Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Permission to Think" with Prof. Alan Davison

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"Permission to Think" with Prof. Alan Davison · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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Good day humans. This is an exciting new unusual little mini episode. It's a great conversation with my you might say new boss not really boss colleague partner and crime
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Professor Alan Davison is the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney which is my alma mater and he is relatively new Dean he hit me up last year during the
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Covid pandemic because I think he was a fan of this podcast and suggested that we work together on a series of conversations with sort of heterodox thinkers the kinds of people who I like to get on this podcast anyway why not combine the resources of UTS
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and more and see whether or not we can't have the kinds of conversations that university should be having more of with the kinds of people who don't fit easily into the political and cultural boxes that we like to force people to inhabit these days.
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The professor is a relatively new hire he's a new Dean he has a vision for a university of free thought of free expression of exciting ideas that is not so stodgy and weighed down by I suppose the group think that you can sometimes find especially in cultural studies faculties of various universities and he's trying to create a safe space for dangerous ideas which ho ho just happens to be exactly the subtitle of this very show
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If you're listening to this for the first time because you came here from UTS hello and welcome to uncomfortable conversations with Josh steps if you are an uncomfortable conversation with Josh steps fan then you can find out more about what we're doing with UTS by searching for permission to think permission to think is the name of the collaboration that this show now has with the University of Technology Sydney and we'll be cross posting these conversations so you'll get the audio in full of the of the other
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upcoming guests here on the podcast feed and you'll get video clips for faculty and staff and the general public on the UTS website so without further ado let's hear from the man himself what he has as his vision for this little adventure it's professor Alan Davidson
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Professor you've got me in here as a visiting fellow is that what I am absolutely why why well a variety of things to do Josh firstly we want your humor your industry expertise
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I don't know so we'll see how we go at least you put that on you see there I'm sure yeah but look what we're really keen to do is get someone in that can have useful open-minded robust conversations with a few really sort of key intellectuals in the areas that I'm really keen about and that really aligned with what I think the faculty should be doing going forward what are what sort of areas well anything from race relations sex gender politics you name it
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every other stuff baby all the hot button stuff that's right what's missing in the in the discourse that you're trying to fill well I think there's quite a few things missing one of which is because they're hot button I think even academics and experts self-sensor a lot when they talk about them which is perfectly understandable you know people have careers the social mob is powerful
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and whilst we have tenured academics or the equivalent of tenured academics perhaps not quite tenured here in Australia we've got something like it but even then having a social mob come out of you and you know after you and demand that you you shouldn't be in your role or that you're causing hate speech which is causing harm etc I think it makes a lot of not any academics but also students you know question do they want to go there
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and so by go there do they want to speak honestly and wrestle with some of these issues in ways that don't conform to what the Twitter mob is going to like yeah and the twitter mobs not of course the majority for Twitter mob is allowed very active local possibly minority
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but I think self-sensory is a tricky one because when we talk about you know freedom of speech freedom of inquiry freedom of expression etc often the bit that's missing from that is the degree of self-sensoring or fear of social mobbing that sits behind that so I think part of this series we've got you to do is just try to sort of lift up the hood of social mobbing if you like of the of the Nazi beat or VW and let's lift up the lead and actually and actually see what are the things that people can and can't talk about in the world
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in their minds and why and that's why we've got I think a really interesting list of guests coming up who have scholarly expertise in the areas they're talking about they've got dare I say it lived experience that gives them legitimacy to talk about those things
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and they'll be able to share their ideas about how they curate and pass and navigate often very complex and difficult things that for many people say typical student or your typical academic or your typical listener to a podcast thinks yeah I agree with that but I wouldn't know how to express it I wouldn't know even how to enter into a conversation about it
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because on your claim earlier that there might be professors who have otherwise very stable employment at academic institutions who feel like they are afraid of the mob coming after them if they explore some of these issues
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is that a phenomenon that's happening here I mean we see a lot of concern about it happening on social media especially in the States
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and we've seen videos of professors trying to negotiate with mobs of students at Yale or Princeton or wherever it was and things going the wrong way
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is that something that has made it to Australia or are you just concerned that it will?
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We often follow the States a little bit behind don't we so that's one thing but I think it'll be good to have the conversations before it gets that bad
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so we don't want like an evergreen here you know what I mean yeah do we just explain evergreen
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so evergreen a few years ago now it's a college in the States and famously Brett Weinstein decided to not adhere to a stay at home order on a particular day
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not a COVID stay at home order and a racially discriminatory stay at home order evergreen is a very progressive college
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in his view well it was discriminatory on the face of it whether or not you think it's good to discriminate against white professors or not is another question
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but it was a request that what academics and what faculty and what students should stay at home
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that's correct and all black day and he felt that was exclusionary
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yeah and students including some of his black students actually wanted him there on campus but I was didn't
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so that evergreen was a bit of a flashpoint in the States
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it devolved into essentially him being hounded and the police having to secure his life and limiting it away
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and then him being losing his job effectively
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yeah and you end up with the perverse scenario where people claiming words of violence
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you've got to profess a hiding from people who actually threatening violence because they're saying his words of violence
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you know now hopefully we don't get to that stage in Australia but you know don't know
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yeah there's a concern that you sometimes hear from the left that when you have these conversations
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in the guise of free speech what you're really doing is just trying to smuggle in bigotry
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and use free speech as an excuse to do it
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what's your response to that?
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oh that's no doubt correct
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yes I mean the thing is this becomes a this becomes a hobby horse of the if you like the right
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very much so because they see examples of suppression of viewpoints
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diversity of perspective etc and they say look what's happening
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you know political political correct us gone mad it would have been called a few years ago
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and and there's absolutely a legitimate point to that but I think we need to look that
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underneath the fog of that claim which in principle I agree with
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there's also very legitimate carefully carefully considered thoughtful people
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who have views that we should be hearing
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because you can agree with the perspective of the cause without necessarily agreeing to the solution to it
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so I think this is the sort of hashtag era we're living in isn't it where we identify
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significant social political cultural sexual gender whatever problems with a hashtag
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and that's good because it motivates people to get on board and do something for change
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that's very positive but of course the discussion and I would argue the critical role of intellectuals
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and academics is to talk about the how the how and the what precisely
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rather than the general principle that we want to be supporting ex people
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or this minority or this this group that's subject to bigotry etc.
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so that's absolutely good that's absolutely on the money
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the question is we need to have nuanced discussions about the how and what are the
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evidential basis if you like for progressing a particular line to intervene or to engage
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and one of the historical environments in which those kinds of conversations
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would take place in which people would wrestle with those big ideas
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would be universities and universities were places which you came to in order to push the boundaries
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in order to explore ideas that would have been to boo elsewhere
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and historically that's an important role that universities have have played
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do they still well possibly at risk we'll find out weren't we look I agree
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look there's one place that a university there's one role that a university
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should have above all others and that's that critical nuanced intellectual inquiry
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into challenging issues if you like and if that fails then I'm concerned
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about the date the downstream impact of the universities not doing their job properly
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because the risk is as universities become more linked into if you like activist causes
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there's nothing wrong per say with being involved in an activist cause
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but if that activist cause means you turn the blind eye into certain types of evidence
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or you don't ask certain types of questions then actually intellectual institutions
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are failing in their fundamental duty which is their intellectual labour not activism
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can you give us some examples of areas where you think that activism has gotten ahead of intellectual labour
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well firstly I'd say that's up to our guests to do more in more detail than I would possibly do
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but you'll be you'll be sketching the rough contours of what kinds of guests we speak with
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yeah so say the role of religion and belief with how say how gender dealt with
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within say high control communities etc what's our high control
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so high control community would be say a conservative ultra orthodox Jewish
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or highly conservative Muslim community and then of course you can go into your sort of
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cultish groups if you like as well you know Scientology at the extreme then you've got
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JWs and all the rest of it their communities that have very strong
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isolationist approaches to their values and also hostile to the outside world
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albeit the outside world being anything in particular democratic freedom of the sex
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is right to vote you name it the right for women to be educated to get a job
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all those things that exist in you know those high control communities
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we should be able to talk about them with absolute scrutiny irrespective of
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race color creed etc and some of the guests we're going to have on and I'm sure
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you'll have a good chat with them when you do they're coming from within those
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communities or they know a lot about those communities and they'll be talking
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about how if you're like in some ways the Western liberal intellectual movements
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let them down because they're not asking the right questions because they don't
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tick the right boxes of identity right meaning that there's a Western liberal
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consensus that you don't want to come across as for example Islamophobic so
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you don't criticize sexism in the Muslim community that's right and that makes
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it really tricky I've got quite a few good ex-Muslim friends and one of the
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things they talk about and some of them are quite public so people like
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Yasmine Muhammad would be a good example and others and Elham Manaya would be
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another one they talk openly about we're trying to get progress progressive
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values and challenge a whole lot of orthodoxies within certain communities
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or belief systems but we see you know well meaning upper middle class white
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liberal standing on the side saying I can't talk about this right and then of
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course there are issues like gender sexuality race I mean we I as you know I
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have many black friends in the states who have a problem with the way that
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black lives matter tries to put race at the forefront of the conversation
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and and they feel it strips them of certain amount of individuality and
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autonomy and optimism about their lives by making them feel like they are
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the subjects of experience rather than the people who are actually in control
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that there's a that if you live inside a dynamic of white supremacy and white
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oppression then as a person of color that's actually disempowering they find
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rather than empowering so that would be another area where they drive to
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perform our own moral righteousness as well educated white people on a
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university campus might actually conflict with the interests of empowering
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people of color yeah and part of it's the matter of you know who has the right
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to say what and I think in the sort of hashtag social media mob mentality
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there's certain types of lived experiences and feel like self identification
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that counts for credibility that goes well beyond the actual the veracity of
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the argument and it doesn't invite scrutinising evidence it doesn't invite a
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fair fair minded good faith discussion to dispute details and how to intervene
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and how to make a difference and a lot of that I think has to come down to
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there's now a conflation of what used to be called the ad honum you know attack
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the person not their argument and that that's a well known sort of critical
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flooring critical thinking you talk about the argument not the person making
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the argument well nowadays that's that's almost disappeared there's an
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authority that comes with someone self-professed identification of the
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experience that now gives them an authority that in some places unquestioned
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and you see that in the media a lot where you know there'll be a person
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that's promoting a particular cause and is represented of that cause can
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come on to a mainstream new show or interview program etc make a whole
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lot of claims which are actually factually disputable you know where is
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the evidence for this and that show me the data and etc but I don't think
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it people are prepared to ask because that person speaks with an
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authority that basically strips away the possible for good faith argument
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because so much of the intellectual or pseudo intellectual discussion going
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on at the moment is about identity and identity is now usurped the ability
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to have good critical robust arguments because they're simply not enough
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good faith around it's amazing isn't it that and sometimes I'll just
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pull this trump card on people who who think like that because as someone
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who's married to a man myself and as someone who had parents grandparents
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who were Holocaust survivors if someone disagrees with anything I say I can
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just accuse them of being a homophobic anti-Semite and it's there and immediately
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I have standing because I have lived three more years let's see how that goes
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well that's true exactly but it is interesting that that lived experience
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like there's no doubt that in a conversation between a woman of color
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and a white man if you're talking about what it feels like to be subjected
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to sexism or racism then the woman of color has more standing in that
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conversation like there is no grounds on which the white man can pontificate
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about the emotional experience of being subjected to racism or sexism
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but what has happened is that reality has now spilled into even intellectual
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abstract arguments about policy or data so that if they're having a conversation
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for example about the disproportionate number of indigenous Australians who are
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incarcerated the white male can't even dispute the facts on the ground
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without it being without it landing as if he is making a racist claim
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and then the woman of color is able to say well I would certainly expect a white
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man to talk down to me and to try to you know minimize the lived experience
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blah blah blah well hang on I wasn't minimizing the lived experience
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we weren't talking about personal experience we were actually talking about
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policy settings and facts yeah I'd say it's almost a little bit worse than that
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because I'd say even taking back a step the point you made that even the representative
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say person of color who's speaking from lived experience they're often selected
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there are lots of people of color there are lots of people in the indigenous community
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who will not tow the line or speak what say progressive liberal should think
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is the the right things for an indigenous person to be saying for the right things
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for a Muslim person to be saying the right things for a gay person to be saying
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I think there's a naivety that you know when someone appears on a talk show
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or a documentary or a news program that is there supposedly to represent
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an entire group which is dubious in the first instance what it's ignoring
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is there's often a plethora of different perspectives and there's a heterodoxy
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within these so-called groups and what happens of course is if you get a person
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of color saying something that doesn't tow the line they're accused of acting white
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when you get a gay person perhaps supporting traditional marriage
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are they're accused of acting heterosexual in other words
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who is selecting who is representative of these so-called groups
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and we're getting very lazy I think in bringing people into institutions
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into mainstream media and elsewhere where it looks like they're speaking on behalf
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of a group that's actually much more disparate
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but those disparate voices within those so-called groups are either not being heard
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or when they are being heard they're being slurred as
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oh you're just you've just gone over to the mainstream you're acting white
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they're Uncle Tom's
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and apart from being extremely offensive to the ethics and the intellectual
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veracity of those people themselves it also means well what do you do
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if you're an outside that group looking in trying to have a good faith discussion
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who is the person that faithfully represents that so-called group
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and I think we're getting very lazy and particularly in our media
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but also in academia where we tend to have people that represent
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time minorities as if there's not minorities within those minorities
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or groups within those minorities that have very different perspectives
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right who's defending the rights of the 15 year old girl
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in the hyper conservative Jewish community to become an atheist
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and to break out of her community no one on the outside
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because they're listening to the chiefdoms of that community
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who are the rabbis that had synagogue and her father
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and no one inside the community because for the very same reason
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yeah it's interesting isn't it I mean coming back to what the purpose
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that university is supposed to provide university is supposed to be a place
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where individuals can wrestle through things and you know
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and the dissident can be upheld and you know there is a valour
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in bucking what bucking conventional wisdom and in pushing back
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on received wisdom and it is as you say as you talk about
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the way that we engage with minorities it is a bit disheartening
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because it's almost like it's tribalism it's tribalism
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and we're assigning each tribe a chiefdom and the chiefdom gets to talk
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you know the chiefdom has the conscience to mix metaphors and novels
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and allegories and we only listen to whoever's got the conscience
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and if you're too weak within that minority to be well not too weak
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I don't want to make it pejorative if you're inside that minority group
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and you're not being permitted to speak by the forces outside that minority group
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then you have no voice because we're not listening to the individual anymore
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we're not listening to the dissident we're listening to the chiefdoms
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that's right and it actually compounds the minority status of those within
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certain so-called communities even more because the outside doesn't want to listen
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because they're not following the narrative of those that are so-called
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that's one thing and the other thing it makes questioning it in any good faith
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nature of argument, nature of the data supporting that argument
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the world views around it it makes it very hard to do
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as an outsider to those communities or an outsider from those minorities
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so part of the idea of this series that we're doing
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permission to think
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awesome title is to get people on who are on the one hand representative
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they have deep knowledge within communities
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they don't pretend to speak on behalf of those communities because the community is a heterodox
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but they've got deep knowledge, deep academic and intellectual insight into the complexities of
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issues of race, gender, politics etc.
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and that's what I'm looking forward to our listeners hearing and you to have a conversation with
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let's tease some of that stuff out because the people we're getting in have deep
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intellectual knowledge into these things and it's the opportunity to
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if you like open the eyes and minds of those of those watching understand
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I'm glad you say deep intellectual knowledge of the community because that is another
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thing that is missing and I see it all the time working in the media
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a certain tokenism towards representatives of a community
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you know if you're doing a story about indigenous
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something that has to do with something indigenous then there's enormous
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pressure at the moment to make sure that the person you're talking to is
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an indigenous Australian now it may well be the case that
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you know and again coming back to the emotional thing if you're talking
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if you want to do an interview about what it feels like to be an indigenous Australian
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and of course you need an indigenous Australian but if what you're talking about
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is something to do with tweaking the policy alignment of what the way that the federal
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government for example funds or structures welfare for indigenous Australians
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then it may be that there's someone who's done a load of research
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and has a deep understanding of the data who happens not to be
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indigenous and I found myself in situations on the air
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interviewing someone who is indigenous
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who would be the first to admit that they're not the best person to talk to
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about this because they're not across the data the way that another academic
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might be but they're there as the stooge and they're there as the the
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the token person with more melanin in order for us to feel good about
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being able to tick a certain check box and what I think is important in these
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conversations is to make sure that the reason why we're choosing the guests
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is because they actually have a deep understanding and a deep knowledge
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of what they're talking about they're not just coming from you know
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we're not plucking them out of a community so that we can pat ourselves
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on the back and feel like we're being diverse.
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Exactly and so they've got not just lived experience
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which is important for them but they've got that deep intellectual credibility
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and they've done they've done the research to back up and support
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and often it's very closely related to their lived experience
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so I think it's going to be really interesting to hear and the reason
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we've called this series Permission to Think is it's allowing those
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outside looking in who are well meaning progressive want to make a
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difference or want to help those at risk or those that have been subject
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to bigotry historically or currently it provides them with more tools to
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engage in that conversation in a much more nuanced way than just the hashtags
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and the slogans.
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Professor we live in a massively polarized time where it's very hard
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to be understood as having nuance without your opponents flipping
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you or even not even your allies flipping you into one box or another
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who was speaking earlier about how there was a certain cohort
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of the rat bag right that will use the cloak of freedom of speech
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as an excuse for smuggling bigotry into the conversation and they'll
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use the excesses of the left by endlessly banging on about how terrible
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cancel culture is as a way of demeaning and marginalizing trans people
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or people with color gay people or whatever it might might be.
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Is there a risk that in even broaching these conversations
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you get some friendly fire and end up the subject of a pile on yourself
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or the faculty or the university?
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Well quite possibly I'd make a couple of comments about that.
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Firstly the risk of not engaging and not getting if you like the sensible
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well-meaning middle of people.
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If we sense some conversations from that well-meaning middle that want
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to do things we create a vacuum.
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So who's left to talk about it? Who's left to contest it?
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Well it's the right wing rat bags. So you'll get often very reasonable people
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social scientists commentators whatever ending up going on a right wing
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and explicitly right wing news channel because the mainstream media
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won't want to talk about it because of its sensitivity.
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So it's a vicious circle. It's a perverse economy where because
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there aren't good, good faith nuanced discussions in the middle
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it creates a vacuum that the right can manipulate as much as the extreme left.
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So that's the first problem.
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And I think that creates an economy that keeps going.
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So it means that those that if you like are given a platform on the right
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even if they're not the right themselves.
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So famously Brett Weinstein appeared on I think the Tucker Carlson show
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because nobody else wanted to listen to what was going on at Evergreen College.
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So then what happens is people on the left go,
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oh look he appeared on Tucker Carlson.
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The right wing, the right wing truck truck sort of equivalent.
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Well that's completely circular.
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It's got nothing to do with the validity of the ideas.
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It's simply about where you identify as a spokesperson in this sort of tribal divide.
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But you can see how that makes it worse.
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The right do not own critique.
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And if the moderate progressive liberals, small ill liberals if you like,
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don't take back some of these ideas, arguments and conversations.
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It will be owned by other people to the detriment of having a mainstream
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reasonable conversation about it driven by evidence and good faith.
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You're reminding me a little bit of David Frums comment that he was a George W. Bush speech writer
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and became a never Trump anti-Trump conservative in recent years.
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But he was very concerned about the rise of far right parties, especially in Europe
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and the rise of right wing populism in America.
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And he felt that the left was letting down the conversation
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by not being upfront and honest about the importance of securing borders
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and having an orderly immigration process.
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And what the line he used was if the left doesn't secure a nation's borders,
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then fascists will, which is the risk here.
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So yeah, I suppose the question then is,
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it's a big task to try to carve out that middle to take fire from both sides,
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to be nobody's friend, to be an ally only of reason.
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Is that what you want, I suppose, the brand of this faculty to be?
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Very much so, but it's also what university should be doing.
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And if they're not doing it, they're not doing their job.
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Are they not doing it?
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I'd like to see them do it more energetically.
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That's good at that way.
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That's very diplomatic of you.
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I mean, look, universities are in this bizarre place of being sort of semi-neoliberal corporate entities,
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which they, to an extent, need to be, and then banging the drum of social justice and progressivism.
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And there's a very interesting gap in the middle there,
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which can be attacked from either side or its opposite.
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I think the one thing university should be doing is empowering deep critical inquiry.
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Full stop.
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And if there's going to be an element of activism that comes with that,
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it's activism empowered by and predicated upon that deep intellectual inquiry.
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I think what we won the risk of, particularly in some disciplines more than others,
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but it'll probably continue to happen, is that we're getting,
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we're getting a culture and academia where we're basically got activist academics
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who are not challenging the basis of their own activist beliefs,
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but they're using the affordance of institutions and the fact that they're clever,
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and they write clever things and they get on shows as experts,
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to basically progress their activism.
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For me, that's completely the wrong way around.
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It looks good, and it seems to tick the box for social justice and progressivism,
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but what's actually happening is,
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is the university doing the one thing above all else that it should do,
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and that is bringing deep intellectual critique to ideas?
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Lastly, if you had to give advice to young people who are leaving high school
29:47
and going to university and are a bit confused by the state of the world
29:51
and aggrieved by the world that they've been left and fearful about climate change
29:56
and feel like the boomers haven't done the greatest job of what they're inheriting,
30:03
what guidance would you offer?
30:06
A couple of different things.
30:08
I think there's a lot to be said for learning about one discipline very deeply.
30:13
So on the one hand, I like the idea of being a generalist,
30:16
hence the classic BA degree, etc.
30:19
It do lots of things, but I think when you become a deep expert in one particular thing,
30:24
you learn so much about how complicated and nuanced an issue is, or a topic is,
30:29
at least you should be learning that.
30:31
You should go to university expecting to be challenged,
30:35
to be challenged in a way that if it's done respectfully,
30:38
it shouldn't trigger you, it should encourage you to question your own beliefs,
30:42
and you should also be very wary of tribalism,
30:45
and the way that just because something sounds like it's a good cause,
30:49
it means it's a good idea, not the same thing.
30:52
Well, it's interesting that you just say,
30:54
Trigger, I just want to dig into that as well,
30:56
because we want this series of conversations,
31:00
permission to think to be what you might call a safe space for dangerous ideas,
31:05
for ideas that are difficult and likely to get you into trouble,
31:09
if you only talk about them in sound bites,
31:12
and yet the whole concept of a safe space is tricky at the moment,
31:17
because it can also be understood as being a space for intellectual conformity,
31:23
a space where you're going to be protected from ideas that you don't like,
31:28
that you're at constant risk of being triggered.
31:32
Even the word triggered, which started out as a legitimate psychological
31:39
or psychiatric condition for people with PTSD,
31:42
and now just means I heard something that offends me, essentially.
31:47
How do you think about what a safe intellectual space it means?
31:53
First and foremost, there has to be an acknowledgement
31:56
and a demonstration of good faith discussion.
31:59
That is, it's two people or more listening to different perspectives,
32:04
but trying hard to understand where that other person is coming from,
32:07
and I won't use the term still man,
32:09
let's go use the word still person.
32:11
Just explain that term, because for people,
32:14
still manning is where, in particularly when you're arguing with an opponent,
32:18
you're trying to do the best job in good faith
32:21
to articulate or re-articulate their view as strongly as you possibly can
32:25
to then attack.
32:26
It's the opposite of straw man,
32:28
where you basically have a caricature of your opponent's views,
32:31
and then you say they're this and they're that and then they're wrong,
32:34
which is, again, rather prevalent, but it's under the disguise of progressive politics.
32:39
So still manning is the opposite,
32:41
is where you make put in real effort to really understand on what basis
32:45
and what's the evidence for that person's idea,
32:47
which I don't like or I don't agree with.
32:49
Once you've established that and that intellectual exercise,
32:52
you then progress to argue against it, provide the counter-evident,
32:56
but it requires some intellectual labour.
32:58
It doesn't require slogans,
33:00
and that's where universities must do that job.
33:04
They must produce in our students the ability to still man an argument
33:08
and to give the best possible intellectual perspective of a view you don't like
33:13
or you're opposed to in order to engage with it deeply,
33:16
and then you challenge that thing,
33:18
not the caricature of that thing.
33:20
It's also worthwhile just noting that for young people and for students in particular,
33:26
showing away from arguments that are obnoxious to you
33:30
or that are offensive or that seem to be bigoted
33:33
is no way to build up your own resilience in attacking them.
33:37
You can't really attack something that you don't understand.
33:40
No, your enemy is critical,
33:43
and I do feel like we're losing the skill of opposing our opponents
33:49
in ways that are actually persuasive to our opponents
33:52
because we don't understand what our opponents even believe.
33:54
I was on Osha Ginsburg's podcast recently,
33:56
and he was, he ascribed an opinion to the treasurer about climate change,
34:02
which was so ungenerous and interpretation,
34:06
something like, oh, you know, I'm sure that he just thinks,
34:08
well, you know, I'm getting rich and my mates are getting rich,
34:10
and that's all that matters.
34:12
And I said, but that's obviously not what he thinks.
34:14
What he thinks is, X, Y, Z, and I steal man,
34:18
essentially what I assume this person who Osha and I both disagree with,
34:23
believes, and it was staggering that it was so hard for him to get to the point
34:29
of putting himself actually in the shoes of where his opponent,
34:34
the treasurer, sits.
34:36
And I hope that this series can also do a bit of that
34:40
by enabling, by like encouraging people
34:43
to engage with ideas that they don't agree with,
34:46
that might be challenging to them,
34:48
because really safe space, schmaff space,
34:51
ultimately, like you're not going to be a good warrior
34:55
for the good fight unless you understand the bad fight too.
34:58
Yeah, and I think what you picked on there,
35:00
something which I'm concerned that students in universities will get,
35:03
is they'll feel it's simply enough to identify the category of the tribe of their opponent
35:08
and pay no heed to actually what the opponent's saying.
35:11
And that seems to be enough nowadays, which is the concern.
35:14
You just stick people on a bucket.
35:16
So one example, if someone is saying that they would favor less
35:19
immigration, lower immigration into Australia,
35:21
then you call them a racist and you're done with them.
35:24
Yeah, and if you actually grapple with their logic.
35:28
And a multitude of other examples like that.
35:31
So what happens is people are getting very good at assigning
35:35
a tribal identity to someone as if that's a skill.
35:38
That's not a skill, that's lazy thinking, that's cheap.
35:41
But it's what social media does, it's the hashtag.
35:44
The whole point of coming to university is you get past that.
35:47
Now it doesn't mean to say there aren't actual real bigots around.
35:50
There's lots of things around them.
35:52
And our views of who those bigots are might evolve over time.
35:56
But when you ascribe bad motives and attach someone to a tribe,
36:02
such as you don't need to engage in their argument,
36:05
then you shouldn't be at university.
36:07
And university shouldn't be assisting you to think that way.
36:10
Professor, you are a breath of fresh air.
36:12
We're lucky to have you.
36:13
I wish there were more like you and I can't wait to see what we can
36:16
produce out of this series.
36:18
Looking forward to a job.