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Glenn Loury: Are we censoring ourselves to death? · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day, humans.
• 0:04
  Welcome.
• 0:08
  to a special collaboration between the Festival of Dangerous Ideas and Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Sepps.
• 0:15
  I am Josh Sepps.
• 0:17
  Nothing could delight me more than to be joined by Glenn Lowry, one of the most influential American academics and cultural commentators.
• 0:26
  He was a Reagan conservative back in the 80s.
• 0:30
  He was nominated to serve in the Reagan White House campaign.
• 0:34
  as the Under Secretary for Education?
• 0:36
  That's correct.
• 0:37
  Until his personal foibles, shall we say, torpedoed that nomination.
• 0:43
  We can get into that.
• 0:45
  He swung to the left.
• 0:46
  He swung back again.
• 0:48
  He had caught the eye of the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at a debate that he gave where he was in opposition to affirmative action.
• 0:58
  And he's been influential in Washington circles ever since.
• 1:02
  In 1994, he published a groundbreaking essay about political correctness called Self Censorship, which was re-released last year as a book.
• 1:10
  It's brilliant.
• 1:10
  You should read it.
• 1:12
  His articles on racial inequality in the US are groundbreaking.
• 1:18
  He teaches social studies at Brown University.
• 1:20
  Are you still teaching?
• 1:21
  Not anymore.
• 1:22
  I've retired a couple of years ago.
• 1:24
  And you're still a professor emeritus, though.
• 1:27
  I am.
• 1:27
  Yeah, you're not going to give that up lightly.
• 1:29
  Well, there are benefits.
• 1:32
  And he hosts The Glenn Show, which streams weekly on Substack, where you can also see Uncomfortable Conversations, and indeed this conversation as well.
• 1:40
  Please welcome Glenn Lauer.
• 1:42
  Thank you.
• 1:47
  Now, the personal foibles, Glenn, should we just get those out of the way?
• 1:50
  Well, why don't we?
• 1:51
  I mean, I read the memoir, and you confess to picking up prostitutes on the street and smoking crack in a Harvard faculty office and keeping a mistress in a bachelor pad.
• 2:04
  And yet you're a victim of cancellation.
• 2:06
  Yeah.
• 2:13
  What's interesting is that probably the biggest cancellation that you've had was because you criticized Israel.
• 2:22
  Well, the foibles are the 1980s.
• 2:26
  The cancellation is the 2020s.
• 2:30
  So they're not really connected.
• 2:32
  You're right.
• 2:32
  I survived humiliating self-degradation and was given a second chance and took the best of it.
• 2:42
  But in terms of my relationship with my former employer, the Manhattan Institute, I didn't survive raising a question about whether or not the IDF's incursion after October 7, 2023, constituted collective punishment bordering on genocide.
• 2:58
  They didn't take that lightly.
• 3:01
  And you had been a friend of Israel, shall we say, intellectually for many years.
• 3:06
  You were invited to give a speech down in Florida about the relationship between the American black community and the Jewish community, is that right?
• 3:15
  What was the, just tell people how the Manhattan Institute relationship fell apart.
• 3:22
  Well, I have a podcast I invite people on.
• 3:25
  I invited Omer Bartov, the Israeli historian who's a colleague of mine at Brown University, to talk about his views.
• 3:33
  He's a historian of genocide who has written long pieces in The New York Times saying, I know genocide when I see it.
• 3:40
  This is genocide.
• 3:41
  I wanted to talk to him.
• 3:43
  I had Norman Finkelstein, an American intellectual of Jewish descent, his parents are Holocaust survivors, who is a sharp critic of the Zionist project in Palestine.
• 3:58
  And I had him on the show.
• 4:00
  I had a young UK-based intellectual who studies the statistics on urban warfare in the post-9-11 environment and who said that the incidence of fatalities, especially amongst women and children in the current campaign in Gaza, was outsized relative to other comparable campaigns on the show.
• 4:28
  And my employers at the Manhattan Institute, I think, under pressure from some of their donors, thought, that's quite enough.
• 4:36
  Thank you.
• 4:37
  We don't require your services anymore and peremptorily discontinued our relationship.
• 4:42
  Don't get me wrong now.
• 4:43
  I mean, they get to decide who works for them and what views they want to countenance.
• 4:48
  And I'm OK. My podcast continues.
• 4:52
  I enjoy the benefits of being Professor Emeritus.
• 4:55
  And I...
• 4:57
  Still get the occasional invitation to speak for a fee from this or that benefactor.
• 5:03
  So I'm not complaining.
• 5:05
  Okay.
• 5:06
  Anyone talking about Gaza, you write in the afterword to the book that was published last year based on the 1990s essay, anyone talking about Gaza, whatever the nuances of their argument, is sorted into the friend pile or the enemy pile and is treated accordingly, you write.
• 5:26
  There is no third pile.
• 5:30
  Does that mean it's a problem of both sides?
• 5:33
  It is a problem on both sides.
• 5:35
  I think the phenomenon that I'm trying to get at there is you take up a position in public on a controversial issue.
• 5:42
  People hear you take that position.
• 5:45
  They're going to come to some conclusions about your motivations, your values, your unstated beliefs, and they may hold that against you.
• 5:52
  You know that in advance before you take the position.
• 5:56
  This issue, the issue of the conflict in Gaza and more generally the conflict in the Israel-Palestine theater, is one such.
• 6:05
  You're either on our side or you're not on our side.
• 6:08
  And the objective merits of your argument can become secondary relative to the signal that your willingness to make an argument gives about your argument.
• 6:18
  unstated values.
• 6:19
  Are you a friend of this project or an enemy?
• 6:22
  Are you for the Jewish people or are you against them?
• 6:26
  Are you an anti-Semite or are you not?
• 6:29
  And that's the environment in which the discourse about the question
• 6:34
  takes place, and the quality of that discourse is conditioned by the fact that this inferential process is afoot.
• 6:44
  Everybody knows that everybody else listening to the speaker is coming to a judgment.
• 6:49
  And it can go in either way.
• 6:51
  You can either be for or against.
• 6:54
  And in the community in which most of the people are for, they will judge you if they think you're against.
• 7:01
  And in the community in which most of the people are against, they will judge you if they think you're for.
• 7:06
  And that interesting sociolinguistic dynamic is what I am attempting to explore in this essay and in the book.
• 7:15
  And when you say sociolinguistic, we're not just talking about ideas, right?
• 7:20
  We're talking about the words that we use to describe
• 7:23
  those ideas and the way that those words can telegraph to our in-group or our out-group what our intentions are.
• 7:31
  So that there's a kind of a jargon that we feel sort of pressured to deploy.
• 7:37
  You give examples of it like differently abled people instead of disabled people or gender affirming care instead of gender transition, the unhoused.
• 7:48
  In this particular issue, there are also a whole bunch of words that you can say, like, genocide has become a kind of a proxy for what side of the Gaza war you sit on.
• 8:00
  To people on one side, a refusal to call it genocide means that you're a puppet of Zionist interests.
• 8:09
  To people on the other side, that comes across as a slur.
• 8:13
  Zionist itself is often used as a code word for a broader, well, for Jews, really.
• 8:20
  I mean, you'll see people talking about how Zionists claim to be an oppressed minority, but actually they're the whitest people of all because they're enacting their whiteness on the brown-skinned people of Palestine.
• 8:31
  And you go, Zionists are doing that?
• 8:35
  Is that what we're really talking about here?
• 8:36
  Hannah's language.
• 8:39
  play its role.
• 8:40
  Well, you said it, I think, quite well.
• 8:43
  This is a collective.
• 8:46
  dynamic in which a community's use of words comes to convey meaning beyond the literal significance of the word itself to signal, as I've said, a unstated or unobserved value that the speaker must adhere to, given that they're willing to use the word in this way.
• 9:10
  That's the phenomenon that we're talking about.
• 9:13
  And then the refusal to use
• 9:16
  a particular word or a phrase becomes in itself evidence that the person might be
• 9:22
  suspect?
• 9:22
  Like, I'm interested in the kind of concentric circles of people's belief here, right?
• 9:26
  There'll be people who are genuinely using a term because they are really committed to the ideological project that that term implies.
• 9:33
  And then there'll be the rest of us who just sort of feel swept up in it, because why would I die on this hill?
• 9:38
  Excuse me for talking over you.
• 9:40
  We just want to avoid the trouble of being thought of as someone who doesn't stand on the right side of history.
• 9:47
  And so we.
• 9:49
  cooperate in our willingness to cooperate
• 9:54
  itself reinforces the dynamic.
• 9:57
  You say unhoused, you say differently abled.
• 10:01
  You don't use the word Negro, even though it's a perfectly respectable historical word, at least in American English, from a period of time when it was a honorific relative to some of the alternative ways of referring to people of African descent.
• 10:16
  But now the use of that word anachronistic and indicative of a kind of backwardness
• 10:24
  You say African-American, even though that's not unambiguous.
• 10:28
  African-American descended from American slaves.
• 10:30
  African-American descended from immigrants from Africa, like even South Africa who come to America.
• 10:38
  That kind of thing.
• 10:39
  But I'm not a linguist, so I try not to...
• 10:43
  spend too much time on the verbal gymnastics as much as I am interested in, as I say, the signaling value that the willingness to make arguments, whatever words one uses to make them, conveys.
• 11:00
  Yeah, I mean, just before we get to the arguments though, I do think that your insights are important on the ways in which we are
• 11:09
  we feel required to ape or comply with the norms of our social groups.
• 11:14
  So it may not be just the words that we use.
• 11:16
  It may be, I mean,
• 11:18
  something like an acknowledgement of country in Australia or a land acknowledgement in the United States.
• 11:23
  There will be a fraction of people in this audience who believe that it's vitally important for us to do acknowledgements of country at every event and at every Zoom meeting between a bunch of white middle-aged HR executives.
• 11:41
  There will be others who will do it
• 11:44
  without really necessarily believing that it's constructive, because why not?
• 11:50
  There'll be others who do it even though they actively feel that it's a kind of fatuous way for white people to signal to each other that they are cleansing themselves of white guilt without really doing anything useful for indigenous people.
• 12:04
  And then there'll be some group of people who refuse to do it.
• 12:07
  But those two middle groups could just as easily refuse.
• 12:11
  I mean, they couldn't just as easily.
• 12:12
  They could just as validly refuse to do it.
• 12:14
  But they don't want to because they don't want to be put into a bucket in which they don't belong, which is the bucket of the proactive bigot.
• 12:23
  Right.
• 12:25
  Hey humans, just jumping in here quickly to make sure you're aware that this is just a preview.
• 12:30
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• 12:35
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• 12:46
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• 12:53
  of mind-expanding, bullshit-free, uncomfortable conversations.
• 12:58
  Back to the show.
• 12:59
  Our work here is done.
• 13:00
  Good night, everybody.
• 13:01
  The ones in the middle are cooperating precisely because the ones at the right extreme of the spectrum are openly eschewing the convention.
• 13:15
  They won't do it because they don't actually believe in the project of rehabilitating the dignity of the historically oppressed.
• 13:23
  They want you to know that they won't do it.
• 13:25
  They are proud of not doing it.
• 13:29
  The ones in the middle who think it's silly don't want to be thought of as being among those who are proud to not do it.
• 13:37
  And so they do it.
• 13:40
  But these things are mutually supportive of each other.
• 13:43
  The meaning of the one who does it is, in fact, to some degree, defiant and countercultural and heterodox, precisely because the others are doing it.
• 13:56
  This leads to a dynamic, and now we can talk about actual ideas,
• 14:00
  where it seems like public discourse is more extreme or more polarised than actual opinion is.
• 14:09
  And I was intrigued by your bringing some of your economic expertise into this and talking about the phenomenon of bad money pushing out money.
• 14:17
  money.
• 14:18
  Can you explain that idea?
• 14:20
  It's similar to what we were just saying.
• 14:23
  If we have two forms of mediums of exchange, two kinds of currency, one of which is corrupted and deflated and the other which is solid, it's gold, it's irrefutable.
• 14:37
  people will make their transactions in the bad currency and hoard the good currency because they anticipate that the value of the good currency will be undermined if they let go of it.
• 14:51
  They want to hold on to their value.
• 14:53
  And likewise, for opinions, people who have solid values but who realize that people with bad values are making certain kinds of statements.
• 15:07
  will withdraw from the conversation altogether in order not to devalue the currency of their own reputation by being thought of as bigots, racists, anti-Semites, Trump lovers, that kind of thing.
• 15:27
  I can see the wry smile on your face when you say Trump lovers as an epithet.
• 15:32
  Well, depending on the community that you're in, for example, suppose you're in Australia.
• 15:38
  where the opinion of the typical person in the audience about the American president is contemptuous and vitriolic dismissive condemnation.
• 15:52
  And you were to say something like, yeah, but he won elections.
• 15:56
  There are, in fact, a plurality of people who like what he has been saying.
• 16:01
  he is the leader of the United States of America and so being is the leader of the, quote, free world, close quote.
• 16:09
  He may not be perfect, but we had to be better off rooting for him to succeed than rooting against him.
• 16:15
  Now, if you were to say that, I want you to understand, I'm not actually saying that.
• 16:21
  I'm just hypothesizing that a person might be saying it.
• 16:24
  Right.
• 16:25
  You would be held in bad order by the audience for doing so if you were in Australia, as I happen to be at this moment, which is why I'm not saying it.
• 16:37
  I think we get the hypothetical, the pure hypothetical there.
• 16:39
  Yeah.
• 16:41
  The other phenomenon that attaches to that is that the unpopular thing that you say hurts the true believer more than the apostate.
• 16:55
  In this kind of currency game where people who value their reputation want to hoard it and people who don't want their reputation to be devalued are the ones who are likeliest to comply with the group and the extremists who don't really give a shit whether or not people...
• 17:13
  hate them or think that they're racist or think that they're Trump lovers are going to go out on a limb and suffer whatever slings they have to, you end up not only with a skewed vision of what people actually believe, but you end up with essentially the good people being the ones who have to maybe not lie, but hide their true beliefs when the bad people are the ones who are able to get away with it.
• 17:41
  Yeah, because the sanction, I think you're a racist, is more painful to the people who are not racist.
• 17:48
  And hence the signal, I hate affirmative action.
• 17:51
  I think the blacks are overreaching.
• 17:53
  I think George Floyd got what he had coming.
• 17:58
  that signal works to separate those who are racist from those who are not, because the anticipation of the negative reaction to sending the signal is more injurious to the ones who are not really racist, and hence they don't send it, and hence it's correct to infer from a person sending it that they are a racist.
• 18:22
  since they are willing to incur the cost because for them the cost is not so great.
• 18:26
  Did that make sense to you people?
• 18:29
  It's a bit convoluted.
• 18:30
  I like it.
• 18:30
  I mean, how can you tell the difference though?
• 18:33
  I mean, there'll be a free speech person who will say, we should be able to say,
• 18:39
  This reminds me a little bit of the argument about the N-word in the United States in particular.
• 18:43
  So people would say, well, there should be a difference between using the N-word as a slur and saying a sentence like, the N-word is the worst word in the world and you should never use it against somebody.
• 18:59
  And then the response to that on social media will be someone saying, oh, here's another white guy who just wants to find an excuse to say the N-word because he loves saying it so much.
• 19:08
  Now, that person might be right, but there's no way of knowing whether they're right or wrong, whether the person's fidelity is to free speech and sort of common sense on the one hand, or to wanting to be allowed to be a racist on the other.
• 19:22
  Can we tell?
• 19:24
  no, I don't think we can.
• 19:26
  I mean, that is to say some of the deviants of the people who are using the forbidden language, some of the people who say genocide, are not saying it because they have contempt for the Zionist project.
• 19:37
  They're saying it because they've looked at the International Court of Justice filings and have come to the objective conclusion that it's
• 19:48
  in fact, genocide by the definitions of international law.
• 19:53
  But there are others who will simply say, I don't care what you people think about me, I'm gonna say this word.
• 20:00
  And I'm not saying it because I'm conforming to some signaling equilibrium, I'm saying it because I'm a gadfly.
• 20:07
  because I take pleasure in the provocative, ironic discourse that is cutting across the norm.
• 20:17
  And no, you can't tell the difference between the two.
• 20:20
  That's a noisy signal.
• 20:22
  A noisy signal is one where not everyone who is sending it conforms to the inference, but most of the people on the average who are sending it do.
• 20:31
  This is even trickier at the moment because the incentives of social media and of the new media create an incentive for us to be as extreme and sort of catchy and clicky and provocative as possible.
• 20:44
  So you've got this phenomenon where...
• 20:46
  people will increasingly don this garb of, I'm going where other people won't.
• 20:52
  I'm the truth speaker who doesn't care about what other people think of me.
• 20:57
  I'm just asking questions about whether or not the Jews control the world or whether or not black people are intellectually inferior to white people or whatever.
• 21:04
  But I'm not, who knows?
• 21:06
  I mean, I'm not saying that.
• 21:07
  I'm just kind of, why can't we talk about it?
• 21:10
  What do you make of that?
• 21:10
  So that's Nick Fuentes, that's Candace Owens, that could be Tucker Carlson.
• 21:16
  Like I said, the gadfly is out there.
• 21:19
  So, um... What are you going to do?
• 21:23
  Exactly.
• 21:29
  At the risk of making this too parochial, we have a particular instance in Australia recently where a certain television presenter lost his job as a result of interviews that he was doing with populist right-wing figures.
• 21:46
  It has been quite head-spinning because there was a real phenomenon between 2015 and probably 2023 of people who simply were curious and wanted to talk about hot-button cultural issues in an intellectually fearless way, dropping like flies and being booted out of legacy media institutions as a result of their curiosity because they weren't conforming to a certain
• 22:13
  orthodoxy of what was considered to be polite social justice, ways of looking at things and talking about things.
• 22:22
  And to now, in 2026, be confronted with people who are crying foul because...
• 22:29
  legacy media institutions made fundamentally unavoidable and basically reasonable economic decisions... Business decisions.
• 22:37
  Business decisions when they were behaving in ways that were completely contrary to the remit of their main job leaves me in a place of like, I don't know what this whole conversation is about anymore.
• 22:51
  What even is cancel culture anymore?
• 22:55
  The institutions have to look beyond the immediate moment to how it is that their handling of a controversial case reflects on their bottom line, on their brand, on the long-term viability of their enterprise, and they may choose to dissociate themselves from people who are in their employ based on that kind of reasoning.
• 23:17
  And that's the way of the world.
• 23:19
  It's always been so.
• 23:22
  Don't we have to make a distinction, though, between when they do it because they're cowards and they are betraying the principles of free inquiry and pandering to a mob, and when they're doing it because the transgressor has actually done something wrong?
• 23:39
  No.
• 23:41
  Yeah, I think that's a distinction worth making.
• 23:44
  I think if I'm interviewing at my podcast a Holocaust denier, I have an obligation to press in the interview.
• 23:52
  And if I softball it and allow things to be said that I don't challenge, the audience is going to make a judgment about me.
• 24:01
  And I don't begrudge them that.
• 24:05
  So when are the rules that we're sort of setting up about who can say what and still remain in polite society?
• 24:12
  Like, do you have a sort of a super theory of how we should be thinking about taboos and group think and speech codes in the sense that some of the, you know, if you and I go to, if we go to drinky poos here afterwards and you're around a bunch of Australians and we're talking about Australian football and you say that you think Australian football is stupid,
• 24:33
  there will be a pressure of ostracization as a result of saying something so deeply offensive to the Australian people.
• 24:41
  I'll get beaten up.
• 24:42
  You'll get beaten up and you won't be invited back.
• 24:46
  That's one kind of policing of conversational parameters.
• 24:52
  But if at the Drinky Poos you start spouting a genetic theory about how black people are inferior to other races and we didn't invite you back as a result of that,
• 25:02
  That wouldn't be because I'm a partisan for black people the way that I'm a partisan for Australian football.
• 25:08
  That would be because I'm drawing a line around the kinds of opinions that I think decent people ought to be able to air...
• 25:16
  And is there a way for us to communally come up with those?
• 25:19
  G'day, humans.
• 25:20
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• 25:27
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