is such a crisis for liberal
• 39:43
  democracy is that it goes to the heart of the fundamental assumptions on which liberal
• 39:50
  democracy is based.
• 39:52
  And that is to do with the marketplace of ideas and the way in which that can function.
• 39:58
  Those assumptions have never been true.
• 39:59
  They've never been accurate, but they've kind of been true enough to facilitate this
• 40:06
  kind of broadly working notion of liberal democracy.
• 40:10
  Now they're being really thoroughly attacked.
• 40:16
  But I don't see the philosophical resources within the liberal democracy to do anything
• 40:20
  about it without violating its own tenets.
• 40:23
  Right.
• 40:24
  That's the contradiction that I'm seeing.
• 40:27
  Now I don't know enough about the tech side of it, I grant you to say for sure that there
• 40:35
  isn't some regulatory slash collaborative tweak that could be made, that could prioritize
• 40:43
  things in a different way, but I just keep radicalized and find it very hard to imagine
• 40:49
  how that can be done in a way that doesn't have speech implications that would then trigger
• 40:54
  the automatic liberal democratic complaint.
• 40:58
  Right.
• 40:59
  I'm ready to be convinced.
• 41:00
  I may need some time and PowerPoint presentation to walk me through exactly how that would
• 41:05
  work, but I'm not sure this is a situation where transparency solves it because you're
• 41:10
  dealing with addiction, you're dealing with huge amounts of profit motive, you're dealing
• 41:17
  with...
• 41:18
  Hang on.
• 41:19
  There's a missing piece of the jigsaw here that I think that you're confusing, which is
• 41:24
  that I can't remember who the French reporter or maybe with the story was about a French
• 41:31
  user.
• 41:32
  This has gone way back now at the beginning of our concerns about social media.
• 41:36
  It must have been about 2010 or 2011 when there was an exposé about the way that YouTube
• 41:42
  does its recommendations, right?
• 41:44
  So there's this right-hand column of suggested videos and they did these experiments where
• 41:48
  they would just start by looking for videos about the terrorist attacks of September
• 41:53
  11th.
• 41:54
  Very quickly, they were being proactively offered conspiracy videos and it was an inside
• 42:00
  job and it was Bush who did it and then you quickly get to Israel and like it was the
• 42:04
  massage and before you know it, you're off to the races.
• 42:07
  Similarly, how do I lose weight as a teenage girl?
• 42:11
  You're very quickly on anorexia videos on things that are promoting bulimia.
• 42:16
  There has to be a way of maintaining the liberal democratic respect for freedom of speech
• 42:22
  in a context in which the platform is not offering you increasingly deranged content.
• 42:31
  You call it deranged.
• 42:35
  So give me a neutral, sort of a speech neutral, apolitical if you like, definition of deranged.
• 42:46
  He says the Supreme Court justice said, you know, I know it when I see it.
• 42:56
  Right.
• 42:57
  But I know it when I see it is an argument that a liberal democracy cannot tolerate instinctively
• 43:04
  when it comes to speech.
• 43:08
  I don't think that with that dumb in our application of ideas about liberal democracy, look, there
• 43:15
  will always be both a free speech contingent that is so absolutist that I want to look
• 43:24
  at content at all and there will also be cynical people who should know better like
• 43:28
  Linda Yaccarino or whatever her name was at X who when Elon was busy going around
• 43:34
  suing companies for not wanting to advertise with bitter anymore, you know, put out a video,
• 43:40
  a free speech video where she was literally wearing a necklace with the words freedom
• 43:44
  around or free speech around her neck at the same time as they're trying to crack down
• 43:47
  on free speech.
• 43:49
  But I don't think it's beyond the can.
• 43:52
  Look, it may be in practice.
• 43:54
  I may be too polyanna and I'm not saying that I think this is a likely outcome.
• 43:57
  Yeah.
• 43:58
  I'm just saying on the table of options, I would hate to not include a scenario in which
• 44:04
  we don't have to go around playing a game of whack a mole and determining whether or not
• 44:10
  an anorexia video is bad and a healthy living video is good because there is something underlying
• 44:17
  underpinning the incentives of those algorithms that is reliably leading to constructive outcomes
• 44:24
  especially among adolescents.
• 44:28
  I also don't know enough about the tech, but I know enough people who do know enough about
• 44:31
  the tech, like Francis and people like that, who do have solutions that are not anti free
• 44:36
  speech about ways in which the algorithm could be more constructive.
• 44:40
  So let me be clear, I'm not saying that the only liberal democratic objections to this
• 44:46
  sort of intervention require a free speech absolutism.
• 44:49
  I'm not saying it will come only from the extreme margins of our society, right?
• 44:55
  Those who have so ardently attached to some principle that they cannot even bring themselves
• 45:00
  to think about the practical realities that they're facing, Allah gun control arguments
• 45:04
  or whatever like that.
• 45:05
  I'm not, that's not my argument.
• 45:07
  My argument is that those free speech objections are reasonably triggered quite easily once
• 45:16
  you start to get to concrete examples.
• 45:19
  So I regard, for example, a huge amount of the anti vaccine information on social media
• 45:28
  really across the board as being worthy of that sort of intervention.
• 45:36
  But there is no way I can articulate that as a principle that you can then use to make
• 45:42
  a judgment without veering into territory.
• 45:47
  That becomes a difficult place or be risks being sensorious beyond reasonable limits.
• 45:57
  Because one of the foundations of liberal exchange and the idea of free speech as a mechanism
• 46:03
  towards, I don't know what you want to call it, betterment or some kind of collective
• 46:09
  discovery of truth or whatever, let's just call it deliberation.
• 46:14
  One of the ideas there is that the exchange takes place within an environment that facilitates
• 46:27
  the best ideas rising.
• 46:30
  But also that the idea that is scandalous today and beyond the pale might be the orthodoxy
• 46:35
  of tomorrow, right?
• 46:37
  That's kind of the idea.
• 46:39
  Now, can I be very clear?
• 46:41
  I do not believe this at all, but let's just assume for a moment someone will clip it
• 46:46
  anyway.
• 46:47
  They'll just talk about that.
• 46:48
  I don't believe this.
• 46:49
  I've had enough of that.
• 46:50
  Well, in that case, I'm going to restate it so I join it.
• 46:54
  So I don't believe this at all, but let's just assume for a moment that we're in a world
• 46:57
  where 50 years hence, we look back and go, wow, that vaccination thing was just an abomination.
• 47:06
  How did we, and it was those brave anti-vaxxers who, now, I think we are so far down the road
• 47:15
  that we know that's not what's going to happen, but the liberal theory of the liberal
• 47:21
  Democrat kind of has to hold out the possibility of it, right?
• 47:25
  And so that's what I mean about the tensions here.
• 47:27
  I think, look, literally you're talking about there, I think is the normal tension that
• 47:33
  has always existed in liberal democracy.
• 47:35
  Agreed.
• 47:36
  I was actually literally about to say that the difference is the machinery through which
• 47:40
  we prosecute these ideas now, that they evolve in a way that is so rapid and so fracturing
• 47:47
  and so splintering.
• 47:49
  And I suppose most relevantly, so inimical to deliberation that we can't catch it before
• 47:56
  it goes, if it were ever true, and I'm not sure what it necessarily was, but if it were
• 48:02
  ever true that the best ideas tend to win, there is less and less reason to assume so
• 48:07
  now.
• 48:08
  I mean, my, yeah, you're singing from my handbook, but I have to hold out hope that rather
• 48:16
  that I still think you're making a mistake in looking at the specific ideas rather than
• 48:23
  the meta accelerator and decelerator of the way that ideas are propagated by this.
• 48:29
  So explain to me, and this is a genuine question, yeah, I'm not being rhetorical, explain
• 48:34
  to me what that means, like what, what is the meta thing you can look at?
• 48:43
  Well, I mean, I would just say that the only prior, the only way that tech companies make
• 48:48
  a profit is by maximizing a the amount of time that people spend on the site.
• 48:54
  So you can imagine different ways of doing that.
• 48:55
  For example, think of television, you mentioned like getting people off television, right?
• 49:00
  30 years ago, 50 years ago, would have been impossible.
• 49:03
  Well, yes and no, we managed to get people off broadcast television by inventing a better
• 49:09
  technology by which they are no longer measured in terms of how many people are watching in
• 49:15
  any 15 minute period, but it was HBO who first did it and said instead of trying to get
• 49:21
  the maximum number of eyeballs every 15 minutes, we're going to invite people to pay a monthly
• 49:25
  fee.
• 49:26
  And we're going to hope that there's at least one thing on the platform that they want
• 49:30
  to watch.
• 49:31
  And so you got the sopranos and you got these very high-end, almost filmic shows, the
• 49:37
  network television wouldn't have been able to invest in because they weren't big enough.
• 49:41
  And now we have succession and white lotus and all these things.
• 49:43
  And some of those shows, not very many people watch by, you know, most of the show fashion
• 49:48
  broadcast standards, right?
• 49:50
  But enough people want to pay a monthly fee for it that you don't get, you haven't just
• 49:55
  got an interminable race to the bottom.
• 49:57
  So we actually did change television and the incentives of television.
• 50:01
  I don't know if it was good, I don't know if it was bad, but it changed.
• 50:04
  So the second metric that tech companies use is just measuring connection because Zuckerberg
• 50:10
  had this idealistic idea back in the day that human connection is good.
• 50:15
  And therefore, all human connection is by definition valuable, including the connection
• 50:23
  between a Russian bot and your grandmother in Ohio about, you know, whether or not Hillary
• 50:30
  Clinton is, you know, demonic.
• 50:36
  So instead of just measuring the time spent on the site and whether or not you're commenting
• 50:41
  on something, you can imagine other metrics.
• 50:46
  The metric is not the thing I find difficult to imagine, but the metric, the mobilization
• 50:51
  of that for profit.
• 50:54
  Well, you could, I mean, instead of having them ad based, you could have the monthly subscription
• 50:59
  based.
• 51:00
  Yeah.
• 51:01
  That would get us somewhere.
• 51:03
  Maybe.
• 51:04
  So what, so what would you do, mando to subscription system?
• 51:09
  Why, I don't know.
• 51:10
  Now we're getting it.
• 51:11
  Now this is above my pay.
• 51:12
  You know, the one, I mean, you could start by putting a cap on the amount of advertising
• 51:16
  that can be on these sites, or you could ban advertising or something.
• 51:18
  I mean, I know that's very behind that sky.
• 51:20
  And now, yeah, yeah, right.
• 51:22
  And I guess by point, look, I'm open to what you say theoretically.
• 51:28
  And there's an extent to which, you know, there's a point at which we should probably just
• 51:31
  go, well, we're not the people to have this.
• 51:33
  No, that's right.
• 51:34
  But I think you're pointing to, I understand what you're pointing to, which is an interesting
• 51:37
  tension inside liberal democracy.
• 51:39
  Well, they just don't think it's necessarily a catastrophically new tension.
• 51:44
  Like this has always been the tension is not new.
• 51:48
  The circumstances are right, right.
• 51:51
  And there are times where they say liberal democracy, like a lot of political ideas, has
• 51:57
  within it the seeds of its own destruction.
• 52:01
  Yes, right.
• 52:03
  All that needs to happen is that the conditions need to come along to make those seeds grow.
• 52:08
  To such an extent that the weeds can't be controlled or whatever.
• 52:11
  It's a tortured analogy, you see where I'm going.
• 52:15
  And we may be at that point.
• 52:16
  The one thing I can think of though, that seems to me obvious.
• 52:21
  And for that reason, I'm skeptical of it because it's so obvious is so much of the way
• 52:26
  social media works is built on the unconscionable farming of data.
• 52:32
  I don't see why that's legal.
• 52:34
  I don't see any philosophical justification for it.
• 52:39
  And maybe this is where privacy is relevant and kind of some social media.
• 52:45
  I never liked it from the very beginning and I've never been on it.
• 52:48
  So it wasn't like I started doing media work and I didn't want that.
• 52:52
  No, before I did any media work, I looked at social media and I didn't like it.
• 52:57
  But what I will say for the early phase of it is that because it was an algorithmic
• 53:02
  or at least not obviously so, you kind of got what it served up.
• 53:09
  And there was that hinge moment, which I rely on others' accounts of this.
• 53:14
  But where your Facebook feed stopped being chronological and started coming at you according
• 53:21
  to different algorithmic imperatives, data is the thing that makes it possible.
• 53:26
  So let's just for the thought experiment say we're banning the collection of data.
• 53:34
  The whole business model has to change.
• 53:36
  The algorithm.
• 53:37
  Just let me interject there.
• 53:38
  Do you mean the collection of data from other parties or the collection of internal
• 53:43
  data within the company?
• 53:44
  The collection of user data.
• 53:46
  Or at least you put a cap on it in such a way that like there are certain places it can't
• 53:49
  go.
• 53:50
  This book has so much of your, if you're online, between Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp,
• 53:59
  they don't need to buy any data, they just have, it's the collecting of it, that's the
• 54:03
  problem.
• 54:04
  Right, I can't.
• 54:05
  I don't know how you would ban it.
• 54:06
  Yeah, I don't know.
• 54:07
  Basically demolishes the company, doesn't it?
• 54:08
  Because they're whole.
• 54:09
  Right.
• 54:10
  So my thing is just knowing about what you like, I mean they would say like it's just like,
• 54:15
  if I run a bakery and you come in every morning for your scom and your latte, and I see you
• 54:22
  walking up the street, I start getting the latte ready and I put the scone in a paper
• 54:26
  bag.
• 54:27
  So I'm collecting data in that way.
• 54:28
  Yeah.
• 54:29
  But I think we can recognize some conceptual difference.
• 54:30
  I think it's a difference in essence rather than just a degree, but we can have that argument.
• 54:34
  But there is a difference between someone manually joining these dots, a very small pieces
• 54:40
  of data and the kind of rich data set that gets handed over.
• 54:46
  I mean, when you saw that Facebook experiment where they're literally measuring and then
• 54:50
  manipulating people's emotions based on status updates or whatever, I think we can accept
• 54:55
  that there is now a level of data collection and a completeness of data that is intolerable
• 54:59
  and uncomfortable and shouldn't be allowed to happen.
• 55:02
  Now whether or not that to me is slippery other than the speech.
• 55:06
  Why is that?
• 55:07
  Well, when you go on Amazon, don't you want it to suggest a book that's similar to
• 55:11
  another political philosophy book that you enjoyed?
• 55:15
  Not if the cost is the emiseration of liberal democracy, no.
• 55:23
  So I think what you've touched on is really interesting because I think what you said
• 55:26
  is the attitude of most people.
• 55:27
  Yeah.
• 55:28
  Like when I go on Netflix, then I want it to be suggesting shows that are similar to
• 55:30
  the ones that I've liked.
• 55:32
  It's certainly more convenient.
• 55:34
  I guess the question I'm asking is what price convenience?
• 55:39
  Like everything in, we are here because of convenience.
• 55:44
  Everything in our lives is built around this principle of convenience, the making of everything
• 55:51
  frictionless.
• 55:53
  So, and that's made possible by the collection of data, which then leaves us entirely manipulable
• 56:03
  by actually a relatively small number of people.
• 56:06
  What, I'm interested in, what did you not like about social media when you first checked
• 56:11
  it out before it was data driven?
• 56:14
  I probably always was data driven, but yes, before it was, before it got went.
• 56:19
  I mean, I don't know how interesting this is, but I, you know, the first thing that
• 56:24
  sent me off was that Facebook called all of the people who followed you, friends.
• 56:32
  And I was like, I don't think you know what a friend is.
• 56:39
  And that sort of, and I might have heard someone make that observation.
• 56:45
  And then the point that that immediately made me a series of connections for me.
• 56:50
  Okay, what this is, is the appropriation of actually rich social categories in order
• 56:57
  to displace them with anemic digital versions.
• 57:03
  And I never accepted this idea that social media was an adjunct.
• 57:10
  That one is just a way of keeping in touch with my friends and catching up with people.
• 57:15
  No, no, no, I mean, yes, but it's not like your human interaction by which I mean sort
• 57:22
  of richer personal human interaction is going to stay at this amount and then you're
• 57:27
  just going to add this little bit.
• 57:29
  It's just going to eat that, right?
• 57:32
  And the more that happens, the more we erode the most meaningful social bonds that we have,
• 57:39
  the more that we erode our ability to apprehend each other as fully human beings.
• 57:44
  I'd already had some experience on like chat forums and things like that.
• 57:49
  Not like I was never like overcome, but like I knew enough about how those things work
• 57:55
  to see how quickly you can just get lost in these things and how inhuman those interactions
• 58:02
  were and then I considered you multiply that by all this, I mean, it's this parosociality
• 58:07
  around.
• 58:09
  And then I started developing this idea, once I started working in media as in broadcast,
• 58:15
  I started noticing something that media is a, and this is relevant.
• 58:23
  Media is an exhausting and ultimately hollowing job if you're not very careful because it is
• 58:36
  a job that forces you to observe yourself through the eyes of an external observer in
• 58:43
  every moment.
• 58:45
  You and I are probably doing this right now, even subconsciously because we're experienced
• 58:49
  enough to make it an automated process, but that's probably what's happening.
• 58:53
  Every time I speak, there's probably, I'm imagining how's that seen?
• 58:56
  What's that?
• 58:57
  If you're on television, did I sit up straight when I say that?
• 59:00
  How did I look when I, did I pull the right facial expression?
• 59:03
  That level of monitoring of yourself?
• 59:06
  That's why doing an hour of broadcast is exhausting.
• 59:10
  And it's also why, if I may, most people who do broadcast end up thoroughly weird people
• 59:17
  who are very difficult to talk to, because what's happening there is you're moving out
• 59:24
  of a mode of, I'll use this loosely, but like natural existence into a mode of performance.
• 59:34
  And performance, here's the thing about performance.
• 59:41
  It is yanking on the ego with an incredible force.
• 59:48
  It's also putting you in a place where you're not terribly interested in learning or being
• 59:54
  persuaded unless that persuasion can be somehow performative.
• 1:00:00
  No one goes out on stage in the hope that they will sing badly so they learn from it.
• 1:00:06
  They go out on stage to nail it to get the adulation.
• 1:00:10
  This is what's inherent to the mode of performance.
• 1:00:14
  And so it seemed to me very early on that what social media was doing by displacing what
• 1:00:20
  I'm going to call rich social interactions with these digital facsimiles.
• 1:00:27
  And by asking us to render almost every moment of our lives performance, whether that's
• 1:00:36
  in the form of now videos that we are doing when we put on our makeup or whatever to taking
• 1:00:43
  photos of our brunch or whatever, everything then becomes for the consumption of an audience.
• 1:00:48
  That is it becomes a performance.
• 1:00:52
  Because I think I was starting out, my views on social media were well set by then,
• 1:00:57
  but it became more entrenched when I started when I was starting out in broadcast,
• 1:01:02
  what's that 2012 11s around there is a rut in the heat of this.
• 1:01:07
  I could detect how unhealthy a space performance was to inhabit perpetually.
• 1:01:14
  I could struck me that it's the kind of thing you should do like twice a year.
• 1:01:18
  Right. So me doing it every day, that in itself was something that gave me a lot of concern
• 1:01:26
  and I wanted to pay very close attention to. Imagine doing it with every moment of your life.
• 1:01:31
  Imagine getting off here and then continuing the performance in some other way.
• 1:01:38
  Imagine even having the thought occur to you when you order your brunch.
• 1:01:44
  This will make a good photo.
• 1:01:46
  Well, I think that's the thing. I think you're putting your finger on the real, what's really
• 1:01:50
  corrosive, which is not just the performance that people are doing when they're crafting the tweet
• 1:01:58
  or recording the Instagram video, but the fact that your whole life becomes a goal hunt,
• 1:02:07
  essentially, for a very particular kind of goal.
• 1:02:10
  This moment, yeah, is this moment of my life, one, it's like you're walking around with a little
• 1:02:16
  here, monk, yellow son, your shoulder, a little version, an avatar of you constantly watching you
• 1:02:20
  going, is this bit worthy of sharing in some way? Is this going to be sticky enough for people
• 1:02:25
  who are sharing? And the point about that is it's not a moral consciousness. No, I'm all for that.
• 1:02:31
  Yeah. I think we should be as morally conscious as possible. And if in every moment our
• 1:02:39
  psyche is being invaded, that's the wrong word, but you know what I mean, preoccupied
• 1:02:44
  with thoughts of, is this the best way for me to do this? Yeah, I don't think anyone would make that
• 1:02:50
  for that. Right. I would misunderstand what you're saying. Great, but when that is replaced by
• 1:02:54
  how does this look? Something really fundamental, I felt, anyway, to the point about
• 1:03:02
  deliberation being the core of democracy. So impedes our ability to be just deliberative,
• 1:03:07
  not even in an institutional context, but just an interpersonal one, because we're always thinking
• 1:03:11
  about whether or not there's a way to own somebody. Like there was a, there was also a real shift
• 1:03:17
  on social media in the mid 2010s, mid to late 2010s, which went from, I really loved Twitter
• 1:03:23
  in 2012, 2013, 2014. I thought it was a really interesting place where all kinds of different
• 1:03:28
  people could just spitball. And, but the incentive to own people and to make a point and to
• 1:03:35
  hound people and to prove that they're wrong and to misconstrue them and to be as ungenerous as
• 1:03:40
  possible in your interpretation of what you think they're saying and to catch out transgressors.
• 1:03:45
  I mean, what came to be called cancel culture, became on both sides and not just has a left wing
• 1:03:50
  phenomenon, became so sort of toxic. It's funny. I remember I first noticed it in 2014, it was on my
• 1:03:59
  wedding celebration, and I tweeted about it was, I think it was the Ferguson Missouri riots.
• 1:04:08
  I should, did you remember that? It was like one of the earliest instances of America losing its
• 1:04:13
  shit over a white cop shooting a blank, I think it was that. And when was, when was Trayvon Martin?
• 1:04:21
  I should know. It was around that, that they were both in my, I mean, I should know, but
• 1:04:25
  it's sad that there are so many possibilities. Yeah, exactly. But I tweeted something,
• 1:04:33
  I tweeted an impolite joke, which was intended to be sympathetic towards black people who live in
• 1:04:40
  racist parts of America by saying like, why would you put up with this level of racist policing?
• 1:04:45
  Why wouldn't you just get out of dodging? I go somewhere where there aren't so many red necks.
• 1:04:50
  And it blew up on the left because I was, I was blaming the victim, right? And it blew up on
• 1:05:03
  the right because I was implying that the south, the deep south is racist. So it was like this
• 1:05:09
  ridiculous firestorm in which everyone on the internet felt like was finding exactly opposite
• 1:05:17
  ways in which I was being a fuckware. Yes. And what actually mattered was that you were there to be,
• 1:05:25
  you were there to be milled, you were the grist. I was there to be held up to be burned at the
• 1:05:29
  stake and to sort of be held up as an example. Yeah, because there was a performance that had to
• 1:05:33
  take place there. Yeah. And by the way, when I say that, I'm not implying that people didn't have
• 1:05:38
  genuine convictions in these matters. It's that there is something different that goes on when you
• 1:05:44
  hold a genuine conviction and you encounter someone who challenges that in some way,
• 1:05:48
  good or bad, in private. Yeah. Yeah. You engage in a different way or it's someone that you know.
• 1:05:57
  But where it's not, once we allowed ourselves to think that the avatar on our screen was the
• 1:06:05
  same thing as a human. That is to say, actually it went the other way that the human exactly was
• 1:06:11
  really just an avatar. Yeah. And that human beings then just became bearers of certain attributes
• 1:06:19
  that we could flatten out into that avatar, right? So they were, insert your adjective here.
• 1:06:27
  Social justice warrior or a right wing nut job, I think was the early iteration of this.
• 1:06:32
  I think I was when I was hosting Weekend Breakfast on ABC Television, which was a Weekend Morning
• 1:06:38
  TV show. I was labeled as an F. Just an F.
• 1:06:50
  Hang on F, R, W and J. Yeah. I hope it's far. Yeah. Could have been something else.
• 1:06:59
  Could be. Yeah. Right. Being that because NJ would be not true. Yeah. NJ, that's right. Because I
• 1:07:05
  was interviewing a Labor Minister of Government about something and asked him a question that
• 1:07:10
  lied that I was not on board with left wing. Yeah. Because I was doing my job. I've got lots of
• 1:07:15
  questions, lots of stories like that. But especially at a place like the ABC, where it is actually your
• 1:07:22
  view is secondary to the, it's in some ways irrelevant. The interview you're doing in the politician,
• 1:07:28
  you have a certain role to perform. Yeah, exactly. You have to push back on them. Totally. That's
• 1:07:32
  actually your democratic function in that situation. Yeah. But I think what we're circling here is,
• 1:07:38
  or we're sorry, what this is all really about, it seems to me, is this phenomenon of making
• 1:07:45
  everything performed. I mean, I think I'm familiar with notions of, you know, you can get into this
• 1:07:52
  butlerian argument about performativity, etc. It's a different thing, actually. Just pause on
• 1:07:57
  that for a second. Yes, a lot of people will be thinking, what about the Billy Joel song
• 1:08:02
  Stranger, which is all about the different masks that we wear and the different faces that we put
• 1:08:05
  on and the way that you walk in your house to your partner and you're wearing a different face than
• 1:08:09
  the one at work? What is not performative? I mean, it's RuPaul says, we're born naked and everything
• 1:08:16
  else is drag. It's just some extent. Yeah. Right. I think we instinctively know the answer to
• 1:08:24
  this question. Yes. I mean, it's a matter of degree. Yes. And I mean, I think if that were true,
• 1:08:29
  then someone getting up on stage would not be anything. There are degrees of performance.
• 1:08:37
  There are, and also, one of the signs of intimacy is the dropping of these masks. Right. In fact,
• 1:08:47
  that should be the core tenet of friendship, really. And the depth of friendship can be charged
• 1:08:51
  by the extent to which you can be authentic with the person. And it may well be true that
• 1:09:01
  there are very few people in your life for whom there is no mask at all, if that's even possible.
• 1:09:08
  Okay. That may be true. But I just think to try to draw some kind of line between that on the one
• 1:09:14
  hand and what is effectively just a digitized version of broadcasting to a kind of mass.
• 1:09:22
  And mass communication is a big part of that. Mass communication becomes inherently performative
• 1:09:27
  because it's so crude. You are talking to an incoherent mass of people that will look at the same
• 1:09:38
  object and interpret it in a million different ways. The smaller the crowd, the more direct
• 1:09:43
  the interaction, the more private the interaction. The fewer takes you are having to manage as you do,
• 1:09:50
  it is the closer you get to an exchange that I would regard as being meaningful or being authentic
• 1:09:56
  or the term I keep using is rich. I'm not sure I agree with that, but I don't want to go down and
• 1:10:01
  wrap up. I'm sure about broadcasting and performativity because I do think there is a kind of,
• 1:10:08
  I think the mass media, even the huge mass media at its very best has the real test of the great
• 1:10:16
  mass broadcaster is the ability to bottle intimacy and authenticity as if it were targeted at a
• 1:10:22
  single person and have it land. Yes, in a myriad different ways for a 40 million or 100 million
• 1:10:29
  people, that's what Carson did. Right. You're like, that's what I'm not to have it did. I'm not
• 1:10:34
  denying that. And there are very skilled broadcasters. But observe, they can only do that within a
• 1:10:42
  fairly small envelope of ideas or expressions because the bigger the audience, the fewer degrees of
• 1:10:50
  freedom that you really have. Consider the alternative of having a one-on-one conversation with
• 1:10:57
  someone that you know really well. You can go to all sorts of places. You can say all sorts of
• 1:11:02
  things that would be open to being misconstrued because you know they're not. You know that the level
• 1:11:07
  of understanding that goes both ways is such that I mean, I wonder if this is actually still a
• 1:11:12
  conversation about social media because before everyone was able to fart out their bad take,
• 1:11:19
  you actually did have quite a lot of freedom, I think. When Sammy Davis, Jr and Galvidal were on
• 1:11:26
  Dick Cavitz show, I don't think there was much censoring of themselves. They weren't allowed to talk
• 1:11:30
  about sex and stuff like that, you know, really crude stuff. But I think there was, you know,
• 1:11:36
  when James Baldwin and you know, they were talking about serious shit that could be very
• 1:11:41
  misconstrued. But I think there was a gatekeeping among the media at the time, which was a gentleman's
• 1:11:47
  agreement that you don't try to take them out of context and you let them do their thing.
• 1:11:52
  I think that's a fair observation. But in some ways that underscores the phenomenon I'm trying to
• 1:11:57
  observe here. What happens when social media came along is that this thing that happens on
• 1:12:05
  television or whatever, that's called that the object, is viewed from a million different angles,
• 1:12:11
  very few of which seem actually to observe the original object. What they've observed is a,
• 1:12:16
  you know, a refraction of that through, you know, clipping or whatever. And then there are
• 1:12:22
  a million unpredictable takes, many of which have very little to do with the object as a
• 1:12:27
  bridge in the mouth, right? And so that makes saying things impossible, right? Or at least very difficult.
• 1:12:34
  And it's not just a question of bravery because you can say, well, if you brave enough, yeah,
• 1:12:38
  but it's not that I'll get slammed. It's that I'll be completely misunderstood. And then so the
• 1:12:43
  communication hasn't actually happened, right? Now all that is is the phenomenon I'm describing
• 1:12:50
  or trying to describe, taken to the nth degree, where the nature of the audience is so varied and
• 1:12:58
  so diffuse that clear communication becomes impossible. Right. Because you've also injected,
• 1:13:04
  though, the incentive to misunderstand. Yeah. I mean, I heard on your radio show, you were talking
• 1:13:09
  about John Mulaney's comedy bit, and I can't remember whether it was you or Scott who were talking
• 1:13:16
  about the how diabolical it is to take a little segment of stand up out of the context and the shared
• 1:13:23
  agreement of the stand up club. And then put it online and say, oh, look at what this person said
• 1:13:28
  about this, you know, historically disadvantaged group or something like that because it's not what
• 1:13:32
  they were saying. The words do not describe what the point of the communication was in the context
• 1:13:37
  in which it happened. And we now live in a world in which there is a an institutionalized algorithmic
• 1:13:43
  incentive to willfully misunderstand and misconstruew everything because we get more followers,
• 1:13:49
  we get more likes, we get more clouds and so on. So anyway, so we agree on that. We agree on that
• 1:13:54
  aspect. Yeah. And to come back to the liberal democracy conversation, all I'm saying is I'm not
• 1:13:59
  sure what the liberal democratic solution to that that is effective. Looks like I just don't know.
• 1:14:05
  So let's zoom out from social media then and just talk about liberal democracy,
• 1:14:09
  I don't know if he's all my piece in the age this morning, but I had a piece in the age and this
• 1:14:14
  anymore. Harold about Charlie Kirk and about freedom of speech. And I mean, I wrestle with this.
• 1:14:19
  And you know, if I had 10,000 words instead of 1,000 words, I would also talk about social media in
• 1:14:26
  the context of that piece. I was simply making the point that the solution to political extremism
• 1:14:35
  and political violence is us standing on small little liberal principles and not catastrophizing
• 1:14:42
  about everything, demonizing our enemies, being more tribal, you know, being hysterical about
• 1:14:47
  how words of violence and is that vision? Do you think naive at them in the 21st century?
• 1:14:58
  It's not naive as a call as an invitation. I don't necessarily like your chances,
• 1:15:13
  but that's not the same as saying it's naive. Right. And I do think there is a time and a place,
• 1:15:19
  in fact, maybe increasingly large time and place where the invitation needs to be issued almost
• 1:15:26
  as a reminder. Now, I suspect without knowing for sure, your farmer or a devotee of liberalism
• 1:15:32
  than I am. So I don't see it necessarily as about calling people to return to liberal principles.
• 1:15:42
  What do you mean by liberalism when you say that I'm probably more into it than you?
• 1:15:48
  Well, I guess the question would start with how how into liberalism do you see yourself?
• 1:15:53
  It depends what we mean by liberalism because I wouldn't have thought I wouldn't have assumed
• 1:15:56
  if someone had asked me that you were less into the liberalism that I am thinking of than I am.
• 1:16:02
  I would have thought that principles of pluralism, democracy,
• 1:16:09
  generosity of spirit towards other people's ideas. I just don't say them as exclusively liberal ideas.
• 1:16:15
  I think there are lots of worldviews, lots of ways of looking at the world that are very into that.
• 1:16:23
  That would predate liberalism. I don't think of those things as liberal. When I think of liberalism,
• 1:16:30
  I think of an idea of the reduction of state intervention to harm. So the harm principle
• 1:16:43
  is governing, really, the limits of state involvement. I think of an allied phenomenon that I
• 1:16:50
  don't know is necessarily part of liberal theory, but I think ends up as a practical reality
• 1:16:56
  falling out of it, which is the shrinking of the conception of what the moral life is to the harm
• 1:17:04
  principle. I can elaborate on that more if you like, but just elaborate. I guess what I mean is
• 1:17:13
  as society becomes more liberal, one thing that goes along with that is it becomes very difficult
• 1:17:20
  to have a conversation with someone chosen at random. Let's say a public conversation that is
• 1:17:26
  anchored in an idea of morality because making an appeal to moral categories starts to feel like
• 1:17:38
  an intervention. So how often do the conversations collapse back into, well, as long as you're not
• 1:17:44
  harming anyone? That's a very casual throw away thing. That's a liberal statement of the purest
• 1:17:53
  kind. Part of what I think happened with liberalism is this idea of, it was a political philosophy
• 1:17:59
  that actually sat atop a sort of idea of a broad moral and cultural consensus around things.
• 1:18:07
  Slowly over time, I think by design, became a moral philosophy, and so that hollows out
• 1:18:17
  really the moral vocabulary, it hollows out moral concerns, and I think that's part of the reason
• 1:18:23
  you see now this sort of weird backlash against liberalism and assertion of morality, but it's a
• 1:18:29
  bit, it's a bit deformed. Can I just inject a couple of things before the train goes too far,
• 1:18:33
  I forget them? I would say that I don't regard relativism as intrinsic to liberalism,
• 1:18:39
  which I think is what part of what you're pointing to. There is a sort of 20th century
• 1:18:47
  philosophy, kind of almost post-structuralist post-modern like Foucaultian sort of attitude towards
• 1:18:53
  culture and politics. It is very unmoored from any fundamental moral basis where you'll find
• 1:18:59
  Western feminists standing up at universities, justifying the Taliban's treatment of women,
• 1:19:05
  because who are we to wag our fingers until the Taliban and what's right and what's wrong?
• 1:19:11
  I see, and that brings me to my second point, which is that I also wouldn't conflate
• 1:19:17
  classical political liberalism with what I mean by liberalism, which is a broader,
• 1:19:25
  and yes, some of it predates the enlightenment, but I think the enlightenment did the best job we've
• 1:19:30
  had so far of trying to pull together the strands of what was good about those human instincts
• 1:19:35
  and write them down on pieces of paper and say this is the way that we should treat each other.
• 1:19:42
  Everyone is his own individual master, we are not beholden to the tribe, we don't get to be
• 1:19:47
  bossed around by people just because they're powerful or they wear robes or whatever, like we have to
• 1:19:51
  be generous towards each other and in diversity and debate, we're going to grow our way towards
• 1:19:58
  a better answer and we're going to build systems that can help guide us towards the truth
• 1:20:03
  rather than shutting other people down. That is the basis of what I'm talking about when I talk
• 1:20:08
  about liberalism as a philosophy rather than as a political strategy. I'm not a conservative
• 1:20:15
  politically, I'm leftists politically within the context of social democracies,
• 1:20:20
  perfectly comfortable with the governments making regulations, with governments taxing rich people
• 1:20:24
  a lot, with governments having universal healthcare and addressing guns and things like that,
• 1:20:29
  I'm not a libertarian on those things, but I think that underpinning at all what liberalism
• 1:20:34
  provides is you're right, the downside is that it finds it difficult to make moral judgments
• 1:20:43
  and that leaves us feeling claims. What depends how big the claim is?
• 1:20:48
  Yeah, I mean, the sanctity of the individual, the right of each human to be treated with dignity,
• 1:20:54
  I think those are moral claims that liberalism is uncomfortable with. Yep.
• 1:20:58
  Right. It finds it hard to make cosmic claims about the purpose of life, but even there,
• 1:21:06
  human flourishing, human wellness, the reduction of harm, those are moral claims.
• 1:21:12
  Yeah, sort of, that human flourishing, human wellness, I'm not sure, I've been
• 1:21:20
  seeing your thoughts actually, I'm not sure liberalism is terribly keen to or even capable of
• 1:21:28
  fleshing out those things in a thick way. It hasn't been, I don't remember that.
• 1:21:33
  But my point is I don't think it can because the minute you start to do that,
• 1:21:37
  you limit its principle concern or the capacity of its principle concern, which is freedom.
• 1:21:43
  Right. Do you? Yeah, I think so.
• 1:21:47
  Yeah. Because if you're going to say freedom by making moral claims,
• 1:21:52
  well, I guess it depends what you want to do with them. But the point I'm making about liberalism
• 1:21:56
  is I just don't think it wants to venture too far into describing what the good life is.
• 1:22:04
  No, because they'll leave it up to communities and people. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:22:10
  And so once you have a liberal order over time, and here I'm talking centuries,
• 1:22:18
  it becomes difficult to have publicly admissible arguments that are anchored in some kind of
• 1:22:24
  grander moral vision, because that just becomes a who are you to say, and it becomes a,
• 1:22:30
  you're now limiting my freedom in some way, right? And I think, I'm not sure that that
• 1:22:36
  drives with my experience of liberalism. I have people on this show all the time who disagree
• 1:22:44
  vehemently with moral principles that I hold dear. And I, I'll grant you that the recent trend
• 1:22:54
  in politics has been to respond to such people with protests and shouting and yelling and
• 1:22:59
  demonization and placards and slogans. Yeah, yeah, which is a slightly different, which is
• 1:23:03
  the thing that I'm talking about. But I think I have perfectly legit and small liberal
• 1:23:12
  moral claims to interrogate their morality using reason. And that might be my own. I just feel
• 1:23:20
  like, I feel like I saw in your eyes a moment of recognition when I gave the example of people saying,
• 1:23:27
  well, as long as you're not hurting anyone, right? Yes. That there is, this is, I don't think I'm
• 1:23:37
  being selective here. I feel like that's a frequently invoked principle of liberal. Yeah, yeah,
• 1:23:46
  yeah, but not as a way merely of delineating government action, but as a way of delineating whether
• 1:23:52
  or not I see something is right. Yeah. Now we get a hold conversation about whether or not that's
• 1:23:59
  desirable. And that that's a separate thing. I'm just making the observation that that's
• 1:24:05
  what begins as a political idea bleeds into becoming a mode of moral thought. Right. And as people,
• 1:24:14
  especially people who are not necessarily going through life trying to filter everything through
• 1:24:19
  philosophical ideas or whatever, which is let's face it the way most sensible people
• 1:24:26
  this sort of happens by osmosis. Right. What's the argument against that as the underpinning moral
• 1:24:32
  principle? Well, it's not a moral principle. Live and let live. Yeah. That's not a moral principle,
• 1:24:41
  but it's not a sufficient moral basis for like, well, it may not be a sufficient moral basis for
• 1:24:48
  an individual's life, but it's not a sufficient moral basis for a country to operate like as the
• 1:24:54
  basic shared principle that a multi-ethnic society has to. Okay, so now we're moving into a different
• 1:25:00
  realm, right? Always. Yeah, yeah, because now you're talking more about principles by which
• 1:25:06
  public and governmental life is. No, no, it's a good government. Like, but I'll grant you
• 1:25:11
  kind of have to include government in that in that because I just think it's cleaner. We probably
• 1:25:17
  both agree that a small or liberal government is desirable in if all we mean by that is a government
• 1:25:24
  that doesn't impose the moral priorities of one community on everybody else in that society.
• 1:25:30
  Okay, so here's where I think you and I would agree. Well, sorry, let me first say here's
• 1:25:36
  where we would disagree. I don't know that I'm of the position that that is in the abstract
• 1:25:42
  ab initio the best form of government. I don't I don't think I can even make that judgment,
• 1:25:52
  but I do think that having walked so far down a path that has left us with such hyper-diverse
• 1:25:58
  societies that has been formed in liberalism's image to such an extent. I've not come up or come
• 1:26:10
  across a better way of managing all that. Well, yeah, and as Churchill said, it's the worst
• 1:26:16
  political system apart from all the others. Yeah, although I think he might have been saying that
• 1:26:20
  as an absolute statement. I'm just saying it as a circumstantial statement. I think, but can you
• 1:26:24
  think of just to just so I understand this better? But can you think of countries where
• 1:26:31
  live and let live is not the and has not been the moral principle that encourage human flourishing
• 1:26:40
  better than Western liberal democracies have over the past since the Enlightenment?
• 1:26:46
  Since the Enlightenment? Yeah, like, you know, since liberalism got going.
• 1:26:50
  Yeah, but I mean, that's...
• 1:26:51
  I'm not saying your counter-arguments have to exist since the Enlightenment.
• 1:27:00
  Yeah, I don't know. I guess I'm just not sure how far we can interrogate this because
• 1:27:08
  in all I'm talking about is as a matter of some kind of absolute principle,
• 1:27:14
  is this the way government should be formed? Well, I don't know.
• 1:27:18
  But that's why I'm not Churchill because of course, it would be ridiculous to claim that we've
• 1:27:22
  come up with the best possible. But also civil society is so radically varied that, you know,
• 1:27:31
  I don't know what it would mean to go into a pre-modern society whose very architecture is tribal
• 1:27:40
  and say, all right, here's a liberal government. I mean, it would probably dissolve
• 1:27:46
  a whole thing into it. I'm just saying you would be able to look at whether or not there was
• 1:27:52
  greater human flourishing in one versus the other. You don't have to believe that one can be
• 1:27:57
  transmuted into the other. Yeah, yeah, okay. But in order to make a claim that this is the best
• 1:28:01
  form of government, I'm not making a claim that this is the best form of government.
• 1:28:06
  Okay, okay. Well, then making the claim that this has done a very good job of creating innovation
• 1:28:14
  and upholding people's rights in a way that is conducive to progress and wellness.
• 1:28:22
  I think that's a fair claim to make except that it's not done yet.
• 1:28:32
  And we might be the chaos that we're currently seeing might be the natural expression of it.
• 1:28:39
  So this is kind of what I meant before about when you, so if we take, if we accept the idea
• 1:28:46
  that over time, what liberalism does, perhaps even by design, is it hollows out consensus.
• 1:28:55
  It hollows out moral consensus. It hollows out cultural consensus.
• 1:29:01
  And it does that actually even irrespective of immigration. It's a part of it might be,
• 1:29:06
  you could say it because you've got all these immigrants and you have all sorts of different,
• 1:29:08
  well, yeah, maybe there's some sort of, there's cultural diversity that happens as a result of that.
• 1:29:13
  But cultural consensus doesn't exist anyway. And part of that is what we've been talking about
• 1:29:17
  technology, age of the internet, so on. Given human beings are so, given we heard animals,
• 1:29:29
  given that we are meaning seeking beings, that inevitably will trigger our reaction to it.
• 1:29:39
  And this is why I sort of frequently when I gaze in the direction of
• 1:29:46
  sort of the more, what would you call it, virulent, strands on the right.
• 1:29:52
  What I see is a debauched response to a pretty constant human yearning.
• 1:30:03
  You're talking about the illiberal critiques from the right of liberalism.
• 1:30:09
  Yeah, this sort of sense that everything's just up in smoker bit,
• 1:30:14
  that there are not things around which we can cohere.
• 1:30:17
  There are, let me abundantly clear, horrific expressions of that idea.
• 1:30:25
  There are some that are retrograde and deserve to be described with whatever label of prejudice you
• 1:30:31
  which to use in some cases as in what sort of examples. Yeah, once you start getting into,
• 1:30:41
  we shouldn't accept immigration from ex part of the world because these are terrible people.
• 1:30:47
  Whatever. I'm comfortable calling that sort of politics racist.
• 1:30:52
  But that's not the same as saying there isn't something beneath them.
• 1:30:58
  That is a more enduring human concern. That is not merely reducible to prejudice.
• 1:31:04
  That there are other things that are scratching around for certain things that have been lost.
• 1:31:11
  But partly I think because it's not morally formed.
• 1:31:17
  It doesn't, it takes on this sort of, I destructive, and I used the word before,
• 1:31:24
  deborched expression. So I suppose the question would become to what extent is a phenomenon
• 1:31:31
  like, let's just say Trumpism, although I hesitate to use that word because I think there are a
• 1:31:38
  lot of people gathered under that umbrella who actually, from the most erasible to actually some
• 1:31:42
  people who I would regard as reasonable, they just happen and they vote a certain way.
• 1:31:49
  But I think some of their concerns are reasonable, right? So there's such a huge range.
• 1:31:54
  But let's just use that. So what do the question becomes? So what extent is Trumpism or some
• 1:32:00
  version of an inevitable outcome of the liberal project? That is the idea that once you
• 1:32:10
  create the conditions for the sort of perpetual erosion of consensus, then it'll be reclaimed
• 1:32:22
  in terrible or terrifying ways. Well, look, I find it heubristic to imagine that we're at the
• 1:32:31
  moment at which liberal democracy is facing its greatest test in the form of a reality
• 1:32:36
  television host, you know, is trying to go all over on America. We've had hundreds of years now
• 1:32:46
  of challenges America literally almost split into in a civil war. If we were talking in the 1960s,
• 1:32:57
  Martin Luther King would have just been shot in the head. The President of the United States would
• 1:32:59
  have been shot in the head. His brother, the Attorney General, who was running for President,
• 1:33:02
  would have been shot in the head. Like we would have been saying. The system is not up for this
• 1:33:08
  challenge. I just don't know what. So if we want to stop sort of using Trump as the kind of
• 1:33:17
  ultimate liberal icon, there are people like Curtis Yavin, who is a thinker, who's calling for
• 1:33:22
  a monarchy, essentially saying that there should be other kind of enlightened tech king, really,
• 1:33:28
  to rule countries instead of democratic systems. There are quite a lot of people swimming around in
• 1:33:34
  this, writing books about illiberal, you know, ideas saying that liberalism has failed,
• 1:33:39
  that basically make the argument that you're sort of just making, which is that it
• 1:33:43
  corrode everything meaningful about human existence. Victor Orban is a big hero for these people.
• 1:33:49
  Not for me, can I be? Not for me, yes, I'm sure. Sometimes this has a valence that
• 1:33:57
  veers on xenophobic or Islamophobic in the case of the Douglas Murray's and of the world. A lot
• 1:34:03
  I count Douglas as a friend here, and I disagree strongly about the stridancy or tone of his
• 1:34:08
  stance both on Israel and also on immigration. So there's a kind of quite a large area of
• 1:34:17
  criticisms of liberal democracy. None of them seems to me to be as persuasive as the old
• 1:34:26
  school liberal claim that you can find the meaning that you need in life, in your family,
• 1:34:32
  in your community, in your faith, if you have one, and that you don't actually need to derive it
• 1:34:37
  from the totality of the nation. Yeah, totality in the nation is probably not where I'll go with it.
• 1:34:45
  That's more status conception, I suppose, than I'm imagining, but I think in society.
• 1:34:50
  I mean, but isn't that where the anti-immigrant who you were bending over backwards to be
• 1:34:55
  generous to a moment ago, but who's probably racist is coming from? The nation is the unit
• 1:35:00
  that liberals care about. Sorry, the nation is the unit that
• 1:35:06
  liberals care about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think part of the preconditions for
• 1:35:20
  that are the erosion of things like community, right? Yeah. So I think one of the reasons that you
• 1:35:27
  become fixated on the nation is that it's this imagined community that we have, and especially if
• 1:35:36
  we feel somehow alienated within our own communities, and here I'm very suspicious of people
• 1:35:41
  who want to blame something like migration for that. There are so many other forces at play
• 1:35:46
  that are eroding community, not least of which is the completely unpredictable working hours
• 1:35:52
  that people have to use. That's not a small thing. That's a huge disruption to the bonds that
• 1:35:59
  actually make people's lives meaningful, right? So in the absence of that, the nation becomes the
• 1:36:06
  avatar of any kind of collective. We don't have a collective other than that really that we can
• 1:36:10
  appeal to. There's a much broader discourse to be gotten into here about just the nature of a
• 1:36:17
  public and whether or not we're even capable of having publics anymore. I mean, one thing that I
• 1:36:23
  think has gone wrong also is that in being too tolerant of relativism, a moral relativism,
• 1:36:32
  and too scornful of religion, liberalism has found itself with pockets of listless,
• 1:36:42
  aimless, contextless communities. These get derided as the cosmopolitan global elite,
• 1:36:51
  and as a part of that cosmopolitan global elite myself, I thought we'd won 10 years ago.
• 1:36:58
  I clearly have more in common with my friend who writes for the Wall Street Journal and lives in
• 1:37:04
  Rome and went to Oxford. Someone also lives in some other part of the world. The people I was
• 1:37:09
  hanging out with in Brooklyn, then I do with many people who live within a walking distance
• 1:37:14
  of my home. We don't, we're not building communities anymore, and then a physical geographical
• 1:37:20
  thing related to these. And that was such an important part of human existence because
• 1:37:26
  the thing that the geography does is it throws you together with people and you may or may not
• 1:37:33
  have terribly much in common with those people. I mean, increasingly in the stratification of
• 1:37:38
  society, you'll probably have things in common because of socioeconomic status and professionalisation,
• 1:37:43
  all those sort of things, but as a general concept, it's one of the reasons I love sports so much,
• 1:37:47
  is it's probably the only sphere of life that where you get a thrownness. Here you are.
• 1:37:54
  Sort it out. What about faith? What about religion? I mean, I just lost my dad, and I noticed
• 1:37:59
  keenly the absence of context, like the difficulty of, you know, going through the motions of supposedly
• 1:38:09
  religious acts without any religious or spiritual grounding in them for me. It's nice to
• 1:38:19
  ape them because I feel like I belong to something that is bigger than myself, but I also think
• 1:38:24
  that that thing is an earthly creation. You know what I mean? I've got an orthodox Jewish friend
• 1:38:31
  who talks about this, people wanting the fruit, but not the tree. Yeah. Yeah, I think he's right.
• 1:38:39
  But I think that that's, I mean, I don't know if this is about liberalism now or about
• 1:38:44
  just the way in which we turn to life. No, no, no, well, I'm saying as I don't know if this is a
• 1:38:49
  function of liberalism per se or just a function of the way in which, you know, the increasing
• 1:38:53
  superficiality or consumerism of the way that we live. But I guess the point of these rituals,
• 1:38:59
  the point of these modes of living is that they weren't trinkets. They sat atop something that
• 1:39:06
  was bigger than that, right? They, um, what was brought with that was a whole series of,
• 1:39:14
  you know, an ontological view, a cosmological view, a sociological view that included
• 1:39:22
  obligations and an understanding of the human being and had a full, quite rich account of the
• 1:39:28
  inherent worth of the human being rather than being something that you would just say. And of
• 1:39:32
  course, all sorts of violations of that and human beings will violate whatever tenets you give
• 1:39:37
  them. But, um, yeah, there was definitely something there. And I think that's one of the reasons
• 1:39:42
  that you're starting to see, although I don't know the data actually backs this up, but anecdotally,
• 1:39:47
  I see an increasing fascination with religion, you know, the, the new atheist thing that was really
• 1:39:53
  hot for a few minutes in what 20 years ago. Yeah, like the minorities. I think 9-11 did a lot to,
• 1:40:02
  give it a kick in the pants. Yeah, that might be nice, but it's interesting. It hasn't
• 1:40:05
  stood up from 2008. Yeah, you know, it was Sam Harris and Dawkins and all these guys. It's
• 1:40:10
  interesting how quickly that sort of, yeah, it's sort of that faded. So there's clearly something.
• 1:40:15
  I think it won a lot. I think it, I think it staked its claim in a way that it wanted to as being a
• 1:40:19
  legitimate part of the national conversation and no longer a fringe thing. But we have definitely
• 1:40:26
  seen a, um, I mean, if you wanted to look at the dysfunctional ways in which human beings
• 1:40:35
  can crave belonging, when the traditional ways are removed, it would be hard to do better than
• 1:40:42
  to point to the period between 2008. And today, yeah, both in identity politics on the left and
• 1:40:48
  cancel culture on the left and workness on the left and then on the right to make America great
• 1:40:53
  style or bun style far right. Yeah, blood and soil nationalism. Or even, um, I mean, I, I just
• 1:41:02
  simply remember reading an op-air. I think it was in the Washington Times. So Washington Post,
• 1:41:06
  you wouldn't be reading the Washington Times. That's a concern. I've seen the Washington. How do you
• 1:41:11
  know? Well, I would not read a conservative paper. Um, no, it's in the Washington Post and I just
• 1:41:16
  wish I'd looked at this before we had the chat because I can't remember the names of the details,
• 1:41:20
  but the point I remember was a, a veteran of the civil rights movement in the 60s talking about
• 1:41:25
  Black Lives Matter. And this wasn't the, the heat of it, right? So this was not a convenient thing
• 1:41:31
  to say. But the point they were making is they can't look at Black Lives Matter and see something
• 1:41:37
  that they can get on board with because it was so different from the civil rights movement.
• 1:41:42
  And one of the key differences in the civil rights movement according to them is it was anchored
• 1:41:47
  in the church. And so as a result of being anchored in the church, it came with a whole moral framework
• 1:41:55
  and a fundamental basis for the moral claims it was making about racial equality. And when you
• 1:42:03
  listened to, I was like, where was I? I was in America last year for the election to, to cover it.
• 1:42:10
  And while I was there, I think I might have been in Atlanta. I went along to a civil rights
• 1:42:15
  museum. And it was really interesting seeing the instructions they would give their protesters.
• 1:42:21
  The way they would handle themselves at those, you know, the, the, the sit-ins at the countertops,
• 1:42:28
  the way they would dress, the way they would speak, the way they would behave,
• 1:42:35
  the way in which someone like MLK anchored his call for desegregation, it was,
• 1:42:43
  Oh, America, you've, you've portrayed your faith, you've portrayed Jesus, right?
• 1:42:52
  So in other words, whatever criticism you might want to make of certain people involved
• 1:42:57
  or whatever, they will always be there to be made in any movement in any, but, but
• 1:43:03
  the point at least this op-ed was making was that it was capable of achieving incredible things
• 1:43:10
  because it was based in a fraternity with the people that was seeking to reform,
• 1:43:17
  while seeking to make claims of, you know, it was appealing to white brothers and sisters
• 1:43:24
  and, and making a claim that was, you see that we are like, you, we, you know this.
• 1:43:33
  Now let me call to your better angels and to a common standard that we can now appeal to.
• 1:43:39
  That's the role of morality, and it's the role of various norms that we try to come up with,
• 1:43:46
  whether it be international law or whatever, but we are increasingly capable of brushing them aside
• 1:43:51
  because the notion of a common standard that we can appeal to is, is slowly eroding.
• 1:43:57
  I think that's kind of what I'm trying to gesture at, and in terms of comments,
• 1:44:02
  do you get moral instruction from your faith?
• 1:44:04
  Yeah, of course.
• 1:44:08
  And it's interesting because the things that I think most about in that context,
• 1:44:14
  other things that are hard as to talk about publicly, the things that are about the state of the
• 1:44:20
  heart, the constant scanning of oneself for what in Islamic terminology would be diseases of the heart.
• 1:44:28
  You can't.
• 1:44:31
  That's such a hard conversation to have publicly because it, not because I fear backlash,
• 1:44:36
  but because I just fear incomprehension, which is what, what are you, what are you talking about?
• 1:44:42
  I'm not sure there'd be that much incomprehension.
• 1:44:44
  I think people are yearning for an opportunity to die when I was there, diseases of the heart.
• 1:44:48
  I agree with that, but, but there's difference between yearning and then having the vocabulary
• 1:44:55
  for it. I constantly find myself, I'm talking to someone who's not familiar with this.
• 1:45:03
  I constantly find myself trying to find the nearest linguistic metaphor to convey the sort of idea.
• 1:45:12
  And how do you deal with the truth claims of your faith as opposed to the moral instruction of
• 1:45:18
  your faith? Because this is what a lot of people have had trouble with since the new atheist
• 1:45:23
  or actually since religion began the doubters who are like, if this really is a divine word,
• 1:45:31
  then on what basis are we believing claims about cosmology or history?
• 1:45:36
  Simply because it says so in a book, what's your relationship to truth claims?
• 1:45:41
  I just have no problem with them, but I've been through a lot of journeys with that,
• 1:45:47
  like I've been through those things, you know, the cool thing when you were an adolescent and
• 1:45:54
  you first came across philosophical ideas or whatever, it's like I'm just radically doubting
• 1:46:00
  everything man and all this sort of stuff. I just found most of the objections to be
• 1:46:06
  pretty weak actually. And I found most of the claims to be all the claims in the end,
• 1:46:13
  to be persuasive. Actually, there's not that many claims you need to get to before you go
• 1:46:17
  through the portal. The question for me was not just clarify that. I mean, I'm not talking about
• 1:46:23
  claims for the existence of a deity or a creator god who we're capable of communing with.
• 1:46:30
  I'm talking about the claims of specific faith traditions. So, you know, the fact that the
• 1:46:35
  Christian does believe that Jesus was, you know, resurrected the fact that the Muslim does believe
• 1:46:39
  certain things about the relationship between Muhammad and the divine and things that happened
• 1:46:44
  to Muhammad. You're such like an intellectually rigorous person and I have such respect for your
• 1:46:50
  skeptical mind. Being a non religious person, I don't understand what the relationship is between
• 1:46:55
  sort of fact checking in every other field of life. And then what would seem to an atheist like
• 1:47:02
  me to be credulity towards historians? Yeah, yeah. So that's the bit I would I just don't
• 1:47:10
  I don't think there's anything credulous about it. I got knowing what happened to someone
• 1:47:15
  a thousand years ago. Yeah. Well, why would that be? I mean, because it's hard to figure out what
• 1:47:21
  happened. Well, actually in the content, I mean, here we're going to get into a lot of specifics if
• 1:47:26
  you really want to. This is one of the things that where I think the Islamic tradition is incredibly
• 1:47:33
  strong. Partly because it's relatively recent. Much harder to establish. Yeah, Yahweh is an
• 1:47:41
  older drink. What exactly happened in Moses' life as deduced from the historical record if you
• 1:47:48
  separate scripture from that is a much more difficult question. Yeah. But how much detail do you
• 1:47:56
  want here? Because in the Islamic tradition, because there was so much concern for the preservation
• 1:48:10
  of the message, but also so much concern for the corruption of that as people became politically
• 1:48:18
  motivated or perhaps motivated for other self-interested reasons, right? Oh, yeah, this is what the
• 1:48:24
  Prophet said, etc. An unbelievably rigorous system of authentication was developed. And to the
• 1:48:34
  extent that depending on how strict you want to be about this, you can't make a claim about the
• 1:48:43
  Prophet having said or done anything without first identifying an unbroken chain of narration.
• 1:48:52
  All the way back to the Prophet himself, in which every single person in that chain
• 1:48:58
  is life story is known. Reliability as a narrator. So their level of memory, their character,
• 1:49:07
  their propensity to lie, whatever is examined and checked. And then you have a very sophisticated
• 1:49:11
  method by which each report is classified as sound as authentic, to good, to weak,
• 1:49:26
  to fabricated, to sound because of other reports that are similar that had a chain.
• 1:49:32
  So it's not, yes, it's not as bad as Moses and it's not as bad as the Gospels where
• 1:49:36
  had people writing 50 years after the fact about things that they didn't see. But we all know that
• 1:49:40
  even today we have games of telephone where we have unreliable strings of, I mean, you get told
• 1:49:48
  something about a piece of gossip about somebody and even if that person is reliable, we sort of
• 1:49:52
  do quite a lot of fact checking to make sure that it's true. And the more extraordinary the claim,
• 1:49:57
  the more extraordinary the evidence you want the evidence to be. Sure. So like did Muhammad
• 1:50:02
  fly to heaven on a winged horse, but something like that. So yeah, I see this. You know what,
• 1:50:08
  I mean, like you would need an extra, I would need an extraordinary, very, very robust.
• 1:50:12
  No, no, I see. Yeah, so that's an interesting example. That's where I think the claim,
• 1:50:18
  the approach is backwards. Okay. I don't need direct evidence of that historical event.
• 1:50:26
  What I need is to answer a couple of basic questions. Do I believe that
• 1:50:34
  the prophet is what he said? Do I believe that the book that he brought is revelation as opposed to
• 1:50:45
  some composition that he or someone else came up with? In other words, do I believe those fundamental
• 1:50:51
  claims and then do I believe the messages preserved? At which point, the things that flow from that,
• 1:50:57
  flow from that? So I can get people want to pin me down on how do you believe in miracles,
• 1:51:02
  etc. Or whatever. So if you are prepared to believe that God exists and if you are prepared to
• 1:51:11
  believe that this man liked various others, lots of others who came before him is God's messenger.
• 1:51:18
  There are no miracles. Right. The least, the least difficult thing.
• 1:51:23
  That doesn't. And in terms of scripture, like I would remember talking to my grandmother who
• 1:51:29
  was a Catholic and my favorite person in the world, and I would talk to her about things that
• 1:51:34
  bothered me in the Bible. And she would gracefully sort of wave them away and say like,
• 1:51:40
  you know, there was written by human beings who were divinely inspired, but you can't take
• 1:51:45
  everything literally that's in the Bible. And she basically constructed like many religious people
• 1:51:49
  do. I think her own hodgepodge of things, which is what gives many secular people pause when
• 1:51:55
  they think that like, you know, to some extent, I have more respect for the fundamentalists who
• 1:52:01
  I met in Egypt and who, you know, were really, really, really dogmatic. You know, almost
• 1:52:06
  the hardest, but certainly Islamists. I was like, you know what, they have a view of the world
• 1:52:10
  that is coherent. They, that if the cosmos is structured, the way that they believe it structured,
• 1:52:15
  then they are behaving perfectly ethically. So there is a middle point between those two. And
• 1:52:19
  then how do you, how do you get out of this? This is important argument or the accusation that
• 1:52:23
  you're just cherry picking. Like, no, no, no, but this is a thing, I think, I think Muslims,
• 1:52:29
  L.A. serious Muslims, very careful not to cherry pick, but they are also very careful
• 1:52:35
  to note the limits of their knowledge. So we don't have a church. We don't have someone who sits
• 1:52:43
  at the top of in bodies orthodoxy, who then provides dictats that are adopted. Yeah.
• 1:52:52
  But what we do have is scholarship, which means conversations are kind of perpetually open.
• 1:52:58
  I mean, there are areas of consensus, and it's why authentic knowledge in the sense of scholars
• 1:53:06
  who have a pedigree. And even that pedigree is established in the way that I described before,
• 1:53:13
  this person who learnt from this person who learnt from this person who learnt from this person
• 1:53:18
  all the way back, right? So you have that and an understanding for someone like me who,
• 1:53:29
  frankly, in the scale in the grand scheme of things, knows nothing. Like you were talking about
• 1:53:35
  an unbelievably vast tradition here, right? I don't, I'm in some ways not entitled to dogma.
• 1:53:50
  I believe the foundational things, the credal things. I believe in God, I believe in the
• 1:53:57
  messengers, I believe in Revelation, I believe in the things that are detailed in that,
• 1:54:03
  and which the prophet pointed to as being the foundational things, you know, and that includes
• 1:54:08
  an unseen world. Okay, so that's what I think. But once you start getting into complicated
• 1:54:13
  questions about stuff, I can hold a view. But I- The question's complicated because I don't get
• 1:54:21
  the complication of theology strikes the non-religious person as being a lot of hot gas that people
• 1:54:30
  who were battered into submission by the Enlightenment and reason and secularism have had to
• 1:54:35
  concoct in order to distance themselves from what is actually the divine message, which is quite
• 1:54:40
  barbaric and homophobic and antisemitic. Look, regardless of the faith you're talking about, right?
• 1:54:46
  If, as you said before, this was, you know, Marmond was not just concocting stuff,
• 1:54:52
  but he was narrating a divine message. I don't think the point I'm adding, like what do you
• 1:54:58
  make of his antisemitism and sexism and- But the war mongering.
• 1:55:04
  Okay. Well, now we're just going to get into an argument about it. I just don't accept those
• 1:55:07
  propositions that if I read the Hadith and the- Yeah, okay, so you're making a really interesting point
• 1:55:13
  here without- I don't know if you mean it. That's where the danger lies. I read this Hadith.
• 1:55:21
  I read these verses- No, but all of them. I mean, do you know how many there are?
• 1:55:26
  Like, do you honestly- Do you know how many- What are you saying that I would walk away from
• 1:55:29
  reading them with a message that was like- I'm saying that- I'm saying if you were really serious.
• 1:55:37
  Yeah, right. That's the wrong way to learn. What you would do is you would sit down with someone
• 1:55:46
  presuming they're available who had mastered it and you would talk to them.
• 1:55:55
  And I guarantee you if you did that, you would walk away with a vastly different impression.
• 1:56:01
  Because the- I'm sure that's true, because that person lives in a world which has been
• 1:56:05
  battered by secularism. If I spoke to- No, not always.
• 1:56:08
  Really? No, no, no, no. I think if I went to Saudi Arabia and spoke to someone who was really,
• 1:56:13
  really devout, I probably would walk away- Yeah, suppressed. Yeah. I don't-
• 1:56:18
  Or not? I mean, I might be wrong.
• 1:56:20
  No, no, but- You're setting up on the one hand, there are those who live in a secular
• 1:56:24
  environment who have been battered by it, I think you said, and then there are those in Saudi
• 1:56:27
  Arabia. That's not how it works. How do I explain this?
• 1:56:37
  The people- If you're talking about studying traditionally, these are people who are out,
• 1:56:43
  they've gone and moved to Mauritania. Right.
• 1:56:46
  And studied at the feet of people that you probably never heard of, or most certainly never heard of,
• 1:56:52
  who are not implicated in some kind of power structure of a petrostate or something like that.
• 1:56:57
  And that's not to cast aspersions on anyone who studies in Saudi Arabia.
• 1:57:01
  You know what I mean? We can cast aspersions on these salafis.
• 1:57:04
  Ah, more complicated than that, right? But-
• 1:57:09
  I mean, I don't- I'm not trying to be mean to them- No, no, no, I'm just trying to understand
• 1:57:14
  the relationship for a skeptical, intelligent person between- between premise one, which is
• 1:57:20
  the words are divine, and premise two, which is, don't take all of the words seriously.
• 1:57:26
  No, no, it's not, don't take them seriously. It's that- certainly in this Islamic tradition,
• 1:57:30
  I can't- I think Christianity is very different in several important ways as a tradition or as a
• 1:57:37
  scholastic endeavor. It's not don't take them seriously. It's- don't
• 1:57:49
  attribute meaning to them dogmatically, lightly. Things have a- a part of it, there's no way to
• 1:58:00
  avoid this. Part of it is to have such a level of the Arabic language, the mastery of the Arabic
• 1:58:06
  that you can actually understand what this word means, what it doesn't, the fact that it's
• 1:58:12
  constructed this way grammatically as opposed to that, how this word is used across hundreds of
• 1:58:18
  thousands of different reports. But is that- is that seriously going to- have you walk away from
• 1:58:24
  the Qur'an thinking that Jews are okay, that Jews aren't lesser than Muslims?
• 1:58:31
  Absolutely. Oh, well, I think- and anyone I've ever spoken to who has seriously studied,
• 1:58:44
  as in I'm talking about proper people. I'm not talking about like serious people. I'm not
• 1:58:49
  about like someone who did a university course or someone who Googled a few things. I mean-
• 1:58:54
  No, I get it, but it just sounds like you're setting the bar unfairly high. Like if a book needs
• 1:58:58
  to be- if you need to devote your life reinterpreting a book in order to make it palatable.
• 1:59:03
  No, it's not that. But no, no, no, no. A billion people read the book and they take away a different
• 1:59:07
  message from it on the whole. But I don't think they do on the whole. I mean, you can go into any
• 1:59:14
  majority Muslim country and you can whip up a mob in the street to- Yeah, but now you're making
• 1:59:18
  a sociological observation. About the way that they interpret a theological text. No, no, but you're
• 1:59:23
  assuming that's all there is. No, I'm just saying- No, it's one piece of a bigger jigsaw puzzle.
• 1:59:30
  There's antisemitism everywhere. It's not exclusive. And I could- you know, I don't
• 1:59:34
  have to be talking about Jews. I could be talking about women's rights or whatever. I mean,
• 1:59:38
  there are a lot of things which- and I'm not picking on Israel either. You know, go to a traditional
• 1:59:42
  Orthodox Jewish community and you're going to find all kinds of treatment of women and gay people
• 1:59:48
  that I would find objectionable. But I do think there's a theological basis for those
• 1:59:53
  for why they think they're doing that. Like the Orthodox Jewish family who's homophobic
• 1:59:56
  towards their son who's coming out. Yeah. It's not unrelated to- No, no, but you're-
• 2:00:01
  The tenets that you're- Okay, revelation. Sure evidence for my evidence.
• 2:00:07
  Your appeal is to the meaning of the text is I can walk into this country and whip up a mob.
• 2:00:14
  And if any reasonable person reads the text, they would come to the same conclusion as the mob.
• 2:00:18
  I'm not interested in a reasonable person reading it. I'm interested in a qualified person reading it.
• 2:00:24
  I think you're just defining qualified person as a person who interprets it in such a way that
• 2:00:29
  it conforms to what you and I agree are- No, no, no. No, no, no.
• 2:00:33
  It's liberal tenets because we got those from the other ones. Can I be clear? That's absolutely
• 2:00:37
  not what I'm doing. Okay. I mean someone who's actually got the credentials.
• 2:00:43
  And I'm not saying that everything that- that what they say will be some miraculous pre-figuration of
• 2:00:47
  liberalism. No. I mean a copy partly for the reasons we were discussing about the moral pleasure.
• 2:00:53
  Liberalism. But you would be- I'm constantly surprised by what I hear from these people.
• 2:01:04
  How have you felt just coming back to the cultural part of things and like identity
• 2:01:09
  in Australia over the past couple of years? You and I both come from migrant families,
• 2:01:14
  we've both come from minority ethnicities and faith traditions, both of which have their,
• 2:01:20
  well, which are both the two largest most discriminated against. Fates.
• 2:01:31
  How's it been? Oh, it's been really hard.
• 2:01:34
  And when I say that, I don't mean me personally. That's not interesting. I mean,
• 2:01:45
  yeah, for people who are- and there are far better people to speak to this than I
• 2:01:51
  then may because they've been swimming in the data and the stories and whatever my wife among them.
• 2:02:00
  But it's the level of violence, the level of abuse, the level of intimidation,
• 2:02:12
  do you mean here in Australia? Yeah.
• 2:02:16
  Reddily available information too. But the point I would make about this is,
• 2:02:21
  I mean, it's not just a couple of years. So in the case of the Muslim community, you're going back to
• 2:02:33
  I was going to say 9-11, it's really before, but 9-11 really. And then the other big one is
• 2:02:38
  is 2005, 2007, in London because that creates the homegrown narrative and then that changes
• 2:02:45
  multiculturalism is in the dark and all this sort of stuff. I thought you were going to say 2015 or
• 2:02:49
  whatever the ISIS said. Yeah, 2014 when they take Mosul, that's another iteration. So there's
• 2:02:54
  just so many iterations of it. And like the, you know, the downed air men in orange jumpsuits being
• 2:02:58
  burned alive in cages in the desert and stuff like that, or the, you know, Daniel Pearl being
• 2:03:02
  beheaded onto me. That was a moment at which I thought the- which I worried about the backlash
• 2:03:08
  against. Yeah. And yes. By the way, ISIS, a very good example of text with no scholarship. Yes.
• 2:03:19
  But the thing that I've found most, I don't know, troubling the word, the thing that has really
• 2:03:26
  bothered me, one of the things that's really bothered me is this insistence from various
• 2:03:31
  quarters of our public conversations, some political, some media, to try to turn this into a competition
• 2:03:36
  or a zero-sum game between Jews and Muslims over discrimination and prejudice. And it just
• 2:03:44
  drives me mad that to identify the presence of some phobia or is somehow to deny the presence of
• 2:03:54
  antisemitism. That just because the conflict in the Middle East has become so zero-sum in the way
• 2:04:00
  that so many people think about it and talk about it and argue about it, that therefore,
• 2:04:06
  and by the way, I don't think that should be a case either, but since that's what's happening,
• 2:04:11
  that even domestic claims and experiences must be zero-sum as well. It bothers me. It really,
• 2:04:19
  really bothers me. Because, you know, you get this thing, what's worse? Who, honestly, I don't even know
• 2:04:27
  how you would answer that question. How rich a data set would I need? And by what metrics am I
• 2:04:33
  saying something is worse or better? I don't know. No, it's silly. I know people also talk about
• 2:04:38
  like reported hate crimes and it's like, well, maybe different communities have different abilities
• 2:04:43
  or instincts about reporting. Well, preparedness to do it all, whatever. And Jewish Muslim
• 2:04:49
  communities in Australia are very different because of, you know, recency of migration levels of
• 2:04:53
  establishment, institutional connections, all these things, they're just very different
• 2:04:59
  communities. So they'll report, if you think that's what you want to pick on, that's what they'll
• 2:05:03
  report in different ways as well. All that is true, but it's just who cares? And, and well,
• 2:05:10
  let me just give the most generous possible interpretation to this, right? One thing that
• 2:05:16
  shits me to tears is when Jewish Australians will interpret any criticism of Israel as being
• 2:05:22
  anti-Semitism. And another thing that equally shits me to tears is when Islamist leaning Australians
• 2:05:31
  will interpret the sense of besiegement among Australian Jews at the moment as being evidence
• 2:05:36
  of carelessness about the lives of cousins or something like that. It's like we've got these boxes
• 2:05:41
  which, you know, are easy off the shelf ways of shutting down someone's conversation. This is
• 2:05:46
  sort of a point that I was trying to make in the article this morning where the moment I call you
• 2:05:50
  an anti-Semite, all of a sudden, you have to go away and stop criticizing, you know, a country
• 2:05:56
  that is currently engaging in war crimes. And similarly, the sort of preciousness and sanctum
• 2:06:02
  only with which some of the anti-Zionists are protesting, and many of them are not Muslims or
• 2:06:08
  Arabs at all, lands for many Jews as being like smelling a little bit off, you know what I mean?
• 2:06:18
  And so to that extent, and by the way, I would say it's used Islamist before. I actually think
• 2:06:22
  that's not where that is mostly expressed. You're probably right. You're probably right. Yeah.
• 2:06:29
  Yeah, I think there are other political commitments go along with that on the far left
• 2:06:33
  that are part of that. That's right. And maybe Arab nationalism is something I should say instead
• 2:06:38
  of Islamism, it's probably actually a... I actually think it's just far more chaotic than all that,
• 2:06:44
  but the phenomenon you're observing is right. And I don't... I don't know what to do about it.
• 2:06:49
  No, I don't know. There is something about it deeply. I worry as well. But I think what worries me,
• 2:06:58
  and this I will admit is more of a concern for my community than for yours,
• 2:07:04
  unless I think it is. But the idea that when you have mainstream political parties and mainstream
• 2:07:14
  media organisations lining up to make this a competition, as a way of getting into
• 2:07:24
  or facilitating basically denial, I just think it's unconscionable. I don't know what end it serves.
• 2:07:34
  Oh, well, no, put it this way. I can think of ends it serves. None of them is good.
• 2:07:39
  And I kind of don't want to succumb to that kind of cynicism. So if I leave aside those cynical
• 2:07:46
  ends, I don't know what... What are the cynical ends, even? The perpetuation of prejudice against
• 2:07:53
  Muslims because they've never liked it. And one of the first things you do in that situation is
• 2:08:03
  you have to deny... I mean, this sort of idea that whatever happens in life, whatever happens
• 2:08:12
  in the world, Muslims can only be perpetrated as they can't be suffering. They can't be victims
• 2:08:18
  or anything. That's not me trying to move off into some kind of victimhood narrative. I'm just
• 2:08:24
  saying, when you framed it that way, then of course you have to deny the existence of
• 2:08:31
  any prejudice or violence or whatever that's visited upon Muslims. You either have to come up with
• 2:08:36
  a narrative that says they deserve it, which is too much for pull up company. Or you have to say it
• 2:08:42
  doesn't exist. Or you have to say if it does exist, it's not a real problem. I mean, they deserve it
• 2:08:47
  is an interesting point because they deserve it is the subtext to a lot of the pro-Israel of the
• 2:08:53
  most pro-Israel conservative media commentary rights. So if you look at the sort of right-wing
• 2:09:00
  populist media commentators in Australia or everywhere who are defending Israel's actions in
• 2:09:07
  Gaza, I do think there's a subtext of maybe Arab and Muslim Australians don't deserve it,
• 2:09:13
  but Gazans collectively do. It's interesting that you mentioned that framework of like
• 2:09:20
  Muslims can only be perpetrators and not victims because that's actually the flip side of
• 2:09:26
  another frame which the left has, which is that I can't remember how it was put, but someone
• 2:09:36
  put it to me saying in any conflict, notice to whom we give agency and notice to whom we give
• 2:09:42
  sympathy. And it tells you a lot about our own political or cultural priorities. And in that context,
• 2:09:50
  I'm agreeing with you, but also adding to it because I think the mirror image of the phenomenon
• 2:09:55
  you're talking about is equally terrifying, which is that there's a progressive off-the-shelf
• 2:10:03
  heuristic, which is that if there are wealthy white males in suits standing up,
• 2:10:10
  then they're the bad guys. And if there are brown people, preferably Muslim or Arab standing
• 2:10:15
  amid rubble, then they're blameless. And so all the agency is on one side. All the sympathy is
• 2:10:20
  on the other. There's an assumption that there's no agency whatsoever. Hamas has no agency. We're
• 2:10:25
  not talking about the agency of, they're all sympathy, all agency. And similarly, as you say,
• 2:10:33
  on the right-wing side, it's like there's something just suspicious and sniveling about
• 2:10:38
  Muslims, even in Australia, they don't quite belong. They don't really share Australian values.
• 2:10:44
  And therefore, they're less deserving of sympathy than nice, upstanding,
• 2:10:52
  whiter-looking Jewish Australian financiers. So can we explore this principle?
• 2:11:00
  And to do this, it's not even about this conflict. It's more general. I think this is one of the
• 2:11:06
  problems that I've started to see in discussions of any form of oppression or any form of
• 2:11:13
  vulnerability, and other, whether it's frequently used. This idea that it is all really
• 2:11:21
  centered on the question of power. So the flip side of might is right is that might is wrong.
• 2:11:29
  Meekness is therefore right. I don't mean much by meekness. I'm just
• 2:11:34
  coming over the alternative. I don't want people to read into it.
• 2:11:41
  And this is pretty much the sort of critical race theory approach to racism, as an example,
• 2:11:48
  is that racism isn't prejudice. It's prejudice plus power. And that what flows from that is that
• 2:11:55
  if you do not have power, you cannot be racist. You can only be the victim of racism.
• 2:12:00
  Yeah. And this becomes expressed, I think, most keenly in the current moment when it's applied
• 2:12:10
  to Jews, because well, Jews are powerful. They don't count as more than the average or whatever life
• 2:12:19
  expectancy is high. Indigenous people, their life expectancy is a lot shorter.
• 2:12:24
  I have a problem with formulation. It's not that I think power is irrelevant.
• 2:12:29
  And I do think there are certain forms of amisseration that flow from powerlessness,
• 2:12:35
  that compound the experience of prejudice and racism, etc. There are some forms of powerlessness
• 2:12:42
  that are such that when you experience prejudice, there is not even a forum for identifying it
• 2:12:49
  or for replying to it. It's a prejudice that can't even be perceived because you are that.
• 2:12:58
  So I accept that. I'm not saying power is irrelevant. But to say that it's the gist of it.
• 2:13:03
  That is the determining factors to whether or not something counts as a prejudice worth
• 2:13:07
  paying any attention to is a problem. And I've even occasionally seen Jews making this argument,
• 2:13:13
  if they might be, say, pro-Palestinian and a lot of pro-Palestinian Jews,
• 2:13:19
  they're making that argument about antisemitism. Well, that's not, you know,
• 2:13:22
  I've never understood the things that you are pointing to as accoutraments of power
• 2:13:30
  would have been applicable of Jews in Europe. Absolutely. I don't know also applicable of
• 2:13:36
  any other, you know, Indian, I don't know if this is still true, but Indian Australians
• 2:13:42
  or Indian Americans, Korean Australians, Korean Americans, Nigerian Australians,
• 2:13:45
  Nigerian Americans, many of these communities earn more than the average.
• 2:13:51
  Many of them are in professions. Indians dominate in medicine in this country. If you
• 2:13:58
  called someone, you're black bastard or you Indian bastard, that is racist. Even if the Indian
• 2:14:05
  is in a position, even if that person is the prime minister of England. Yeah. So I think
• 2:14:10
  right. Right. And then you'll get into a broader argument about, well, they might be the prime minister,
• 2:14:15
  but that's not the passion to be there. So you then are not in a never ending argument about how
• 2:14:20
  exactly we want to categorize and rank power. Right. And of course, one of the problems in our
• 2:14:28
  time and in any hyperdiverse society is that power isn't linear. It very much depends on where you are,
• 2:14:35
  on the sphere that you're talking about and so on. Another way this might play out is in respect
• 2:14:42
  to say Christians. So I have had conversations with Christians in Australia who feel genuinely
• 2:14:49
  like they're hiding. They might work in an industry like show business where it's a very difficult
• 2:14:56
  thing. Now that will be scoffed at by anyone who doesn't like Christianity or doesn't like Christians
• 2:15:03
  on the basis of what do you mean? This is the establishment religion. How are all this power? Let me
• 2:15:07
  point to this in history and history and all these sorts of things. But that doesn't change the
• 2:15:10
  social reality that that person's experiencing. None of this is to say I don't care for any analysis
• 2:15:16
  that involves power. Power is important and relevant and it's something to pay attention to.
• 2:15:23
  But it is far too promiscuous an idea and far too an elusive an idea to make the fundamental
• 2:15:31
  basis on which everything in social understanding must revolve. That's right. And it may have been
• 2:15:37
  true in the 1950s and it certainly was true in the 19th century that an identity label that you
• 2:15:43
  possessed automatically conferred tremendous power. It's no longer true in the 20s that an identity
• 2:15:49
  label automatically confers uninherited power. Unless you're talking about the reverse phenomenon
• 2:15:55
  that you're talking about where it is possible for I'm feeling embarrassed revealing this anecdote
• 2:16:00
  about myself, but because it's so not the person I want to be. But this morning I had an email from
• 2:16:06
  the Sydney Theatre Company about their line up next year and they've got this revolving little
• 2:16:10
  gif of all of the stars who you're going to all of the actors who you're going to see on stage
• 2:16:14
  next year. And this is in the context of my pre-existing knowledge that the New Yorker,
• 2:16:23
  the premier publication for literary fiction, short fiction in America, has never published
• 2:16:32
  a work of fiction by a white male who was born since 1980. White straight male who was born
• 2:16:39
  since 1980. And I don't think that any major theatre company in Australia has published,
• 2:16:46
  has, has put on a play by a straight, that was written by a straight white male,
• 2:16:50
  born since 1980. Everyone I know will say, oh crocodile tears, boo hoo hoo, you guys have been running
• 2:16:57
  the shop for thousands of years now it's our turn. But the, the individual men, the young men
• 2:17:03
  who are pretty dysfunctional at the moment, to feel like there's no way for them to wrestle in
• 2:17:07
  public with, they're not writing book, they're not writing novels, there are no novels being written
• 2:17:10
  by young straight white males. Oh, red, apparently. Oh, red. Oh, red. But this Sydney Theatre Company
• 2:17:17
  gif came up, they've got eight actors that it's on a scroll and five are women, two are men of color
• 2:17:24
  and one is David Wenham who is one of our most famous and successful and celebrated actors. So one
• 2:17:29
  white male, the fact that I noticed that will lead, fucking, I hate myself for it, I hate society
• 2:17:38
  that it has put me in a headspace to notice that because five years ago, I wouldn't have paid
• 2:17:43
  any attention to it whatsoever, would have been completely irrelevant. But you're being asked to,
• 2:17:47
  I'm being asked to, yes. So constantly being like, we're turning each other's volume up on
• 2:17:54
  difference because it's all unhealthy because it's a basis for claimmaking. So this is where things
• 2:18:01
  get interesting if we go back to liberalism, because my understanding of this phenomenon is
• 2:18:09
  it's an attempt to try to make visible things that exist in liberalism's blind spots.
• 2:18:17
  Because liberalism understands the world has been society has been constituted through individuals,
• 2:18:22
  it's not that other things don't exist, but the relevant
• 2:18:27
  unit of analysis is the individual, individual liberty, the relationship of the individual with the
• 2:18:32
  state, so on and so forth. All of the claims that it wants to allow, that it will respond to,
• 2:18:40
  and all of the equality that it wants to grant, it will anchor in some kind of
• 2:18:52
  individual rights claim. And that is true. I would say for the most part, I was going to save
• 2:18:59
  him more than that, even of the claims that we think of as identity victories, whether it be
• 2:19:07
  I don't know, something like Roe v. Wade, right? That was a decision that was anchored in a doctrine
• 2:19:18
  to do with privacy. So you see what's happening there, right? And I'm not getting into an argument
• 2:19:24
  about abortion laws in America or it, but I just mean the mechanism of the reasoning.
• 2:19:31
  Right, so it's an individual, I regard the
• 2:19:35
  identitarian move of the past decade that has yielded that imbalance in the voice that we give
• 2:19:44
  we allow from certain cohorts, like young stray white males, and the band that contaminates,
• 2:19:51
  I would say, our thinking about discrimination against Muslims and discrimination against Jews,
• 2:19:56
  like it's a running joke among Jews, for example, that no one in the world can ever just say that
• 2:20:00
  they oppose anti-Semitism. No one puts a full stop after it. They always say,
• 2:20:06
  end Islamophobia and all other forms of... Yeah, there's no other bigotry that has that
• 2:20:11
  phenomenon. It's, you know, not to, not to play one up on itmanship against who is more,
• 2:20:18
  like, who's discrimination is more punished. No, no, because it does have a sound of early range.
• 2:20:22
  No, but people, politicians can say like, there's no excuse for Islamophobia.
• 2:20:26
  On the left, at least. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, but on the right,
• 2:20:30
  sure, but on the right, they'll go, I oppose anti-Semitism, and if you talk about anything else,
• 2:20:34
  you're an anti-Semite. But they won't say that. No, not literally, but that is what they'll say, right?
• 2:20:40
  It's the only prejudice I will recognise. That's the reason. There is a very stupid cohort of
• 2:20:48
  bloating right-wing shock-jock who behaves that way, but I don't think that's the same thing.
• 2:20:53
  Some of them are not even shock-jots, but no, no, I accept your point. I'm not accept your point.
• 2:20:57
  So I just regard liberalism. I regard that we don't live in a liberal moment.
• 2:21:03
  No, no, but the point I'm, well, I guess the point I'm trying to make, I think I've been making
• 2:21:07
  this point badly since the start, this conversation, is that because what liberalism wants to do is
• 2:21:16
  rant equality or whatever, recognise your claim on an individual basis, it doesn't really have
• 2:21:24
  the theoretical technology to understand things that are more structural than that in their nature.
• 2:21:33
  So, pens are a bit on the version of liberalism you want to identify or appeal to, but
• 2:21:43
  one of John Howard's classically liberal objections to saying sorry of the stolen generations
• 2:21:52
  or any notion of treaty or anything like that is with First Nations Australians.
• 2:21:57
  Yeah, with First Nations Australians, yes, for the international audience.
• 2:22:01
  Is that, well, these are just citizens. You can't have a treaty with your own people.
• 2:22:08
  You make treaties with other countries. You don't make treaties with yourself. Right.
• 2:22:13
  Or, well, if you want your interest represented, then contribute to public debate, etc.
• 2:22:25
  What that never grappled with fully, especially in a pre-internet age, which comes with its own
• 2:22:32
  depredations, the internet age, but what that never grappled with is yes, but that's merely a
• 2:22:39
  rhetorical, if you don't have access to the public conversation. Yes, I just think you're sort of
• 2:22:48
  conflating individualism with liberalism a little bit more than I do. I think of myself as a liberal.
• 2:22:52
  I voted in favor of a referendum that would have established a voice to parliament, which was
• 2:22:57
  an advisory body for Indigenous Australians to have a context in which to have their voices heard.
• 2:23:02
  And I found that perfectly consistent with liberal ideals. Even though... Can you explain that,
• 2:23:08
  actually? Why did you find that? Because the clearest objection to the voice, of course, was that it was
• 2:23:14
  identitarian? Yes. And that it was identifying Australians with reference to group
• 2:23:20
  management. And that did bother me that it stuck in my
• 2:23:22
  crawl a little bit. My basic overwhelming sense was everything we've been trying so far has not
• 2:23:28
  yielded the results that I've had. That's a pragmatic concession. It's pretty pragmatic.
• 2:23:31
  So, but that's not a liberal concession. That's a pragmatic... That's you saying, I'll suspend
• 2:23:35
  my liberal commitments out of a pragmatic desire to try something. Ah, I'm not sure that's true.
• 2:23:41
  I think that it's a sense that liberalism functions best when conversations and deliberation
• 2:23:48
  are optimized. And you don't have to be a radical individualist about how people have those
• 2:23:54
  conversations in order to feel that, you know, liberalism is best served. The liberalism is not
• 2:24:01
  synonymous with each unitary solitary individual human being conversing. Like society is complicated
• 2:24:09
  we live in a multi-ethnic society. There are all kinds of informal forums. Like, if it had had
• 2:24:14
  a veto power or something, then I wouldn't have voted for it. But simply to have a context in which
• 2:24:19
  a large number of disparate communities from around the country who found it quite hard, frankly,
• 2:24:25
  I'm talking about First Nations communities. There were so many of them that it's quite hard for
• 2:24:29
  them to hear around recommendations that are easily understood and accessible by parliamentarians
• 2:24:36
  and let alone the public. That I just felt there's nothing, there's nothing
• 2:24:40
  illiberal about just as there's nothing illiberal about faith communities gathering together and
• 2:24:46
  worshipping every week and nothing illiberal about, you know, religious people objecting to my
• 2:24:53
  lifestyle or, you know, my position is not every single individual has to be solitary unit.
• 2:25:01
  It's just no, no, no, understand that it's more about the grammar of the relationship between
• 2:25:07
  the state and the citizenry, right? That's more the issue. So put it this way, I would have
• 2:25:14
  also, I would have had a problem if at the same time Chinese Australians wanted some context
• 2:25:21
  in which to express their in which to lobby government and that was being deprived of them.
• 2:25:28
  Would you have accepted a constitutional Chinese advisory body?
• 2:25:32
  I think the whole constitutional thing was stupid to begin with. I didn't really.
• 2:25:36
  Yeah, I understand why the prime minister didn't just, this is all a bit in the ways
• 2:25:41
  of the Australian context, but just create the bloody thing and then just it's done.
• 2:25:44
  Why does it have to be in the constitution? Well, because the whole, again,
• 2:25:47
  I don't want to remove it from the process of opposition and government.
• 2:25:55
  So, yeah, I understand because I mean, it doesn't create something and it doesn't work in 20
• 2:26:00
  years. You have to hold a whole other referendum in order to get rid of it. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, but
• 2:26:05
  I think the point of that the architects of the voice were making was it has to be constitutional
• 2:26:12
  so as to sit above the fray of electioneering, right? Yes. And the concession, I was not really
• 2:26:22
  the concession, but the offset is that it doesn't have any formal power. It's merely an advisory
• 2:26:27
  sort of a thing, right? Yeah. So, anyway, but the fact that you're uncomfortable with that means
• 2:26:32
  that the Chinese question asked is beside the point. But yeah, I'm not saying there is no way a
• 2:26:39
  liberal could have voted for the voice. What I'm saying is that liberalism's tendency is to
• 2:26:45
  apprehend people's claims. Yeah. And grant them rights. And rights is the main gist of liberalism,
• 2:26:55
  right? Liberalism doesn't talk about, you know, more demanding notions such as obligation,
• 2:27:04
  duty, so on. That's a different language. I'm not saying it's an illiberal language, but it's not
• 2:27:10
  a liberal language, right? So when you're reducing things to rights and so on, they have to be
• 2:27:15
  individually understood. Even when we start to do things like legislative hate speech and stuff
• 2:27:22
  like that, the claim is brought by an individual. And the claim must be brought by an individual. And
• 2:27:29
  there's this tension that happens in the liberal mind and the liberal democratic process when we have
• 2:27:34
  legislation like that because it's a bit of group, whatever it's about, but it's the individual as
• 2:27:40
  as they exist as a member of a group. The group doesn't necessarily have a legal
• 2:27:46
  corporeal existence. And so you see what I mean. So what the way I understand it the way I've
• 2:27:54
  described it is liberalism was very good at providing what I've called like a subsistence level
• 2:28:00
  of liberation, right? You can, there's a flaw. But it's not by its nature very interested in
• 2:28:10
  lifting people off the floor. No, no. And I am fully, I fully understand why liberal would say
• 2:28:17
  and that's fine. That's nothing. It's the job of people and communities to figure out how to
• 2:28:23
  get off the floor. But all I'm saying is that's what's opened the door for this focus on power
• 2:28:32
  because how do you get off the floor? The situation you have is I'm on the floor. I've
• 2:28:38
  granted these rights. I experience them as mostly rhetorical and I have nowhere to go. There's
• 2:28:42
  nowhere I can make this claim that's going to elevate my social position or remove the discrimination
• 2:28:48
  that I feel. There's not really any way I can stop someone not giving me a job because of my
• 2:28:53
  surname because I can't prove it. And whatever. So what we need is some kind of more structural
• 2:29:00
  intervention, some kind of identity-based claim-making mechanism. You are right to call it
• 2:29:07
  liberal in some ways. The whole point is that it's liberal. Where I think it became really tricky
• 2:29:14
  for that movement and it started to eat itself is because of what I was trying to say before about
• 2:29:19
  how liberalism evacuates moral vocabulary. There was nothing that it could appeal to
• 2:29:27
  in the way that a moral vocabulary might have to do with, I don't know, fraternity or
• 2:29:36
  the obligations towards fellow human beings or whatever. So it had to reach for what liberalism had
• 2:29:43
  and that is harm. And so this identity movement, sorry, that's not right, this identity-based
• 2:29:52
  politics. This policy calibrated around the notion of group membership rather than individual
• 2:29:57
  existence. It had to make a harm appeal. It had to make a safety appeal. And this is where we
• 2:30:05
  ended up because how can I make this harm appeal other than when I'm trying to describe something
• 2:30:10
  that's actually quite structural. Well, the only way I can do that is to expand the notion of harm.
• 2:30:17
  So it becomes so comprehensive. You said this thing that perpetuates this prejudice,
• 2:30:24
  even if it's an incremental amount, no longer will I call that prejudice or have the argument with
• 2:30:29
  you because the whole public conversation is tilted by power structures. It means that my claim
• 2:30:35
  can never really be heard in your court of public opinion. So I'm going to call it harmful. If I
• 2:30:40
  call it harmful, now I have a basis for regulation. Now I have a basis for resisting it.
• 2:30:45
  What flows from that, everything's harmful. Nothing can be heard. And it becomes
• 2:30:50
  sensorious and in its way authoritarian because it just becomes a race to define harm. And the thing
• 2:30:55
  that astonished me no one, oh no, the thing that astonished me so few people seemed to pick up was
• 2:31:01
  how easy this weapon was to wield against the people who I think it's harmful to say something
• 2:31:07
  bad about the ANSEX harmful to national morale, harmful to national spirit, harmful to my family
• 2:31:13
  who's my grandfather who fought in the whatever war. In other words, it just becomes such an untethered
• 2:31:22
  principle that can be invoked in the service of just about anything that it undoes all the
• 2:31:29
  claims that you might be or all the goals that you might be wanting to achieve. And that's why
• 2:31:33
  I say perhaps the difference between you and me is I think you're committed more committed than I
• 2:31:38
  am to liberalism as an idea. I accept liberalism more or less as a pragmatic concession. In this context
• 2:31:47
  with all the proliferating concerns and all the proliferating diversity that we have,
• 2:31:53
  that's only growing because of sort of ever expanding ways in which an individual can
• 2:31:59
  constitute themselves in identity terms now, particularly in the internet age. Because of all that,
• 2:32:05
  I don't know that I can think of a better way for us to be prosecuted.
• 2:32:09
  I think I would agree with you that liberalism is a pragmatic concession. My ideal is that
• 2:32:15
  everybody agrees with me about everything, right? That's everybody's ideal. And that is what
• 2:32:22
  liberalism seeks to remedy. I know what you're saying. I'm being slightly facetious obviously,
• 2:32:27
  but what we all want, basically, is to feel like we're right and that our worldview is the
• 2:32:33
  noble one and that people who want to undo our vision of the good life are fuckwits.
• 2:32:40
  I would just like to say that is the pragmatic concession to allow to allow a plurality of people
• 2:32:45
  who have different conceptions of the good life to get along. Sure. Then maybe we agree to that
• 2:32:49
  extent. Yeah. And I would also say just to push back slightly, I think you did an amazing job of
• 2:32:54
  articulating that that dynamic that has happened and I haven't heard it put quite that well,
• 2:33:00
  there is an alternative. Liberalism does offer an alternative for uplift off the floor.
• 2:33:05
  And the perfect case study of this, and then we'll rack because I'm late for a plane to fly back to
• 2:33:10
  it, is the gay rights movement between, I would say, the 60s or really the 80s and the 2010s.
• 2:33:18
  Probably the fastest and most successful civil rights movement in the history of the world,
• 2:33:22
  I would argue. It's gone from being, when I was born, it was illegal in some Australian states,
• 2:33:27
  and then, and now we have every single right, including marriage. And how was it one? It was actually
• 2:33:34
  not one on a, you're harming us by speaking against us movement. There was an initial flurry of
• 2:33:41
  violent protests in the 60s when, you know, to protest police abuse, but the main strategy was
• 2:33:47
  fraternity, egalitarianism, universalism. Like we want what you have, we're not going to take
• 2:33:53
  anything from you, you don't have to do anything. We want, we're going to appeal to the same,
• 2:33:57
  the same liberal principles that you all claim to believe in. We just want to be able to open
• 2:34:02
  bank accounts. We want to be able to get a mortgage together. We want to not be discriminated
• 2:34:06
  against when we're trying to rent a property. If one of us gets sick, we want to be able to go to
• 2:34:09
  the hospital without being treated like a stranger. We're one of us dies. We want to be able to
• 2:34:13
  get the inheritance. And ultimately, we'd even like the word marriage, if that's cool with you.
• 2:34:17
  Not going to change your marriage in any way. And that relentless sort of just claim on liberalism
• 2:34:25
  throughout the 80s and 90s and 2010 and 2000s was wildly successful. Contrast that to the transgender
• 2:34:33
  movement of the past 10 years, where there's been a refusal to engage on the, on the principles.
• 2:34:38
  Declarations of harm. Declarations of harm. Shutting down of debate. Transwomen are women.
• 2:34:44
  Alligations of murder. Yes, you have the blood of transwit children on your hands. If you even
• 2:34:50
  open up this conversation. And the problem with the wins then is that the wins are paper thin,
• 2:34:55
  and they fall apart because the backlash, because you haven't won over a quarter. And I think we've
• 2:34:59
  seen similar things play out over certain forms of race claims. You could maybe even make a
• 2:35:05
  similar argument over certain me two claims, right? Yeah. I'm so glad you gave this example because
• 2:35:12
  you're right in that that is an example of where liberal claims led to the aims of the movement
• 2:35:20
  really effectively. But it's also, I think there's a very specific reasons for that that demonstrate
• 2:35:27
  that it can only really apply to a case like that. Why? What are they? It's dispersal.
• 2:35:35
  That's not a claim a racial group can make because it's not like most families in Australia have
• 2:35:42
  if you suddenly have one child who's an Arab or a Jew. Yeah. Yeah. And they might just randomly
• 2:35:49
  have a gay kid. The combination with the contrast with the transgender argument in some ways makes
• 2:35:57
  my point because what you don't have there is anything like the same level of dispersal.
• 2:36:02
  Don't you? No. Do you think so? Well, I know that you don't as a matter of
• 2:36:11
  well the populations are clustered but it's not like an ethnic group in the sense that
• 2:36:15
  the transgender people aren't giving birth to transgender. No, no, no. But in that case,
• 2:36:18
  no, no, no. You're right on that. But in that case, throughout the population. But the numbers
• 2:36:22
  is so much smaller. Yes. So that's what I mean in that case, right? In the case of other claims.
• 2:36:29
  claim. And then there's also just dispersal throughout culture making in society.
• 2:36:36
  How many, when the Victorian government, the state government in Australia, the Victorian
• 2:36:46
  opposition was running an argument about Sudanese crime gangs. How many Sudanese people
• 2:36:54
  were there to say making the news programs in the editorial meetings in all the political
• 2:37:03
  party. But again, I mean, that is again an neoliberal critique because the liberal
• 2:37:09
  in me wants to say it should not be necessary for a news for an editor of a news magazine program
• 2:37:17
  to be Sudanese in order to understand how distasteful it is to demonize the Sudanese community.
• 2:37:22
  Agreed, but it should not be necessary. But there are certain things that are going to be
• 2:37:36
  clearer to you and more vivid to you if you have a clear personal connection with that thing.
• 2:37:45
  Yes, I'm not. Can I be really clear? I'm not here advocating for standpoint of
• 2:37:49
  epistemology. This sort of idea that things are only knowable through I think the phrase
• 2:37:56
  that's commonly used is lived experience. And therefore, when someone with lived experience speaks,
• 2:38:02
  they're unchallengeable and nothing of their knowledge can be communicated except through lived
• 2:38:07
  experience, which is to say not communicated. I'm not saying that. I don't believe that at all.
• 2:38:14
  No, I think I mean, I think we take the soft version of the argument, which is that you need
• 2:38:19
  to have your antenna somewhat tuned to a phenomenon. We all got to realize we've all got that memo,
• 2:38:28
  well, I don't think there are unless you would have to at this point in our history to be
• 2:38:34
  obstinate if you were not even as an old white straight male dinosaur to not have your radar
• 2:38:43
  reasonably sensitively tuned to the possibility of how often. I would say two things about that.
• 2:38:48
  One is there seem to be a lot of people without that radar being tuned in that way.
• 2:38:53
  And in some ways, there's a lot of political profit in that in the current moment.
• 2:38:58
  But secondly, if it is true that we understand that now, that is, we have to admit,
• 2:39:08
  one of the consequences of the identity claim-making that has been going on.
• 2:39:13
  So whatever it's depredations, and I think you and I agree on a lot of the criticism of that.
• 2:39:19
  I've written extensively about that. I try and we would also agree that there was a utility.
• 2:39:23
  I mean, I'm not someone who thinks that the MeToo movement and the Black Lives Matter were by
• 2:39:27
  definition wrong from the start. No, no, always. Yeah, or if it's not that they were, they had
• 2:39:34
  instance here claims or that they weren't grasped in real problems. No, I think that's all true.
• 2:39:40
  But I just think there's something interesting to be observed here in how, in some ways,
• 2:39:44
  the way liberalism works, what it sees, what it emphasizes, what it de-emphasizes,
• 2:39:51
  meant that some form of identity claim-making in a certain sense had to occur because
• 2:39:59
  it was filling a gap. It overplayed its hand. It was rooted in a philosophical orientation
• 2:40:07
  that I think is suspect intellectually, and I have concerns with, like from a moral point of
• 2:40:13
  view as well, and all these sorts of things. But we're all entitled to have views that I don't know.
• 2:40:20
  As long as you don't have anybody. So it was stepping into a breach, and it has left its
• 2:40:28
  contribution at the same time as it's made contributions that I wish it wouldn't, and it's doing
• 2:40:37
  ironically what I would call harm to public conversation and to our ability to turn towards one
• 2:40:43
  other and learn from one another. But it is there, right? And so we are looking at,
• 2:40:50
  I fully understand this sort of liberal critique of identity-based politics, and let's move on now.
• 2:40:55
  If dispensed with this, I will bulldoze my way through the next conversation. But I do think
• 2:41:00
  it's worth understanding that there are these currents and countercurrents there. There are these
• 2:41:04
  blind spots that are being filled. There are, there's this messy process. I don't like where all the
• 2:41:12
  things that's thrown up, and I may not even like where it's going. But there's an interplay. There's
• 2:41:19
  a dynamic at work here, which is why do I think have fairly relatively clear views on
• 2:41:29
  some of these things, on the nature of this claim-making, and where I think it's gone too far, etc.
• 2:41:36
  I do want to put it gently, because I want to acknowledge that there are contributions for people
• 2:41:43
  to make, even where those contributions I might regard in total as being wrong-headed.
• 2:41:49
  Well, thank you. We can come back in half a century's time to see how liberalism did. Now I've
• 2:41:56
  got to catch a plane to see it. I'm sorry, I made you like it. Thanks, mate.