Latest / Thinking Class / #023 - Helen Pluckrose - How To Keep Liberal Principles Alive In An Illiberal World

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#023 - Helen Pluckrose - How To Keep Liberal Principles Alive In An Illiberal World · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, friends, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Helen Cluckrose.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Helen is a political and cultural writer and commentator addressing current affairs from a liberal humanist perspective.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Helen's particular focus is critical social justice or woke scholarship and activism.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Helen took part in the Grievance Studies Affair along with Peter Pogosian and James Lindsay, which submitted shoddy, ridiculous, and ideologically biased papers to academic journals known for publishing critical social justice scholarship.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: In 2020, Helen co-authored Cynical Theories with James Lindsay, which traced the evolution of postmodern thought into critical social justice scholarship.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: In that same year, she co-founded Counterweight, an organization for helping individuals push back at authoritarian critical social justice policies and training programs at their place of work, university, or child school.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Helen continues to work with individuals and organizations to resist ideological capture, and she really just wants you to value evidence-based epistemology and consistently liberal principles.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: In today's episode, Helen and I talk about why critical theories are too narrow a way to see the world, why they have led to the authoritarianism we see today, what prospect we see of a freer world, and why some say liberalism is dead, and why those who value liberalism must practice it if it's to survive.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: If conservatism and liberalism can live side by side, and why leaders of public and private institutions should be guided by gentle reform over revolution, and we talk about so much, much more.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: What this conversation brought out for me is why, even in these fractious, polarized times where it's easy to find yourself self-censoring or being censored, and that there are many who wish to censor their opponents in return, that we should be careful not to fall into tribalism and to stay our hands, because whatever tactics we employ could be employed on us eventually.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think like so many others, I came across you when you became very well known for your hoax academic work with James Lindsay and Peter Bogosian back in 2018.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was these um fake academic papers that you'd gotten into journals which uh covered a whole gamut of topics which hit um news media uh worldwide.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, some of the themes were um making a convincing case that dogs engage in in rape culture.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: You um also rewrote part of a chapter of Hitler's Mein Kampf in feminist language and um talked in a rather choice way about how men could reduce their transphobia if they did something with sex toys.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And these got published in academic journals, and the the whole idea was to try to shine a light on just how um uh corrupted or academically corrupted um some social sciences departments had gotten throughout of academia.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then I suppose after that it was your book with James Lindsay in 2020, Cynical Theories, which was about the whole concept of critical theory, which we'll get onto in a moment, but I think before we get there, Helen, before I understand how you found yourself focusing on these topics, how did you earn your crust before you found yourself in the world of critical theory?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: I was um a care assistant.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: I um worked with elderly people in their their own home um if suffering with dementia or physical disability and um and and supported them to live their lives.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I I've done for 17 years, worked in social care and and um nursing.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, and what was there a was there a moment in which you thought uh um I'm I don't I need to go and um scratch this itch of academic life?
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think you're doing something so different to critical theory, weren't you?
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: That wasn't really your your field of research.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: What was it that made you uh turn your attention to this?
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I um uh I I uh 15 years ago now, I I had a um uh a neurological accident which um affected my my balance and my my vision and made me quite disabled.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I took the opportunity then to do what I've always wanted to do, get my um a degree.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: I so I I got an undergraduate degree in English literature and and then I got postgraduate uh degree in early modern studies looking at um at religious writing 1300 to 1700.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I I found myself um very, very limited in the kind of scholarship that I could do as a historian by these um postmodern uh theories, particularly.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: So um queer theory, post-colonial uh theory, um, and and various sort of forms of of feminism, which really make the historian have to be anachronistic.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: We can't it was getting so very difficult to look at, which I wanted to look at, was um what we could know of of women's experiences um uh and and how they they used the the Christian tradition to negotiate authority and autonomy for themselves um within these um sort of before and after the Reformation.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: That that was what I was looking at.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: But you just have to use particular kinds of feminist theories, particular kinds of focus on on race and imperialism and and queerness.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: And um I I suggested that sexual selection was real and was accused of being a conservative, and um I I suggested that Othello um and Desdemona getting married really wasn't going to be um hugely alien and and strange to Shakespeare's audience because religion was the big divide in 1601, and the um the whole sort of racial division grew up over the 17th century in uh during the um the spread of the transatlantic slave trade, and I was asked to not make that argument because it it could be um offensive to American um black communities now.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I this I I found myself in the end, I was going to appear in medieval manuscripts, and I was going to do an edition of various women's writing, and it was just because I could there were right and wrong answers.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: I could transcribe, I could translate, and I couldn't get into trouble for it.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought, well, I this isn't what I want to do.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: I want to explore social realities, and I I can't do that because I have to have this particular feminist, particular um view on sexuality, particular view on race, and that's stopping me doing rigorous scholarship.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: Very long answer.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I I wouldn't criticize you for long answers.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: I am the king of long answers and equally long questions, so um not going to start throwing stones in my glass house over here.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you mentioned a few of the theories that sit under the category critical theories without me presuming that listeners know what they are.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um you mentioned post-colonial theory, queer theory, uh, gender theory.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: What are critical theories and um why aren't they a sound way in which to um view the world through, or at least one lens to view the world through?
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: So the the branch of critical theories that that I am looking at are are the ones that that have stemmed particularly from from postmodern thought and from Michel Foucault in particular, and the idea that that knowledge is a social construct, it's constructed by the powerful in the service of their own power.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: They then legitimise this knowledge and um as ways of talking about things, we all talk into these patterns that assume that men are leaders and women are subordinate, that white people are superior to black people, that straight people are superior to gay people, and we all talk in these patterns and these perpetuate these oppressive systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: And these come out in things like um post-colonial theory first, where we see the decolonized movement, then um queer theory, where we we hear that that sex and and gender are in entirely social constructs.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: And uh critical race theory has has a large element of the postmodern stance within the intersectional realm, which is defined by Crenshaw as contemporary politics linked with postmodern theory, and and then in in various forms of intersectional feminism that that appear in gender studies and in things like fat fat studies, disability studies, and and it it's um you can recognize these kinds of critical theories, and I I call them critical social justice theories after Rosalind Sensoy and Robin D'Angelo.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: You can you can tell these kinds of theories because they are radically skeptical of objective knowledge.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: They believe that these invisible power systems run through everything, that they're perpetuated in the way that we speak, and that we need to change the way that people think and that they speak.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: Most people aren't aware of these systems that they're contributing to, and so they need to have their unconscious bias um made clear to them, then they need to work to dismantle their whiteness, detoxify their masculinity, decolonize their way of knowing.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: So this is where we get the whole woke concept from.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's um it's people who think they can see through to these power systems running everywhere, and they need to wake everybody else up to them.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think they are.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Why don't they work?
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because this simply isn't an accurate um depiction of reality.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, that the the kernel of truth in that is culture exists.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: We all know that culture exists.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: We know that assumptions um can be made and they can be sometimes cultural assumptions.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: We can make assumptions about people because of their sex, their race, their gender identity, their sexuality.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: But this idea that we are all socialized into exactly the same ideas and only the critical social justice activists can see them simply isn't the case.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: You you may notice there's very little focus on class.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: There's almost a denial that intellectual and ideological diversity exists among groups, and there's a very strong um rejection of the idea that people can evaluate ideas for themselves, reject or accept them, and as well as the critical social justice um activists can.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: For them, you can either be racist and accept it and work to dismantle it, or racist and in denial and therefore for perpetuating the problem.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: There isn't the the option to say, I also um see problems with racism when they arrive and I oppose them.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think they're um they're inevitable in every single interaction.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think any look at the newsreel would um, uh depending on which news outlets that you're reading, I suppose, would show the uh the the remnants of these uh ideological spasms, I think, and how they've um become very influential and how we govern uh our public and private institutions.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: So uh we'll maybe not recap those.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: I think we'll we'll probably get to some examples a little bit later.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: I I think most people would make the argument that it ultimately became the governing ideology of um of the recent era.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um what what progress has been made in a pushback against it, if any?
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: So if I'm I'm thinking about you know the rise of the gender critical feminists, I think JK Rowling's probably the most high-profile one there who's been leading the light on that, um, amongst with a cast of others like Julie Bindel, Kathleen Stark.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but there are, I suppose, other pockets that have been pushing against different parts of these.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, has there been any progress and uh what's that looked like?
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so a measurable progress, we can see that uh particularly strongly in the UK.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: We're we're we're doing well here.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um when there are uh measurements of um what what language is being used in mainstream media, in in companies, um, emails, we we can see that there is a a decrease in support for the critical social justice ideas in the the UK.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: We have seen, as you say, that the rise of gender critical feminists.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: There has also been significant pushback um from uh black Brits um particularly who really don't like having these American-centric um notions of of race and racism imposed upon them.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh counterweight when I was helping um people push back at it in their own organisation, and in one month, 40% of the people who were pushing back at anti-racist training were black Brits.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: Now, considering that only 4% of Brits are black, that really shows there's an outsized um effect on the people these theories claim to speak to.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: So you've had, I I think, the the wonderful Tommy Wa Oelade on on here and and and his book, it it just it it sums up and and gives a really good context and grounding to what a lot of of black Brits have said about these these theories, that they they don't uh speak to their experience, that they are American-based, and they don't even particularly work that well in America, but they certainly don't work well here.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_01: So we've seen that pushback um from a lot from a lot of black Brits, from a lot of feminists.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: There's been um rejection from a lot of people who could fall under the queer um label as well, particularly uh gay men and lesbians, but there's also been a vocal opposition from um people who identify as trans to being roped into this um very particular gender identity-based ideology.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so this hasn't been supportable.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: We we've seen move we've seen improvements where um obviously the the the Tavistock Centre has has been justly uh criticized.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: We we had a halt on puberty blockers, legislation has has changed um to protect incarcerated women and and women's sports.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: So in the UK, we are we are I think we can now safely say that the tide is turning.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: This there we see a similar drop-off of support in in the US, but the polarisation and the um of the extremes is is still escalating.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: So whereas we, I I would say we have this cultural tendency to get very, very close to a revolution and then back off and pretend we were never going to do that in the first place.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I think we're doing that again, whereas the the US is is still at the moment heading uh towards a particularly nasty clash and things are escalating.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: In Canada, there isn't the same sign of a drop-off.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: There's um language in the mainstream media in in companies um is is still is still rising, particularly in relation to gender identity, and we're starting to see these ideas take root and grow, particularly in northern Europe.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_01: So we are are doing quite well.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: America has the potential, I think, to to start pushing back, but there's likely to be a clash thirst, and in some parts of the world it's still growing.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: For those who would listen to that and think this feels like a celebration of um these well-intentioned policies collapsing.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: Could that not cause harm?
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh would you, Helen, um, be able to describe another approach in which to treat people um fairly and uh with a quality of dignity, as it were, without resorting to the the theorizing and the policy making which you've described already.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I mean I think this is that is a very good point because how are we going to back off from these ideas?
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: So in some places there we can see that there are people who want to have a backlash, and what they they want to do is is ban certain critical social justice ideas, penalise them.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: There's um a sort of growing um sort of interest in in socially conservative ideas which are not just applied to one's own life but but um also getting into into other people.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: So we're seeing that this possibility of, and I keep taking stats from the US, which isn't all that helpful, but you know, support for same-sex relationships has dropped seven points in the last year.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: And um we're we're seeing a rise of uh sort of overtly racist um um output on social media.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: There have been calls to to um repeal the civil rights movement.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_01: So this is the backlash, and that is just as ugly and just as authoritarian as um as the problem that that that it's dealing with, and potentially much worse.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: So the the way I would argue to ethically and um effectively address the issues that um that still do need addressing is to step back from this um unconscious bias, invisible systems of power, everybody's trained to think the same way, and get into empirical research.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: There is good work being done out there into what um imbalances still exist, what disparities exist, why they exist, have empirical research within companies, within um within broader society, stop forgetting that class exists, stop forgetting that geography exists, have a broader and more sort of granular approach on a factual level.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: And on an ethical level, what it is being found time and time again with companies that have tried to implement um DEI um training.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: For example, I I think what one one study found that five years of DEI training in a company uh produced an average of 9% fewer black women in positions of um management because it increases racial tensions, it makes people more aware of difference, it makes them feel that they're not aiming for the same goals.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: So instead of taking this approach, what I I would argue we would do, and what I'm working with some employers to do, is a take, go back to that much more um individualistic, pluralistic, universalistic, so I will break that down, approach where you say we will treat people as an individual.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: This doesn't mean that we ignore the group that they come from or any disadvantages that they may have.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: But first and foremost, you are a person with the same rights and the same freedoms and the same sort of emotional and psychological makeup as everybody else.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: So if we are see if we remember our shared humanity and we remember that people are individuals and not tokens of X group with X lived experience, then we are getting a much more ethical um approach to the issue of social justice.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: So if we take for a concrete example, the idea of colour blindness, which Coleman Hughes has written about um very well recently, and this is of course a metaphor, this is not the idea that we can't ever see what race someone is, and so we can't possibly see when racism is happening.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's the idea that we uh when we when we deal with other people, we do not make assumptions about them because of their race.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: We if if if cultural identity is important to you, then then obviously say so, and that that is a fact about you.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: Your melanin levels aren't.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: So we treat this person first and foremost as an individual, as a a human member of society, and we we try to go from there.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: And this is what has worked, I would argue, from the civil rights movement, liberal feminism, liberal gay pride movements, where they have just uh said some people are gay, get over it.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: Now we can we can deal with that.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: We can deal with why shouldn't women have the same access to the same professions?
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: Why shouldn't people have racial minority?
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: There are very few people of goodwill now who would have any kind of problem with that or believe that we've already solved all those problems.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: So this this is the liberal approach that I argue that we that we need to return to it has worked and it will keep working if we don't get this tribal identity politics sort of re-inscribing old racist imperialist tropes.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think I'm gonna bring them up a couple of times um today.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: Uh have you ever heard of a writer from the 20th century called Stefan Swan?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Have you heard of him before?
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so he was a Jewish Austrian writer, and he wrote um a memoir called The World of Yesterday.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm definitely going to quote him a couple of times today because when I knew I was going to be recording with you, I thought it's it's very apt for the conversation I thought we were going to have.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: But his memoir is about the liberal Europe that was lost through First World War and then the rise of the Nazis.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: And he describes in vivid detail just how free living this place was and how cultured and civilized and all these things, and how they just never saw the world that was to come with this rising authoritarianism.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: Even if they thought that they could have predicted it, they never realized how bad it was going to get.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: But what one one of his quotes was about um the uh being careful as to how to treat your enemy, your perceived enemy.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it and he says this they did not know those innocents who spread such lies, that the accusation of every possible cruelty against the enemy is as much war materiel as are munitions and planes, and that they are systematically taken out of storage at the beginning of every war.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: War does not permit itself to be coordinated with reason and righteousness.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_00: It needs stimulated emotions, enthusiasm for its own cause, and hatred for the adversary.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_00: And clearly that is the antithesis of the the liberal values which you're espousing here.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think people quite seem to recognise in that heat of the moment when it's so easy to jump into that othering.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the irony here is that most of these theories are built around the concept of othering, and they don't really seem to care about the othering of these people who aren't on message, is that the harder you go, the more you um castigate someone, the more that you tear them down, is when the opportunity for revenge comes, you know, not everyone is going to be thinking in a particularly charitable forgive thy neighbour way.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so uh I I can only hope that what you're describing here in Britain, and I think you are right, we do have a tendency in which to release ourselves from the gas pedal before things turn nasty.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we have a good way of talking around things and making sure to, you know, watch our P's and Q's.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's a good national trait of ours.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, we think we we need to be careful because um should that political pendulum swing back, which it will at some point, is you need to make sure that there aren't excesses and and I think people are acting excessively um uh at the moment.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: I I I call this um um reciproc sorry, um reciprocal overcompensation.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: It it's um it's a it's a kind of of reciprocity where you know you you have we we have such an innate sense of fairness.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: What people uh fail to remember is that we are apes.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we are we are tribal territorial animals, and we have within us the ability, well we we can't actually fail to be have an in-group bias.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: We will do that in in any uh situation that we come to, we will form into cliques.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: And the way to address this is to try to push it out.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: The very worst thing you could do if you wanted to um address an issue like racism is to say, well, we'll have the black people in an affinity group there and the white people in an affinity group there, and then we'll say that these people think like this and these people experience that, and um the the the rights of these people are naturally oppressive to these people and and and separate people are so very different.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's it it's almost as though the the theorists who have come up with these ideas have um tried to find the way to increase race racial tensions and and reduce empathy across groups.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: If you compare this with with Martin Luther King, when he spoke in that universalist way, that when he spoke of his own little children, is appealing to his wider audience.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: I am a father like you.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: I have dreams for my children like you, and I dream of the day that they will be judged for the content of their character.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: Don't you?
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: You raise your children to be good people, to be knowledgeable, to work hard, and then you want them to have the fruits of that effort, so do I.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: So this is that universalist uh empathy across groups, that is what worked.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's what worked with liberal feminism.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: Women had got the same rights as men because men supported them in it.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's what's worked with uh with LGBT rights, same-sex marriage happened not because there are a lot of people who want to get same-sex marriage, but because so many other people said, why shouldn't same-sex couples have the same right to a recognized union that everybody else has.
• 27:02
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• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh, and um the drawing of tribal lines uh rarely works out so well, particularly in an age where given that we live in multi-ethnic societies, uh multi-faith societies, is there are any number of ways in which to draw those lines.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: And um I think you're right, is the idea of sorting people out into um predefined camps in the name of belonging, um, allows them to belong within those camps, but not in a shared camp with everyone else.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: And uh that's um that's clearly a big problem.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: And and I think companies, organizations, whether public or private, I think they probably need to revisit those to uh as to whether that's the appropriate way forward.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: We've talked a bit about rising authoritarianism and um and and and the ideologies that might sit behind that.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: I seem to have gone quote mad today because I've got a couple of quotes to read at you to get your reactions to.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_00: But but but John Gray, the political philosopher from my part of the world, Northeast England, although he's way more distinguished than than I, so I shouldn't try and squeeze myself in on the same sentence.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: He's he's written a lot about liberalism and its fate.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um many people talk about liberalism having passed into existence.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: And um his quote is on illiberalism as a a governing force now.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and uh I will I I'll I'll get your take on it.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um so John Gray on illiberalism.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: Within Western societies, rival groups seek to capture the power of the state in a new war of all against all between self-defined collective identities.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_00: There is an unrelenting struggle for the control of thought and language, enclaves of freedom persist, but a liberal civil civilization based on the practice of tolerance has passed into history.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: In schools and universities, education inculcates conformity with the ruling progressive ideology.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: The arts are judged by whether they serve approved political goals.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: Dissidents from orthodoxies on race, gender, and empire find their careers terminated and their public lives erased.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: This repression is not the work of governments.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: The ruling catechisms are formulated and enforced by civil society.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: Libraries, galleries, and museums exclude viewpoints that are condemned as reactionary.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Powers of censorship are exercised by big high-tech corporations, illiberal institutions of policing society and themselves.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: That was from his recent book, The New Leviathans.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: In your view, Helen, how did we, if you agree, end up in that society that that John Gray describes?
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: I I think um, and this this is what my my my next book is going to be uh about.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I didn't know that, so that's a great tee-up for the for the plug.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm I'm glad I'm glad that has worked very well.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: The subtitle of it is Has Liberalism Failed or Have We Been Failing to Be Liberal?
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that this is where what it comes down to.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: The reason that um we are always battling the rise of um authoritarianism, it is I think fundamentally counterintuitive to us to let other people be wrong.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: That's something that has emerged within in liberal democracies, within a modern age, it is much more common for us to uh point or have take power a moral, a dominant moral orthodoxy, and for it to say what can and can't be believed, what can and can't be said, and to penalise um people doing anything different under um heresy, blasphemy, apostomy, tr treason.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so that this liberal uh concept of of live and let live, each person has the same right to the life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, you know, and let people believe what they want unless they are hurting you, that is something that needs to be actively defended all the time.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think that liberal societies have got complacent about this.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: They too many of them see too many people when somebody says to me liberalism has failed, and I say to them, What have you been doing to preserve it?
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: Who have whose right to speak have you supported who you don't agree with?
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: If you yourself are not defending the beliefs, rights and freedom of of those you disagree with, then it's difficult for you to complain that yours are not being protected by this liberal society.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: People will often say, where is this liberal society?
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you're it.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: Are you doing your part in it?
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I will be arguing that we need to see liberalism as a responsibility as much as a right.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: That too many people, I think, at the moment see it a liberal society as something that protects them, the individual, or their group, which they psychologically see as in the same way as an individual, and they don't see themselves as having the duty of protection as part of that liberal society.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: So as we have had to fight less and less for liberal rights, we've had to stand up for them less, because there has been a broad consensus on live and let live, leave people alone unless they're hurting you.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_01: We've had some of these authoritarianisms sort of creep their way in again.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_01: So with the critical social justice movement, this this came in on the the wave of um advances in um in women's rights, we we had the same right to access all professions, be paid the same amount, have mortgages in our own name, uh homosexuality was decriminalized, um, sort of uh race discrimination on the grounds of race was criminalized.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: So we had all these successes, and as people then had a very reasonable uh need, I think, to want to keep dismantling the the ways of thinking that had allowed that to be acceptable in the first place, these critical theories have kind of snaked their way in as a way to do that.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, sure, a lot of laws have changed now, but is any are people still racist at all?
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: Are people still sexist?
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: Are people still homophobic?
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, so we need to change society as well.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: And the liberal approach to that would be to say, well, we carry on treating people as individuals, we we carry on frowning upon racist and sexist and homophobic ideas, and we we marginalise those.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: That the the critical social justice approach, as there was less overt prejudice to um address, have have started really trying to dig it out of people's unconscious minds.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: They they see it there, they assume it must be there, it can't just have have gone away.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then we have this very simplistic blanket approach to to trying to find the source of white supremacy racism in this cultural um soup, essentially, and dig it out of of individuals to change systems, which uh it's a very neat theory, but that's not quite how reality works.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: But it's crept in because there was a will to continue um opposing racism, sexism, and homophobia.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: But as soon as people started monitoring and policing speech, that is when a liberal society has to say no.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, this paradox of of tolerance that is supposed to exist.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't believe in that.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think liberalism was ever intended to be tolerant of illiberalism.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: You can express these views, but as soon as you start infringing on the rights of somebody else or telling them what they must think, the liberal society has to say no.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's a that's an argument um that I've heard Stephen C.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: Hicks, uh I think he includes the the middle uh acronym of his uh name.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he he was on an episode of trigonometry with um James Orr and they're debating liberalism and conservatism, and then they went on to um be hosted by Constantin Kisson's Substack, where they exchange ideas.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_00: I do actually think everyone should go and read that because you'll see both um schools of thought in probably their best lights, but he makes that point actually about muscular liberalism, um, that it can't just be a case of um not backing it up with with any kind of authority.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you um you you also mentioned something really interesting there, which have now heard a couple of different guests referred to it in in different ways.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but as you were talking about neat theorizing that doesn't really match reality, is um I've had Lionel Shriver, the spectator columnist and author on the show.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: And uh one of the quotes which I then went and put on Twitter, and I hardly have any followers, but it generated lots of responses, and people went and watched the clip.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, was the left lives in a world of ideas rather than uh reality.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_00: And um uh there's truth to that is um that there are uh there there are there are political mindsets that are less attuned to the empiricism that you talk about, and those that deal with abstract theory as a preferred governing um um force, I suppose.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: We we I'd like to talk a little bit about the prospects of moving away from this this world which we talked about, which has become authoritarian when whether you call it soft or hard.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_00: But I would say there's probably some examples of this soft authoritarianism having turned hard, just showing up in the rich pickings of this this month of April.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: So um beginning of this month, we saw uh first in Scotland that the hate speech um law get uh enshrined and is now out there, and so that relies upon um what's the best way of putting it?
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_00: It relies on on fellow citizens to log complaints against people, and then it ends up on some kind of a criminal record in the background that you don't even know exists.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's got a bit of an East German feel to it, uh a bit of a throwback.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then more recently, in the last couple of days, we've seen the National Conservative Conference, National Conservatism Conference in Brussels be shut down twice by um uh, or at least the venues cancel on them twice because of complaints by a local Antifa group.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the socialist mayor was supportive of that.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: He's been found to have links to Turkish Islamist parties, and then they employed the police to come and shut down the third venue once it was actually going.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I believe Suela Bravaman and Nigel Tharaj might have been on stage at the time.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I think they got inside and realized, oh, there's actually quite a lot of press here.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't going to look good, so they just closed the doors instead and didn't allow people in, uh, which hasn't been a particularly good look.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um I suppose you you've also got an example over at Unheard.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: They they've recently released an expose on um the disinformation industry, as they call it.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: So um a brief background here, they signed a deal with some advertisers, three advertisers who thought here's a great growth model.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: But once they started using them, they found that the ad revenue is consistently much lower than anticipated.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, once they investigated, they found that companies within the advertising analytics value chain, as it were, um, pinged a couple of other companies.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of them was Oracle, uh, and then, or at least there's a company between them and it.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then another one went to this overarching company called the Global Disinformation Index.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: And basically, it held a whole rating system of people or organizations that were deemed to um uh circulate disinformation, which they um class as anyone promoting an adversarial narrative was their words.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not even particularly around falsehoods, it's just about disagreement.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then basically that sends the messages all the way back down and it clips your ad revenue.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_00: And they they they actually did set themselves up to say they wanted to starve organizations, and that's effectively a direct quote of um funding um if they're found to be on the disinformation list.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: So it and that's funded by government, it's funded by the UK Foreign Commonwealth Office, it's funded by a German Interior Ministry, the EU, uh George Soros' Open Society Foundation, which all sounds a bit conspiratorial, but it's it's uh it's an example of, you know, you've got the hard authoritarianism of the National Conservative Conference shutdown, you've got this stuff in the background that's basically saying, don't move off message.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_00: If you do, we're gonna find a way to shut you down.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um every time you feel like there's a a pushback into this, I suppose how you've described us practically living the liberal world, just get out there and say the things and have sunlight be the best disinfectant, you then find these examples and you go, whoa, um liberalism really is not the governing um uh the governing ideology of our of our of our elites now.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um so uh m but but I suppose my question to you, based on what you see and some of the projects you get involved in and the landscapes that you're part of, what prospect do we have of moving away from the the the tightening fist, as it were?
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I I I think um what what you you have just have just brought up here, where there are different levels of um of illiberalism um happening is is a a very important marker of society.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: And and this is what I I say to people when they they say to me, liberalism isn't working, liberalism's failed, we need to try something else.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: Does it look as though we have a liberal system at the moment?
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't think it it does.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I I would take issue as well, and I'm sure there was a context with Lionel Shriver's um comment that it is the left who who lives in in this fantasy world because if uh you know and our government is conservative, so it if it is a part of this um this this censorship regime, I I really don't think you you can blame the left.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_01: This is a growing um sort of movement really of people away from caring what is true and away from from caring about freedom of speech and belief.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: We we saw this um recently with the um the the mass murders that happened in in Bondi in in the US.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: People were immediately creating narratives around it.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: There were there were those who were really wanted it to be an Islamist, then some poor young Jewish guy uh got got pulled in.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm I'm sure this was an entire fabrication that he looked somewhat similar because there was another faction who wanted to have a Jewish terrorist, and then there were people focusing on the fact that that he was white and that there would then be bias um to call him mentally ill because of that.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: And then there were other people trying to make a narrative that he was an incel because five of his six victims were were female, even though there's a good chance that more of the people who couldn't get out of his way were female because sex differences exist.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_01: We don't know this.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: So we we have this.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: I I um had had to have quite a few differences with James Lindsay politically now.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_01: But one thing that that he said that I I think is very um accurate is he said, as we're we're coming into this stage that you could call late postmodernism, the age of narratives.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that this is what what we are seeing on on a whole level of um both sort of authoritarian government systems who are just trying to manage um information and knowledge, and they're they're doing this this within systems that decide what may and may not be seen.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_01: And then that softer power of um of social disapproval and who will get invited um to what is all being.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: And a part of this growing sort of illiberalism and this focus on getting the right narratives out there and this battle of narratives, and Mack McManus and his book, The Right The Rise of Postmodern Conservatism, is very, very good on this because it shows how that that same um kind of living in an illusion, this imaginary system that is emerging on the right.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: And we we do see this.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: We see cultural appropriation on the right.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: If somebody has has recast a character as black, for example, then there's suddenly outrage because this is not this is not their culture.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: And it's such so much of a mirror image, and that's because it's it's the same very post-modern narrative Trumps truth.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, on the one side we have the postmodernism, on the other, we had the post-truth system.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_01: But I I think um what you're speaking to, particularly at the end there, with these systems that are growing, is probably best um addressed that that I have ever seen by some work in in progress by Mike Nayner.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know the Australian filmmaker?
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_00: I do.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_00: He made a film with you and James and Peter, I think.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh what you had said recently, uh just now about John Grey, and then particularly about these these systems that are being imposed on people, is what feeds very much into a concept that he is developing of discourse engineering, which is when you know people are trying to bypass a rational mind, decide for people's own good what they can and can't be told.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: And now, you know, you you can make make some arguments for um sidelining um really factually completely inaccurate things about the earth being flat and um you know not having this in science magazines, for example.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: But the the idea that that people cannot evaluate bad ideas for themselves, that we must be be fed something that has been monitored, and again, not even on the grounds of evidence, but on the grounds of being adversarial to a particular narrative, that's that is a a current problem of our age, which I think speaks much more to Mike's particular work than than mine.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: I I focus much more on the sort of ideological um castles um and fantasy worlds that people are are building and then trying to reside in and then wondering why it doesn't work.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think there's a a way out of this stopping short of unplugging the internet?
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because clearly it sounds like what's happening is people are trying to meme whole populations into their preferred way of uh you know living, um, governing all those things, viewing other groups.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um I I I wonder if there ever is going to be a reckoning uh amongst um the internet uh algorithmic overlords, as it were, because um it seems to me that those people who spend the least time online probably will report much higher levels of mental well-being, feeling like they're connected to those around them, doing things worthwhile, etc.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_00: And most of us are um typically swept up in the currents of you know the latest hashtag trend, um, the kind of the whole of the internet um is effectively geared toward um creating a herd mentality in every direction you can possibly imagine.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I don't really know how at some point it gets co-opted for good without it being engineering per se, but I suppose just how do you stand down all of this stuff that's sending us off into these different groups?
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_00: Or, you know, is it the make the case of making the full the full gamma of um just freedom for everybody and let them do what they want, um, even if they're trying to engineer stuff and let let it go as it is?
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I don't I don't really know where we're we're gonna go from here.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: I I have to say I I cannot um set out a a solution to you how we are we are going to find our our way out of various different um elements of the the narrative war of narratives Maya that we're finding ourselves in and that the growing escalation and polarisation and um decrease of of value for what is for what is true and other people's right to to hold their own views.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a big complex mess, and although I would like to save the world, I cannot um in in honesty set out a plan for you.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_01: I I think different aspects of this have got to be addressed in different ways.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: Jonathan Haidt have you seen his new book, The Anxious Generation?
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_01: So he he has um convinced me um to shut down my social media accounts, which I have.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_01: I am no longer on them, and and the the benefits of this for mental health is um extraordinary.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_01: Keeping these away from from children so that they can at least develop um having a sort of healthy play-based childhood, I think that is is very important.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'm seeing some interest and and a kind of hunger uh for authenticity, for um for truth, for liberalism that is emerging from the toxic stew at the moment.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm hearing from increasing numbers of people who want to get behind a an inspiring and a solid concept of liberalism where people will say let people believe, speak, live as they see fit, provided it harms no one else, nor does nor stops them from doing the same.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_01: But it has within it as well that very strong no feature where we we do not just let ideas float about, we also have a value for uh reason for evidence.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I I see more people who are now looking for something solid because my fear is that while the UK is backing away from this really sort of post-modern um thing, it it's going to head into a post-liberal um uh time as well, and it's going to shrink in, it's going to become very small, it's going to oppose um uh growth and exploration.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of the post-liberal thinkers seem to see um science as um as as frightening, technology as as dangerous, uh progress as a myth, and um and really want to to to kind of turn us to being a small island off the coast of France, not known for thinking very much.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I um oppose to this um this post-liberal movement, which seems to me to be born of culture, wars, fatigue.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think we need, and Matthew Dancona, in his book on post-truth, wrote a wonderful thing about this.
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_01: We need an inspiring um narrative of of liberalism.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, call it tell us the truth.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_01: And to to get more people on board with with wanting to protect our freedoms and also wanting to protect our our heritage as um as defenders of science and reason and um this whole sort of marketplace of ideas.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm my my only hope is that the cultural tide will shift, and I see some signs of it, for people to have a stronger wish for a solid system like that, rather than shrinking into themselves or going off into diverse little denominations of personal truth, that we will come back at some point to a need for evidence-based epistemology and consistently liberal ethics.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what I'm gonna argue for continuously.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think that's a very noble thing to argue for.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I if I'm putting on the hat of a post-liberal and I and I'm reading between the lines, so I'm thinking if you go and read Patrick Denine's Why Liberalism Failed, for example.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, if you uh yeah, if people are reading those kind of things, or um uh I'm trying to think of others, but you know, he he's he's written other books on the topic.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_00: Or if you're looking at Mary Harrington, even who um I think she would perhaps describe herself as someone who accepts we live in a post-liberal world rather than a post-liberal, is when I read between the lines, particularly of those two thinkers, um I get the sense that part of the reason why people are perhaps cheering on the downfall of liberalism, cheering might be a bit strong, is that they see it for having let many things in through the door that eroded the sense of belonging that was felt.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_00: So, for example, you know, you mentioned heritage.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think lots of people would say um liberalism wasn't able to um uh guard against um illiberal ideologies.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: And with those illiberal ideologies, whether they came through something like the remote.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_01: Why was it liberalism that wasn't able to guard against it?
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I I I would um I would say it's because um liberalism has been set up on the uh basis that um any any boundaries, any customs are seen as uh oppressive, and clearly there are lots of cultural norms and um social boundaries and customs which come up uh uh about being a kind of settled people, I suppose.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and many of those, I think, would have had uh a religious background as well, if we're thinking about our own Christian heritage.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so if the project was moved towards the sunlit uplands of liberalism where everyone can be free and do those things and they're unencumbered from them, is people would argue it doesn't recognize ourselves as these um culturally um bounded, socially bounded individuals, and that because of the um rise of these liberal ideologies, that on the watch of liberalism is people would feel like things have been taken away from them with regards to their own national cultural story.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think some people perhaps might see it as an opportunity for how do you get some of that stuff back?
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_00: How is it that you get to say that this is what we're about and and what we do?
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I and I do think you know, giving them if I if I think about people like James Orr, who is is certainly a champion of conservatism, he doesn't want to lose liberalism altogether.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_00: He just thinks that conservatism is a better governing, uh a governing mantra, as it were.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_01: A conflict there.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um most most conservatives are are liberal.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_01: I I happen to be a left um liberal economically, but we we must not let um people think that that liberalism belongs to the to the left.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_01: That that's a a system of of democratic and um and the the free exchange of ideas.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_01: But I I think that that there's um what what you're describing here is a a yearning for a um a unity that that never really existed.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_01: Because uh coming from my um perspective of of studying um Christian history 1300 to 1700, it wasn't as though when everybody in a country had the same um religion and um had the same uh skin colour and and um there were the expectations to to marry.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not suggesting you think pet everybody needs to have the same skin colour, um, you know, that uh they were going to marry people of the opposite sex and you're going to follow these things, that there wasn't um big cultural strife and and division.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_01: I could take almost any decade from those three centuries and um tell you who was in conflict with who, and it could um really make you change your grading curve of of what a culture war is.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I I think there is this this kind of yearning to go back to having um shared values and um and boundaries which doesn't really map on well to any history that's that's ever existed.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: So we you know we can people who who want to be more patriotic, who who want to celebrate their traditions, and I do.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, that's the one area of moral foundations where I come out as more conservative than most conservative is is my my love of history and tradition.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_01: Bringing that that all in, certainly that's I wouldn't say it is at odds with liberalism, though, unless you want to stop people from ever criticizing that religion or leaving that religion or um trying to reform that culture.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_01: Because I I think there is a strong difference between um liberalism and um sort of an intense sort of narcissistic individualism that sometimes um culturally conservative people mistake liberalism for.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think that the liberalism, like like like Burke, who who I would say is is obviously conservative liberal, um and John Stuart Mill, who I I think falls more on the left liberal, they both had this um belief in uh reform over revolution, that we need to keep making progress, but we need to not throw away our traditions at the same time.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that is central to what is understood as liberalism.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I I can't agree with anybody who thinks that it is it is liberalism that has enabled um the rise of authoritarianism and um and and pushing out of of culture.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's more of a um a postmodern um certain stream of the left that that has come in uh from that angle.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's focus on what people can do if they're exercised by your arguments to keep this liberal inheritance um going longer.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um you you're you're doing some good stuff in the real world, working with companies and what what have you behind the scenes to help them remain liberal in their in their outlook in their treatment of their employees and their customers.
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um if peep there are people listening who are working for organizations or even just thinking about how they engage politically, uh, what can they what would you advocate for them to do in the real world to try to keep this way of uh seeing alive?
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so there there's quite a lot of um rather detailed advice I I would give to employers about how to to um uh set up policies, but I I think that might be getting too much into the weed.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_01: So so what I I would uh say is I would recommend four things generally for the average person to do in the real world, and that is uh first of all to have a strong understanding of the liberal tradition um from uh John Stuart Mill and in particular and and from Edmund Burke.
• 1:00:07
  SPEAKER_01: So from right from left, Adam Smith, just uh I don't mean you have to read everything that ever existed, but have this grounding in this sense of um letting people live as they see fit, provided it doesn't hurt anyone else, of reform over revolution, this evolving practice which wants to preserve what is good over and and and reform for what is better.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think that the second thing is to recognize liberalism as your responsibility rather than just your your right.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_01: If you are concerned that your freedoms of speech, belief, and speech are not being protected and you are not living in a liberal society, make sure that you yourself are protecting other people's.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_01: So if if we can can make a commitment to do this, if you are a leftist and you see a conservative being silenced, then speak up for that.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you are a Christian and you you see a Muslim getting bashed, defend their right to believe.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_01: And the other way around.
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_01: So that this is uh is part of the third thing of trying not to entrench into groups, because when we have a sense of existential threat, which so many people do right now, what the temptation is is to return into an identity group and to defend that group and to conform to that group.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_01: And this um then I think activates what we were talking about earlier, which is that very tribal mentality, and people are then seeing um whole collectives of people.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_01: I just saw before I came on here someone saying, look, here's a woman complaining that chivalry is dead, but women demanded um equality.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_01: How is this like they're different women?
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_01: Why is this hard?
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_01: So trying to stop um entrenching into groups, which we treat as individuals and seeing things as a zero-sum game.
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I would also really recommend people to look at countries and history in which there hasn't been a strong liberal tradition, those which are much less liberal than we are, recognize how liberal society still is, what that does allow you to do and how and to live and how it has benefited you, and then defend that tradition.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_01: If you are a progressive type, defend liberalism because it has been the best thing for getting women, racial minorities, same-sex couples, equal rights, and it can continue doing so.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_01: If you are a more cultural conservative type, recognize that you cannot conserve Western civilization without conserving that liberal tradition.
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_00: That was very succinctly put.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_00: I would probably be spending another hour going down the rabbit hole on those those uh topics.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Helen, I'm gonna let you go in a second, but you referenced that you're writing a new book.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: When can we expect that?
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_01: Oh well, the the Counterweight Handbook is the one that's coming out now.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's in print now, being going to print now, and that's the one that's a very practical guide for individuals uh pushing back at critical social justice, woke, cancel culture in their their organization, in their life.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that that's uh a guide to recognizing when you have a problem what kind of problem it is, how to deal with it.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's got sample letters and um it's very practical.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_01: The book after after that is is going to be at looking at revitalizing the the liberal tradition and why reform is better than revolution or reactionism.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I can sign on the dotted line to that.
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you you also said that you've closed down your social media accounts.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_00: Can people find you and follow your work anywhere as you move through it, or is it total shutdown?
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, no, I'm um my I'm still a friend is still posting things on Twitter for me on H Pluckrose about you can find me um on um uh Helen Pluckrose on Substack, and my my Substack is called the The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very good Substack too, so I'd highly recommend it.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_00: Helen, thank you so much for coming on today and for being so generous with your time before the show uh and during the show.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh hopefully we'll stay in touch and um I wish you all the best with Fighting the Good Fire.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_00: We need more people like you.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me on, John.
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_01: It was good talking to you.
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_00: Likewise, pleasure.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining me in Thinking Class today.
• 1:04:31
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• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_00: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values, and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 1:04:57
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• 1:05:06
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