The conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which escalated significantly in 2022, has deep and complex roots involving historical, political, ethnic, and strategic factors. Here are some key reasons:
Historical Context: Ukraine has a long history intertwined with Russia. Part of Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire and, later, the Soviet Union. The historical ties and differing perspectives on this shared history contribute to tensions.
Ethnic and Linguistic Divisions: Ukraine is ethnically and linguistically diverse, with significant Russian-speaking populations in the east and south. This diversity has been a source of internal conflict and external influence.
Political Shifts in Ukraine: The 2014 Ukrainian Revolution, which saw the ousting of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, marked a significant turning point. It led to Crimea's annexation by Russia and the pro-Russian separatist movements in Eastern Ukraine, escalating tensions.
NATO Expansion: Russia has long been wary of NATO's eastward expansion. Ukraine's growing closeness with the West and potential NATO membership has been a significant concern for Russia, which sees it as a threat to its security and sphere of influence.
Geopolitical Strategy: Ukraine's strategic location as a buffer between Russia and Europe, its access to the Black Sea, and its role in energy transit routes (especially for natural gas) are significant factors in the conflict.
Economic Interests: Russia has economic interests in Ukraine, including natural resources, industrial infrastructure, and agricultural output.
Internal Ukrainian Politics: Political instability, corruption, and economic challenges within Ukraine have also played a role, affecting its relations with Russia and its path towards European integration.
Russian Foreign Policy: Russia's foreign policy objectives, under President Vladimir Putin, aim to reassert its influence in the post-Soviet space and resist Western influence, with Ukraine being a key focus area.
Information Warfare: Propaganda and disinformation campaigns have been used by both sides to influence public opinion and justify actions, adding complexity to the conflict.
International Law and Norms: The conflict raises questions about international law, including the principles of state sovereignty and territorial integrity.
It's important to note that this is a highly complex and evolving situation, with each point containing layers of nuance and varying perspectives. The viewpoints and motivations of both Russia and Ukraine, as well as the involvement of other international actors, add to the complexity of the conflict
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Sources:
"The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine" by Serhii Plokhy "Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine" by Anna Reid "Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism" by Charles Clover "All the Kremlin's Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin" by Mikhail Zygarder Putin. "The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin" by Steven Lee Myers
Well, I've been away from this for quite a little while now. It seems I don't know, geez, I guess I better have a little shot of rum here, right yeah, a little round its good stuff its aged 12 years.
So like I said, I haven't done this too for quite a while and in part is because of the ridiculous amount of hours that I've been working. I've been a while back for 12 weeks. I was working night shifts from nine in the evening to six in the morning, so it didn't allow me too many opportunities to be able to do any of this kind of stuff, but tonight's topic is the sheeple.
We've all heard the term sheeple, but what does it actually mean sheeple means anyone who doesn't agree with your position, yeah.
Ooh, that's something profound, isn't it? Holy shit, man, you're really doing it to me, and why that is it is complicated uh it's really, really complicated, and it all starts out with one you have a concept called the status quo, and you start from there, so your programming starts at the moment that you're born.
The first exposure that you have is, of course, the doctor with the catcher's mitt catches you as you, you know, out of the old well, I won't say it because I want to get into some kind of problems from the pro politically correct people.
But anyway you're, you're born the first really the first interaction with your environment uh is your parents, and of course, they instill on you their values, their beliefs and all those kind of nice things; then time goes on, and you start school well, then the school starts programming you how to think, and then you get through school and then you have to deal with your community well it's how the community sees you the status quo of the community so then you have work, and there's programming that's taking place there it may be subtle, but it's there because you're having a lot of social interaction right with other people.
I'm starting to think like a sociologist here. So, that's how it all develops.
But you know, many, many years ago, I was as guilty as the next person on you know, yeah your a sheeple people because I mean I would you know present something and I would spend a lot of time researching it getting the empirical evidence, and I'd get these responses, and wow, so okay, now I stopped responding.
Let's examine that point; we think that we are rational people, but we're not "Hint book publication, book publication" we're not rational as what we think we are; we tend to be more emotional. Because we are emotional, that can be manipulated very, very easily.
Okay, now I kind of gave a hint, but I'm not going to give a spoiler alert to the book, so we have these people called the sheeple, so why are they sheeple? Well, to answer that, you've got to look at within yourself, you've got to look at your own biases and your own value system and then here comes the challenge to examine it objectively, and that is the challenge to be able to look at yourself in an objective way and understand and figure out why you believe what you believe that is the biggest hurdle that was something that you know came you know, face to face to me, I mean I faced the demon, uh, you know, because I always thought that, you know, I'm talking, you know, a few years back.
You know, I always thought I was, you know, a fairly educated person and that I was very open-minded, and once I got into introspection over a period of time. I realized that holy damn; I'm no better off than our ancestral knuckle-dragging low-brow ancestors.
So it took time for me to divorce my emotions to pure rational and purely rational, I mean, you know, really being critical, questioning everything. It doesn't matter, and while I mentioned that like, we've got some shit happening in the Ukrainian.
I don't know what the truth is there. I mean, I'm l you know, reading American propaganda, I'm reading Russian propaganda, I'm reading Canadian propaganda everybody has got a spin on that, so which one do you believe well they are you know some a little bit of guidance and uh and this is where critical thinking comes into is asking the right questions and then asking yourself what is the probable which one is most probable of being true, and that's a difficult question to answer.
But anyway, I don't want to go on rambling on, and that was just a few points that I wanted to touch on, and I hope in a short period; I've been able to, if not give me the feedback tell me if I didn't explain something enough and like I said, there is a drawback because I will not give the spoiler to the book that I'm writing, so anyway, I'm going to finish off with that.
Thank you very much for tuning in to catching me catch my little ramble and you know god bless, and as Mr. Spock would say, "live long and prosper."
Stephen’s teammate
is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, a YouTube
sensation,
and the author of the big new international bestseller,
Twelve Rules for Life. Ladies and
gentlemen, Toronto’s Jordan
Peterson.
We’re going to get our debate underway momentarily, but
first, a quick checklist to go through.
We’ve got a hashtag tonight,
#@munkdebate.
Those of you in the hall and those of you watching online, please weigh in;
let’s get
your opinions going. Also, for those of you watching online
right now, we have a running poll at
www.munkdebates.com/vote.
Reflect, input, react to this debate as it unfolds over the next hour and
a half.
Ah, my favourite aspect of the show, which was
Peter’s brilliant idea and creation — we have our
countdown clock. It
keeps our debaters on their toes and our debate on time. So, when you see
these
clocks on the screen go down to zero, I want you to join me in a
warm round of applause, and we’ll
have a debate that ends when it’s
supposed to end.
Now, let’s see; we had our resolution tonight. On
the way in, we had this audience of roughly three
thousand people here
in downtown Toronto vote on, “Be it resolved: what you call political
correctness, I call progress.” Let’s see the agree/disagree on that
number: 36 percent agreed and
64 percent disagreed. So, a room in
play.
Now, we asked you how many of you are open to changing your
vote over the course of debate. Are you
fixed agree/disagree, or could
you potentially be convinced by one or other of these two teams to
move
your vote over the next hour and a half? Let’s see those numbers now. Wow — 87
percent said
yes; 13 percent said no. So, a pretty open-minded
crowd. This debate is very much in play.
As per the agreed-upon
order of speakers, I'm going to call on Michelle Goldberg first for her six
minutes of opening remarks. Michelle.
Michelle
Goldberg:Well, thank you for having me. As Rudyard knows, I
initially balked a little
bit at the resolution that we’re debating,
because there are a lot of things that fall under the
rubric of
political correctness, that I don’t call progress.
I don’t like “no
platforming,” or trigger warnings. Like a lot of middle-aged liberals, there
are
many aspects of student social justice culture that I find
off-putting — although I'm not sure that
that particular generation gap
is anything new on the record about the toxicity of social media
call-out culture — and I think it’s good to debate people whose ideas I
don’t like, which is why
I'm here.
So, if there are social justice warriors in the audience,
I feel like I should apologize to you,
because you're probably going to
feel that I'm not adequately defending your ideas. But the reason
I'm on
this side of the stage is that political correctness isn't just a term for
left- wing
excesses on college campuses, or people being terrible on
Twitter. Especially as deployed by Mr.
Peterson, I think it can be used
as a way to delegitimize any attempt for women and racial and
sexual
minorities to overcome discrimination, or even to argue that such
discrimination is real.
In the New York Times today, Mr. Peterson
says: “The people who hold that our culture is an
oppressive patriarchy,
they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on
competence.” That’s not particularly insane to me, because I'm an
American and our President is
Donald Trump, but it’s an assumption that
I think underlies a worldview in which any challenges to
the current
hierarchy are written off as political correctness.
I also think we
should be clear that this isn't really a debate about free speech. Mr.
Peterson
once referred to what he called “the evil trinity of equity,
diversity, and inclusivity” and said,
“Those three words, if you hear
people mouth those three words, equity, diversity and inclusivity,
you
know who you're dealing with and you should step away from that, because it is
not acceptable.”
He argues that the movie Frozen is politically
correct propaganda, and at one point he floated the
idea of creating a
database of university course content, so students could avoid post-modern
critical theory.
So, in the criticism of political
correctness, I sometimes hear an attempt to purge our thought of
certain
analytical categories that mirrors, I think, the worst caricatures of the
social justice
left that want to get rid of anything that smacks of
colonialism or patriarchy or white supremacy.
I also don’t really
think we’re debating the value of the enlightenment, at least not in the way
that somebody like Mr. Fry, who I think is a champion of enlightenment
values, frames it. The
efforts to expand rights and privileges, once
granted just to landowning, white, heterosexual men,
is the
enlightenment, or it’s very much in keeping with the enlightenment. To quote a
dead white
man, John Stuart Mill, “The despotism of custom is everywhere
the standing hindrance to human
advancement.”
I think that some of our opponents, by contrast, bring
challenges to the despotism of custom as
politically correct attacks on
a transcendent natural order.
To quote Mr. Peterson again, each
gender, each sex, has its own unfairness to deal with, but to
think of
it as a consequence of the social structure, it’s like — come on, really — what about
nature itself? But there’s an exception to this, because he
does believe in social interventions to
remedy some kinds of unfairness,
which is why in the New York Times, he calls for “enforced
monogamy to
remedy the woes of men who don’t get their equal distribution of sex.”
When
it comes to the political correctness debate, we’ve been exactly here before.
Allan Bloom, the
author of The Closing of the American Mind, compared
the “tyranny” of feminism in academia to the
Khmer Rouge, and he was
writing at a time when women accounted for 10 percent of all college
tenured faculty.
It’s worth looking back at what was
considered annoyingly, outrageously, politically correct in the
1980s,
the last time we had this debate. You know, not being able to call indigenous
people
“Indians,” or having to use hyphenated terms, at least in the
United States, terms like
African-Americans. You know, adding women or
people of colour to the Western Civilization
curriculum, or not making
gay jokes or using “retard” as an epithet. I kind of get it, right: new
concepts, new words sort of stick in your throat. The way we’re used to
talking and thinking seem
natural and normal, by definition.
And
then the new terms, new concepts that have social utility, stick, and those
that don’t fall
away. So, if you go back to the 1970s, Ms. — you know,
MS, as an alternative to Miss or Mrs., stuck
around. And “womyn” with a
“y” didn’t. And I hope that someday we’ll look back and marvel at the
idea that gender-neutral pronouns ever seemed like an existential threat
to anyone.
But I also don’t think it’s clear. That might not happen
because, if you look around the world
right now, there are plenty of
places that have indeed dialled back cosmopolitanism and reinstated
patriarchy in the name of staving off chaos. And they seem like terrible
places to live.
You know, I come to you from the United States,
which is currently undergoing a monumental attempt
to roll back
social
progress in the name of overcoming political correctness.
And, as someone who lives there, I assure
you, it feels nothing like
progress. Thank you.
Rudyard Griffiths: Great start to the debate, Michelle. Thank you. I'm now going to ask Jordan
Peterson to speak for the “con” team.
Jordan
Peterson:Hello. So, we should first
decide what we’re talking about. We’re not
talking about my views of
political correctness, despite what you might have inferred from the last
speaker’s comments.
This is how it looks to me: we
essentially need something approximating a low-resolution grand
narrative to unite us. And we need a narrative to unite us, because
otherwise we don’t have peace.
What’s playing out in the
universities and in broader society right now is a debate between two
fundamental low-resolution narratives, neither of which can be
completely accurate, because they
can't encompass all the details.
Obviously human beings have an individual element and a collective
element — a group element, let’s say. The question is, what story should
be paramount, and this is
how it looks to me: In the West, we have
reasonably functional, reasonably free, remarkably
productive, stable
hierarchies that are open to consideration of the dispossessed that
hierarchies
generally create.
Our societies are freer and
functioning more effectively than any societies anywhere else in the
world, and than any societies ever have, and as far as I'm concerned —
and I think there’s good
reason to assume this — it’s because the
fundamental low- resolution grand narrative that we’ve
oriented
ourselves around in the West is one of the sovereignty of the individual.
And
it’s predicated on the idea that, all things considered, the best way for me
to interact with
someone else is individual to individual, and to react
to that person as if they're both part of
the psychological process by
which things we don’t understand can yet be explored, and things that
aren’t properly organized in our society, can be yet set right.
The
reason we’re valuable as individuals, both with regard to our rights and our
responsibilities,
is because that’s our essential purpose, and that’s
our nobility, and that’s our function.
What’s happening, as far as I'm concerned, in the
universities in particular and spreading very
rapidly out into the
broader world, including the corporate world, much to what should be its
chagrin, is a collectivist narrative. And of course, there’s some
utility in a collectivist
narrative, because we’re all part of groups in
different ways.
But the collectivist narrative that I regard as
politically correct is a strange pastiche of
post-modernism and
neo-Marxism, and its fundamental claim is that, no, you're not essentially an
individual, you're essentially a member of a group.
And that
group might be your ethnicity and it might be your sex and it might be your
race, and it
might be any of the endless numbers of other potential
groups that you belong to, because you
belong to many of them. And that
you should be essentially categorized along with those who are
like you
on that dimension in that group — that’s proposition number one.
Proposition
number two is that the proper way to view the way is as a battleground between
groups
of different power. So, you define the groups first and then you
assume that you view the
individual from the group context, you view the
battle between groups from the group context, and
you view history
itself as a consequence of nothing but the power of manoeuvres between
different
groups.
That eliminates any consideration of the
individual at a very fundamental level, and also any idea,
for example,
of free speech. Because if you're a collectivist at heart in this manner,
there is no
such thing as free speech. It isn't that it’s debated by
those on the radical left and the rest of
us, so to speak; it’s that in
that formulation, there’s no such thing as free speech, because for
an
individualist, free speech is how you make sense of the world and reorganize
society in a proper
manner.
But for the radical left type of
collectivist that’s associated with this viewpoint of political
correctness, when you speak, all you're doing is playing a power game on
behalf of your group. And
there’s nothing else that you can do, because
that’s all there is.
And not only is that all there is in terms of
who you are as an individual now, and how society
should be viewed, it’s
also the fundamental narrative of history. For example, it’s widely assumed
in our universities now that the best way to conceptualize Western civilization is as an oppressive, male-dominated
patriarchy, and that the best way to construe relationships between men
and women across the centuries is one of oppression of women by men.
Well,
look, no hierarchy is without its tyranny. That’s an axiomatic truth; people
have recognized
that literally for thousands of years. And hierarchies
do tend towards tyranny, and they tend
towards the usurpation by people
with power. But that only happens when they become corrupt. We
have
mechanisms in our society to stop hierarchies from becoming intolerably
corrupt, and they
actually work pretty well.
And so I would
also point this out: you know, don’t be thinking that this is a debate about
whether
empathy is useful or not, or that the people on the “con” side
of the argument are not empathetic.
I know perfectly well, as I'm sure
Mr. Fry does, that hierarchies tend to produce situations where
people
stack up at the bottom, and that the dispossessed in hierarchies need a
political voice,
which is the proper voice of the left, by the way, the
necessary voice of the left.
But that is not the same as
proclaiming that the right level of analysis for our grand unifying
narrative is that all of us are fundamentally to be identified by the
groups that we belong to, and
to construe the entire world as the
battleground between different forms of tyranny in consequence
of that
group affiliation.
And to the degree that we play out that
narrative, that won't be progress, believe me, and we
certainly haven’t
seen that “progress” in the universities. We’ve seen situations like what
happened at Wilfrid Laurier University instead.
We won't see
progress: what we’ll return to is exactly the same kind of tribalism that
characterized the left. Thank you.
Rudyard
Griffiths: Thank you, Jordan. Michael Eric Dyson, your
six minutes starts now.
Michael
Dyson: Thank you very kindly.
Wonderful opportunity to be here in Canada. Thank you
so much. I'm going
to stand here at the podium
— I'm a preacher, and I will ask for an
offering at the end of my presentation!
This is the swimsuit
competition of the intellectual beauty pageant, so let me show you the curves
of my thought. Oh my God, was that a politically incorrect statement
I’ve just made? How did we get
to the point where the hijacking of the
discourse on political correctness has become a kind of Manichean distinction
between us and them?
The abortive fantasy just presented is
remarkable for both its clarity and yet the muddiness of the
context
from which it has emerged.
What’s interesting to me is that, when
we look at the radical left, I'm saying, wait ahead, I want
to join
them. They ain’t running nothing. I'm from a country where a man stands up
every day to
tweet the moral mendacity of his viciousness into a nation
he has turned into a psychic commode.
Y’all got Justin, we got
Donald.
So, what’s interesting, then, is that political correctness
has transmogrified into a caricature of
the left. The left came up with
the term political correctness, shall I remind you? We were tired
of our
excuses and our excesses and our exaggerations; we were willing to be
self-critical in a way
that I fear my confrères — my compatriots — are
not. “Don’t take yourself too seriously — smile.”
Take yourself not
seriously at all, but what you do, with deadly seriousness. Now it has
transmogrified into an attempt to characterize the radical left. The
radical left is a metaphor, a
symbol, an articulation. They don’t exist,
their numbers are too small. I'm on college campuses, I
don’t see much
of them coming.
When I hear about identity politics, it amazes me.
The collectivist identity politics? Uh, last
time I checked, race was an
invention from a dominant culture that wanted groups at their behest.
The invention of race was driven by the demand of a dominant culture to
subordinate others —
patriarchy, right.
Patriarchy —
patriarchy was the demand of men to have their exclusive vision presented. The
beauty
of feminism is that it’s not going to resolve differences between
men and women; it just says, men
don’t automatically get the last word.
In the course of my career, they never did.
And so, identity
politics has been generated as a bête noire of the right, and yet the right
doesn’t understand the degree to which identity has been foisted upon
black people and brown people
and people of colour from the very
beginning, and on women and trans people.
You think that I want to
be part of a group that is constantly abhorred by people at Starbucks? I'm
minding my own black
business. Walking down the street, I have group identity
thrust upon me. They don’t say, “Ah, aha,
there goes a Negro — highly
intelligent, articulate, verbose, capable of rhetorical fury at the
drop
of a hat — we should not interrogate him as to the bona fides of his legal
status.”
No, they treat me as part of a group, and the problem —
which our friends don’t want to acknowledge
— is that the hegemony, the
dominance of that group, has been so vicious that it has denied us the
opportunity to exist as individuals. Individualism is the characteristic
moment in modernity.
Mr. Peterson is right. The development of the
individual, however, is predicated upon notions of
intelligence —
Immanuel Kant and David Hume, and others. Philosophically, Descartes comes
along,
introducing knowledge into the fray, saying that knowledge is
based upon a kind of reference to the
golden intelligence, the
reflective glass that one possesses. And yet it got rooted in the very
ground of our existence.
So knowledge has fleshly basis, and
what I'm saying to you is that the knowledge that I bring as a
person of
colour makes a difference in my body, because I know what people think of me,
and I know
how they respond to me, and that ain’t no theory.
Am
I mad at trigger warnings? The only trigger warning I want is from a cop — are
you about to
shoot me? Not funny — in America, where young black people
die repeatedly, unarmed, without
provocation.
And so for me,
identity politics is something very serious. And what’s interesting about safe
spaces … I hear about the university, I teach there. Look, if you have a
safe space in your body,
you don’t need a safe space.
Some of
that is overblown, some of it is ridiculous, I understand. I believe that the
classroom is
a robust place for serious learning. I believe in the
interrogation of knowledge based upon our
mutual understanding of the
edifying proposition of enlightenment. At the same time, some people
ain’t as equal as others, so we have to understand the conditions under
which they have emerged and
in which they have been benighted and
attacked by their own culture.
And I ain’t seen nobody be a bigger
snowflake than white men who complain: “Mommy, Mommy, they
won't let us
play and have everything we used to have under the old regime, where
we were right, racist and supremacist and dominant and patriarchs and
hated gays and lesbians and transsexuals.” “Yeah, you’ve got to share. This
ain’t your world, this is everybody’s world.”
And let me end by
saying this: you remember that story from David Foster Wallace: “Two fish are
going along and an older fish comes in the opposite direction. He says,
‘Hello, boys, how’s the
water?’ They swim on, they turn to each other:
‘What the hell is water?’”
Because when you're in it, you don’t
know it; when you're dominant, you don’t know it. Nothing
Keyser Söze
said the devil did is more interesting than to make people believe he didn’t
exist.
That’s what white supremacy is.
Rudyard
Griffiths: Thank you, Michael. Stephen, you’re up.
We’re going to put six minutes on
the clock, and please start.
Stephen
Fry:I’ll try and be as quick as possible, because if I miss that plane to
London, I won't half hear the end of it from the bridegroom’s mother.
Now,
in agreeing to participate in this debate and stand on this side of the
argument, I'm fully
aware that many people who choose — incorrectly, in
my view — to see this issue in terms of left
and right, devalued and
exploded terms as I think they are, will believe that I am betraying myself
in such causes and values that I’ve espoused over the years. I’ve been
given huge grief already,
simply because I'm standing here next to
Professor Peterson, which is the very reason that I'm
standing here in
the first place.
I'm standing next to someone with whom I have, you
know, differences, shall we say, in term of
politics and all kinds of
other things, precisely because I think all this has got to stop — this
rage, resentment, hostility, intolerance; above all, this
with-us-or-against- us certainty.
A Grand Canyon has opened up in
our world. The fissure, the crack, grows wider every day. Neither
side
can hear a word that the other shrieks; nor do they want to.
While
these armies and propagandists in the culture wars clash, down below in the
enormous space
between the two sides, the people of the world try to get
on with their lives, alternately baffled,
bored, and betrayed by the
horrible noises and explosions that echo all around. I think it’s time for this toxic,
binary, zero- sum madness to stop before we destroy ourselves.
I’d
better nail my colours to the mast before I go any further than this; it’s
only polite to give
you a sense of where I come from. All my adult life
I have been what you might call a leftie, a
soft leftie, a liberal of
the most hand-wringing, milksop, milk-toast variety. Not a burning
man-the-barricades socialist; not even really a progressive worth the
name. I've been on marches,
but I’ve never quite dared wave placards or
banners.
Am I a loathed member of that band, an SJW — a social
justice warrior? I don’t think highly of
social injustice, I have to
say, but I character myself mostly as a social justice worrier. My
intellectual heroes, growing up, were Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore,
liberal thinkers, people
like that, writers like E. M. Forster.
I
believed, and I think I still do believe, in the sanctity of human relations,
the primacy of the
heart, and friendship and love and common interest.
These are more personal interior beliefs than
they are political
exterior convictions, more a humanistic version of a religious impulse, I
suppose. I trust in humanity, I believe in humanity — I think I do,
despite all that has happened
in the forty years of my adulthood.
I
am soft, and I can easily be swept away by harder hearts and harder
intellects. I'm sometimes
surprised to be described as an activist, but
over time I have energetically involved myself with
what you might call
causes. I grew up knowing that I was gay — well, in fact, from the very first
I
knew I was gay. I remember when I was born, looking up and saying,
“That’s the last time I'm going
out one of those!”
I'm
Jewish, so I have a natural, obvious horror of racism. Naturally I want
racism, misogyny,
homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, bullying,
bigotry, intolerance of all human kinds to end.
That’s surely a given
amongst all of us.
The question is how such a golden aim is to be
achieved. My ultimate objection to political
correctness is not that it
combines so much of what I have spent a lifetime loathing and opposing:
preachiness (with great respect), piety, self-righteousness, heresy-
hunting, denunciation,
shaming, assertion without evidence, accusation,
inquisition, censoring. That’s not why I'm
incurring the wrath of my
fellow liberals by standing on this side of the house.
My real objection is that I don’t think political
correctness works. I want to achieve, I want to
get to the golden hill,
but I don’t think that’s the way to get there. I believe one of the
greatest human failings is to prefer to be right than to be effective.
And political correctness is
always obsessed with how right it is,
without thinking of how effective it might be.
I wouldn’t class
myself as a classical libertarian, but I do relish transgression, and I deeply
and
instinctively distrust conformity and orthodoxy. Progress is not
achieved by preachers and
guardians of morality but, to paraphrase
Yevgeny Zamyatin, by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers,
rebels, and
skeptics.
I may be wrong — I hope to learn this evening. I really
do think I may be wrong. I'm prepared to
entertain the possibility that
political correctness will bring us more tolerance and a better
world.
But I'm not sure, and I would like this quotation from my hero, Bertrand
Russell, to hover
over the evening: “One of the painful things about our
time, is that those who feel certainty are
stupid, and those with any
imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” Let
doubt prevail.
Rudyard Griffiths:A
great set of opening statements to set the scene. We’re now going to go
into a round of rebuttals, to allow each of our presenters three minutes
to reflect on what they’ve
heard, and to make some additional points,
and we’re going to do that in the same order that we had
the opening
statements. So Michelle, you're up first. We’ll put three minutes on the clock
for you.
Michelle Goldberg: First I would say
that I think that the attempt to draw a dichotomy between
individual
rights and group rights is a little bit misleading. Traditionally, there have
been large
groups of people who have not been able to exercise their
individual rights. And I think that a lot
of the claims that are being
made on behalf of what we “politically correct” types call
marginalized
groups are claims that people who have identities that have not traditionally
been at
the centre of our culture, or been at the top of our
hierarchies, have as much right to exercise
their individual talents and
realize their individual ambitions.
When we say that we want more
women in power, or more voices of people of colour in the canon, or
in
the curriculum, or directing movies — all of these things are not because, at
least on my part,
because I'm interested in some sort of very crude
equity, but because there are a lot of people who
have not traditionally
been able to realize themselves as individuals. That’s what
the women’s movement was; that’s what the civil rights movement was;
that’s what the gay rights movement was; that’s in some ways what the trans rights movement was.
I mean, far from a collectivist
movement, this is a kind of classical liberalism pushed to its
extreme.
These are people saying, “I have the right to define my identity against the
one that was
collectively assigned to me.”
Finally, I would
say that, from a lot of the things that Stephen Fry said, and particularly his
temperament, we’re probably in agreement. But this inquisition, this
censoring. On the one hand I
see where he’s coming from, but I think
it’s a little bit virtual. I mean, who’s really censoring
you?
I understand what it feels like to feel censored. I
understand what it feels like to be on the
wrong side of a Twitter mob,
or get a lot of nasty comments. And that’s a bad feeling. It’s a
counterproductive tactic, but it’s not censorship.
And again,
it’s especially strange, coming from a country where the president of the
United States
is trying to levy additional postal rates on the owner of
the Washington Post, in revenge for its
reporting. And people who have
kneeled to protest police brutality at football games have seen
their
careers explode.
Or women who have challenged Mr. Peterson who have
been hounded by threats and trolls and
misogynist invective.
Thank
you.
Rudyard Griffiths:Jordan, we’re going
to have three minutes up on the screen there.
Please respond to what
you've heard.
Jordan
Peterson: Well, I guess I would like
to set out a challenge in somewhat the same
format as Mr. Fry did, to
people on the moderate left. I’ve studies totalitarianism for a very long
time, both on the left and on the right in various forms. And I think
we’ve done a pretty decent
job of determining when right-wing beliefs
become dangerous. I think that they become dangerous
when they, and the
people who stand on the right, evoke notions of racial superiority, or ethnic
superiority, something like that. It’s fairly easy — and necessary, I
think — to draw a box around
them and place them to one side.
We’ve
done a pretty good job of that.
What I fail to see happening on the left — and this is
with regard to the sensible left, because
such a thing exists — is for
the same thing to happen with regard to the radical leftists.
So
here’s an open question: if it’s not diversity, inclusivity and equity as a
triumvirate that
mark out the too excessive left — and with equity
defined, by the way, not as equality of
opportunity, which is an
absolutely laudable goal, but as equality of outcome, which is how it’s
defined — then exactly how do we demarcate the too extreme left? What do
we do?
We say, well, there’s no such thing as the too extreme left?
Well, that’s certainly something that
characterized much of intellectual
thinking for the twentieth century, as our high-order
intellectuals,
especially in places like France, did everything they could to bend over
backwards,
to ignore absolutely everything that was happening in the
catastrophic left world in the Soviet
Union and in Maoist China not
least. We’ve done a terrible job of determining how to demarcate
what’s
useful from the left, from what’s pathological.
And so, it’s
perfectly okay for someone to criticize my attempts to identify something like
a
boundary. We could say, diversity, inclusivity, and equity —
especially equity, which is in fact
equality of outcome, which is an
absolutely abhorrent notion. If you know anything about history,
you
know that. And I'm perfectly willing to hear some reasonable alternatives.
But
what I hear continually from people on the left, first of all, as my opponents
did, is to
construe every argument that is possibly able to be
construed, on the axis of group identification.
And to fail to help the
rest of us differentiate the reasonable left, which necessarily stands for
the oppressed, from the pathological left, which is capable of
unbelievable destruction.
And what I see happening in the
university campuses in particular, where the left is absolutely
predominant — and that’s certainly not my imagination, that’s well
documented by perfectly
reasonable people like Jonathan Haidt — is an
absolute failure to make precisely that distinction.
And I see the
same thing echoed tonight. Thank you.
Rudyard
Griffiths:Michael, give us your rebuttal.
Michael Dyson: I don’t
know what mythological collective Mr. Peterson refers to. I'm part of
the left. They're cantankerous. When they have a firing squad, it’s
usually in a semi-circle.
Part of the skepticism of rationality was
predicated upon the enlightenment project, which says
we’re no longer
going to be subordinate to superstition; we’re going to think and we’re going
to
think well.
Thomas Jefferson was one of the great arbiters
of rationality, but he was also a man who was a
slave-owner. How do you
reconcile that? That’s the complication I'm speaking about. That’s not
either/or; that’s not a collective identity. Thomas Jefferson believed
in a collective identity —
that is, during the day. At night, he got
some Luther Vandross songs, went out to the slave quarter
and engaged in
sexual relations, and had many children with Sally Hemmings. His loins trumped
his
logic.
And when Mr. Peterson talks about postmodernism, I
don’t know who he’s talking about. I teach
postmodernism; it’s kind of
fun. Jacques Derrida — just to say his name is beautiful. Michel
Foucault — Michel Foucault talked about the insurrection of subjugated
knowledge as people who had
been marginalized now began to speak. The
“subaltern,” as Gayatri Spivak talks about it in
postcolonial theory.
The
reason these people grew up and grew into existence and had a voice, is
because they had been
denied. As Ms. Goldberg said, our group identity
was foisted upon us; we were not seen as
individuals. Babe Ruth, when he
broke the home run record, didn’t bat against all the best
ballplayers;
he batted against the best white ballplayers.
When it’s been rigged
in your favour from the very beginning, it’s hard for you to understand how
much you've been rigged. You’re born on third base, then you hit a
triple. Epic Toronto Blue Jays
game.
And here we are,
deriving our sense of identity from the very culture that we ignore. Look at
the
Indigenous names and the First Nations names — Toronto,
Saskatchewan, Winnipeg, Tim Hortons.
But I’ll tell you, there’s an
envy of the kind of freedom and liberty that people of colour and
other
minorities bring, because we bring the depth of knowledge in our body. There’s
a kind of
jealousy of it. As the greatest living Canadian philosopher, Aubrey
Drake Graham, says, “Jealousy is just love and hate at the same
time.”
And so for me, I think it’s necessary — I agree with Mr.
Fry; we shouldn’t be nasty and combative.
And yet, I don’t see nastiness
and combativeness from people; I see them making a desire to have
their
individual identities respected. When I get shut down for no other reason than
I'm black,
when I get categorized for no other reason than my colour, I
am living in a culture that refuses to
see me as a great individual.
Stephen
Fry:It’s interesting to hear that there really doesn’t seem to be a problem,
but yet, I think we all instinctively know that there is some kind of
problem. There isn't
censorship, of course not, in the way that there is
in Russia. I've been to Russia and I have faced
off with a deeply
homophobic and unpleasant man, and there’s political correctness in Russia.
It’s
just political correctness on the right.
And that’s what
I grew up with, political correctness, which meant that you couldn’t say
certain
things no television — you couldn’t say “fuck,” for example, on
television, because it was
incorrect to do so. And as always, the reason
was that someone would appear and say, “I'm not
shocked. Oh, of course,
no, I'm not shocked, I'm not offended. I'm offended on behalf of others —
young, impressionable plastic minds, the vulnerable.”
And
that’s not good enough. So often people are saying, “See, I don’t mind being
called a faggot or
a kike, or whatever, or a mad person because I've got
mental health issues. I don’t mind people
insulting me.” And people say,
“Well, that’s all right for you, Stephen, because you know, you're
strong.”
I don’t feel particularly strong, and I don’t know
that I like being called a faggot and a kike
particularly, but I don’t
believe that the advances in my culture that have allowed me to be
married — as I have now been for three years to someone of my gender —
are a result of political
correctness.
And maybe political
correctness is actually just some sort of live trout, that the harder we
squeeze it, the further it goes away. And you will be saying, “I'm not
talking about this; I’m
talking about social justice,” with which I
agree, whether you want to call it identity politics,
or the history of
your people, or the history of my people. My people were slaves as well. But the British were
slaves of Romans, and the Jews were slaves of the Egyptians — all human
beings have been slaves at some point, and we all, in that sense, share that knowledge of how important it is to speak up.
But
Russell Means, who was a friend of mine towards the end, who founded the
American Indian
Movement, said, “Oh for God’s sake, call me an Indian,
or a Lakota Sioux, or Russell. I don’t care
what you call me, it’s how
we’re treated that matters.” And so I'm really addressing a more popular
idea.
Also in Barrow, Alaska, an Inupiat said, “Call me an
Eskimo. It’s obviously easier for you, because
you keep mispronouncing
Inupiat.”
You know, words do matter. I’ll just end with a quick
story. Gay rights came about in England
because we slowly and
persistently knocked on the door of people in power. We didn’t shout, we
didn’t scream. People like Ian McKellen eventually got to see the prime
minister.
And when the Queen signed the Royal Assent, as she has
to, for the bill allowing equality of
marriage, she said, “Lord, you
know, I couldn’t imagine this in 1953. Really is extraordinary,
isn't
it? Just wonderful!” and handed it over.
Now, that’s a nice story,
and I hope it’s true. But it’s nothing to do with political correctness;
it’s to do with human decency. It’s that simple.
Rudyard
Griffiths:So, some brave rebuttals there, and strong
opening statements.
Let’s move now into the moderated cross-examination
portion of this debate, and get both sides
engaging on some of the key
issues here. I think what we've heard here is a bit of a tension —
let’s
draw it out a bit more — between, on the one hand, the rights of groups to
feel included and
have the opportunity for individuality, and, on the
other hand, a belief that there’s something
under threat here when these
groups are overly privileged through affirmative action or other
outcome-oriented processes.
So Michael, to start with you.
Why isn't harm done to groups by privileging their group identity,
whether it be a group identity of race or of gender, and not immediately
treating them as
individuals in the way that Jordan and Stephen would
like you to see them first.
Michael
Dyson: Well, a couple of
things: first of all, there was no arbitrary and random
distinction that
people of colour and other minority groups made. When I talked about the
invention
of race, the invention of gender, the invention of group
think, that was not done by those groups
that have been so named, as Ms.
Goldberg said.
So first of all, you've got to acknowledge the
historical evolution of that reality. The concept of
group identity did
not begin with them. It began with a group that didn’t have to announce its
identity. When you are in control, you don’t have to announce who
you are. So that many white brothers and sisters don’t see themselves as
one among many ethnicities or groups. They see themselves as, “I'm just
American, I'm Canadian, can't you be like us? Can't you transcend those narrow
group
identifications?”
And yet those group identifications
have been imprinted upon them by the very people whose group
power has
now been challenged. Let’s make no mistake about it, there’s a challenge.
I agree with Mr. Fry in a kind of Neverland, of how sweet it would be to
have a kingly and queenly metaphor about how it got resolved; that ain’t
the real deal, homie. That ain’t the real world.
In the real world,
there’s stuff at stake. What’s at stake are bodies. What’s at stake are
people’s
lives. What’s at stake is that people are still being lynched,
killed. What’s at stake is that
people, because of their sexuality and
their racial identity, are still being harmed.
So, what I'm
suggesting to you is not that we are against being treated as individuals —
that’s
what we’re crying for. Please don’t see me as a member of a group
that you think is a thug, a
nigger, a nihilist, a pathological person.
See me as an individual who embodies the realities.
But I’ll end by
saying this: what Michelle said is extremely important. The people who have
individual rights did not have to fight for them in the same manner that
people of colour and
others have had to. When Mr. Fry talked about
enslavement, he named them.
Read Orlando Patterson’s comparative
history of race and slavery over twenty eight civilizations.
The Greeks
did not have the same kind of slavery that Americans did. It was chattel
slavery. In
Greece you could buy back your freedom, you could teach the
children of the people who enslaved
you, and because of your display of
prodigious intellect, you could secure your freedom.
That was not the case in America; you were punished and
killed for literacy.
So my point simply is this: it’s that I am all
for the celebration of broader identities, and I
think that often those
who are minorities, and others, are not celebrated to the degree that we
are.
I’ll end by saying this: In America, we have the
confederate flag — I don’t know if you all are
familiar with that — we
have a confederate flag. We have white guys, mostly, in the South but
others as well, flying those confederate flags, that are part of the
South that refuse to cede its
legitimate conquest at the hands of the
North.
There has been a politics of resentment — you talk about
politics of identity. They are wearing
that flag, not the American flag.
They are not American; they are celebrating a secession, they
move away
from America. And a man named Colin Kaepernick, who is a football player,
saying, “I want
to bring beauty to that flag,” has been denied
opportunity.
So we have to really set the terms of debate in order
before we proceed.
Rudyard Griffiths: Thanks, Michael, good point. Jordan, let’s have you jump in on this idea of
what you see is the pernicious danger of group think when it comes to
ethnicity, when it comes to
gender. Why do you think that’s one of the
primal sins, in your view, of political correctness?
Jordan
Peterson:Well, I think it’s one of
the primal sins of identity politics players on
the left and the right,
just to be clear about that. Personally, since this has got personal at
times, I'm no fan of the identitarian right. I think that anybody who
plays a conceptual game where
group identity comes first and foremost
risks an exacerbation of tribalism, it doesn’t matter
whether it’s on
the left or the right.
With regard to the idea of group rights,
this is something we have fallen into terribly in Canada,
not least
because we’ve had to contend with the threat of Quebec separatism. The idea of
group
rights is extraordinarily problematic, because the obverse of the
coin of individual rights is
individual responsibilities. And you can
hold an individual responsible, and an individual can be
responsible,
and so that’s probably why individuals have rights.
But groups —
how do you hold a group responsible? It’s not a good idea to hold a group
responsible.
First of all, it flies in the face of the sort of justice systems that we’ve laid out
in the West, which are essentially predicated first on the assumption of
individual innocence, but also on the possibility of
individual guilt,
not group guilt.
We saw what happened in the twentieth century
many, many times, when the idea of group guilt was
enabled to get a
foothold in the polity and in the justice system. It was absolutely
catastrophic.
And so, okay, fine — group rights. How are you going
to contend with the alternative to that, the
opposite of that? Where’s
the group responsibility? How are you going to hold your groups
responsible? Well, we don’t have to talk about that, because we’re too
concerned with rectifying
historical injustices, hypothetical and
otherwise.
And that’s certainly not to say that there wasn’t any
shortage of absolutely catastrophic
historical injustices — that’s not
the point. The point is how you view the situation at the most
fundamental level, and group rights are an absolute catastrophe in my
opinion.
Rudyard Griffiths: Michelle, come
in on that point. This is something you've written about —
the idea that
in identity politics the identity of the group is absolutely a valid part of
the
discourse, and individuals could and should be seen as participating
in groups as they enter into
the civic space.
Michelle
Goldberg:I'm not sure that we necessarily have to analogize
from individual. The
opposite of individual rights is individual
responsibility, but I'm not sure that that analogy
necessarily holds for
groups.
One of the things that I think is complicated about this
discussion, is that we’re talking about
three very different cultural
contexts, three different histories, three different kind of legal
regimes.
But in the United States, a huge part of our
politics has been groups struggling for rights for
their individual
members: women in the United States seeking the right to reproductive control
of
their body; African Americans in the United States seeking redress
from police brutality or
discrimination or simply the tendency in
America of white people to call the police whenever they
see an
African-American in a place where they don’t think that they're supposed to
be.
I don’t see how you can contend with any of those social
problems if you see society as just an
ocean of atomized individuals.
And again, I don’t think there’s anything pernicious
about people banding together on the basis of
their common identity, to
seek redress for discrimination and exclusion. I think that that is
everything that’s best about our democracy; that is the definition of
progress.
And so again, I keep stumbling on the idea that this is
somehow tyrannical, or “that way lies
Stalinism.” And a lot of those
people who are opposed to political correctness, talk about the
concept
of “category creep,” a concept that was originated by, I believe, an
Australian academic.
It’s basically the failure to draw distinctions, so
that you can't see the difference between, say,
a KKK grand wizard and a
conservative like, say, Ben Shapiro; or that you see everybody to your
right as fascist, sexist, totalitarian, intolerable.
And I
think that is a real thing that happens, in part, because undergraduates often
think in broad
and slightly overwrought categories — I know I did when I
was a kid — maybe still do.
But I hear a lot of category creep in
the argument against political correctness, or against
seeking group
redress. The idea that “that way lies dehumanization,” or —
Rudyard
Griffiths: Let’s have Stephen come in on this — this was part of your opening
remarks.
You're a “category creep,” Stephen. Now respond to that.
Stephen
Fry: I'm still very lost about why we aren’t talking about political
correctness; we’re talking about politics — and that’s fine. And I share
exactly what you think
about it. I'm not an enemy of identity politics
per se. I can obviously see where it goes wrong and
where it’s
annoying.
But let’s be empirical about this: how well is it working
for you in America at the moment? Not
well at all, it really isn't. You
can answer me in a moment.
The reason that Trump, and Brexit in
Britain, and all kinds of nativists all over Europe are
succeeding is
not the triumph of the right, it’s the catastrophic failure of the left. It’s
our
fault.
My point is not that I’ve turned to the right or
anything like that, or that I'm nice and fluffy
and want everybody to be
decent; I'm saying, “Fuck political correctness. Resist. Fight. If you
have a point of view, fight it in the proper manner, using democracy as
it should be, not channels
of education, not language.”You know, it’s so silly — there’s a chess rule: the best
move to play in chess is not the best chess move, it’s the move your
opponent least wants you to play. At the moment you're being recruiting
sergeants for the right, by annoying and upsetting instead of either fighting
or
persuading.
But political correctness is a middle course
that simply doesn’t work. That’s my point.
Michael
Dyson: Well, first of all, you
said, “be empirical.” Now, as far as I know, the
word “empirical” means
that which can be verified or falsified through the senses.
Stephen
Fry:
Exactly.
Michael
Dyson: So if we look at it in
an objective way, the reality is that people don’t
have equal access to
the means to articulate the very moment you're talking about.
Stephen
Fry:
No, no, no, I'm talking about the empirical results of this political
attitude.
Michael
Dyson: I understand that, but
my point is simply this: I'm suggesting to you that
people use the
weapons at hand. Now, it was Abraham Joshua Heschel, the rabbi, who said that
everybody’s not guilty, but everybody’s responsible. Right? There’s a
distinction there.
Everybody clearly is not guilty, but what’s
interesting is to look at the flipside. If you have
benefitted from
three hundred years of holding people in servitude, thinking that you did it
all on
your own — “Why can't these people work harder? Let me see,
for three hundred years, you ain’t had no job.”
So the reality is
that for three hundred years, you hold people in abeyance. You hold them in
subordination; you refuse to give them rights. Then all of a sudden you
free them, and say, you're
now individuals — not having the skills, not
having—
Jordan Peterson: Who’s this you that you're referring to?
Michael
Dyson: I'm talking about
American society first of all; I'm talking about the
northern
hemisphere; I'm talking about every society where enslavement has existed, but
I'm
speaking specifically of the repudiation of individual rights among
people of colour in America,
who were denied the opportunity to be
individuals. I obviously and ideally — and I think Michelle Goldberg
does too
— agree with the emphasis on individuals. What we’re saying to
you is that we have not been
permitted to be individuals; we have not
been permitted to exercise our individual autonomy and
authority. And
the refusal to do so, to recognize me as an individual, means that when you
roll
upon me and I’m a twelve- year-old boy in a park, and you shoot
first in ways you do to black kids
that you don’t do to white kids, you
are not treating that person as an individual.
If we’re living in a
society where women are subject to aberrant forms of horrid, patriarchal
sexist and misogynist behaviour, you are not acknowledging the
centrality of the individuality of
women; you are treating them
according to a group dynamic.
And if we get beyond the ability of
people on the right to understand the degree to which they have
operated
from the basis of benefit from group identity, without having said …
I’ll
end by saying this: that great American philosopher, Beyoncé Knowles, said
that it has been
said that racism is so American, that if you challenge
racism, you look like you're challenging
America. We are challenging
inequality; we are challenging the refusal to see me as an individual.
When we overcome that, have at it; we’re all on an equal playing
field.
Rudyard Griffiths: The pot is
getting stirred here, I like it.
Jordan
Peterson: So I’ve got a couple of
questions. Let’s assume for a moment that I’ve
benefitted from my white
privilege, okay? So let’s assume that.
Michael
Dyson: That’s a good
assumption; that’s a good assumption.
Jordan
Peterson: Yeah, well, that’s what
you would say. So let’s get precise about this,
okay?
Michael
Dyson: Hmm, was that very
individual of you? Jordan Peterson:
Let’s get
precise about this, okay?
Michael
Dyson: Mm-hmm, let’s get
precise.
Jordan Peterson:
To what degree is my present level of attainment or achievement a
consequence of my white privilege? And I don’t mean “sort of.” Do you
mean 5 percent? Do you mean
15 percent? Do you mean25 percent? Do you mean 75 percent? And what do you
propose I do about it?
How about a tax? How about a tax that’s
specialized for me so that I can account for my damn
privilege, so that
I can stop hearing about it?
Now, let’s get precise about one other
thing, okay? We’ll get precise about one other thing.
Michael
Dyson: Precise?
Jordan
Peterson: Yeah, precise, yes.
Michael Dyson: Mm-hmm.
Jordan
Peterson:And so, if we can agree —
and we haven’t — that the left can go too far,
which it clearly can—
Michael
Dyson: Mm-hmm.
Jordan
Peterson: Then how would my worthy
opponents precisely define when the left that they
stand for has gone
too far? You didn’t like equity — equality of outcome — I think that’s a great
marker. But if you have a better suggestion and won't side-step the
question, let’s figure out how
I can dispense with my white privilege so
that you can tell me when the left has gone too far,
since they clearly
can.
And that’s what this debate is about, about political
correctness. It’s about the left going too
far, and I think it’s gone
too far in many ways, and I’d like to figure out exactly how and when,
so the reasonable left could make its ascendance again and we could quit
all this nonsense.
Rudyard Griffiths:Okay,
Michelle, jump in.
Michelle Goldberg:Do you mind if I answer
Stephen? I will answer you, but I just want to answer
Stephen Fry first,
because you, Stephen, talked about how we got Trump, and that it was the
failure
of the left.
I'm a journalist, as you know, and I
went through a ton of temporalities during the campaign in
different
parts of the country. You're right. Everywhere I went, I heard complaints
about political
correctness far more than I heard complaints about, say,
NAFTA.
But when you asked people what they meant by political
correctness — they would complain that they
called a woman theyworked with “girl” and she got mad at them. And that you
couldn’t in public wonder aloud whether the president of the United
States was really a Muslim. They didn’t like that they couldn’t make gay
jokes anymore.
And so, on the one hand you're right, and I’ve
written about this. I think that when people have
these kinds of
prejudices and you try to suppress them, it can create a dangerous
counter-reaction.
But, again, to go back to the title of this
debate, I also think that what they were reacting to —
what they called
political correctness
— was the fact that they had to have this urbane
black president who they felt talked down to them,
which is really what
they meant. I don’t see a way around that, because as I said, that’s
progress.
So to the question of when the left goes too far, to me
it’s pretty easy — violence and censorship.
I'm against violence and I'm
against censorship.
But also — looking around the world right now,
I understand that there is a problem of a kind of
left-wing annoyance.
There’s a lot of ways in which random people on the internet, in particular,
are able to swarm individuals and turn stray remarks into social media
campaigns.
This is often conflated with political correctness, and
it’s a bad phenomenon. I wish there was a
way to put an end to it. But I
don’t think there is a way to put an end to it simply by having
reasonable liberals or reasonable socialists denounce it. It’s just a
kind of awful phenomenon of
modern life. And if you want to have a
debate about whether social media is terrible for democracy,
I will be
on the “yay” side.
But, when you see stuff like actual fascism
ascendant all over the world, the idea that the radical
left poses a
greater threat than the radical right strikes me as something that you can
literally
only believe if you spend your life on college campuses
Rudyard
Griffiths: Mm-hmm. So Mike, I want to come to you on
Jordan’s point. How does he get an equal voice in this debate back, if
it is implied that his participation brings with it this
baggage of
white privilege that doesn’t allow him to see clearly the issues that are
before us.
Michael
Dyson: But that is to be
complicit in the very problem itself, terminologically.
You're beginning
at a point that’s already productive and controversial. You're saying, how can he
get his equality back. Who are you talkingabout? Jordan Peterson,
trending number one on Twitter? Jordan Peterson, international bestseller? I want him to tweet something out about me and my book.
Jordan
Peterson, right, this is what I'm saying to you: why the rage, Bro? You're
doing well, but
you're a mean, mad, white man and you're going to get us
right.
I have never seen so much wine and snow-flaking. There’s
enough wine in here to start a vineyard.
And what I'm saying to you
empirically and precisely, when you ask the question about white
privilege, and ask it in the way you did — dismissive, pseudo-
scientific, non-empirical, and
without justification — is that, first,
the truth is that white privilege doesn’t act according to
quantifiable
segments; it’s about the degree to which we are willing, as a society, to
grapple with
the ideals of freedom, justice, and equality upon which
it’s based.
The second thing that was interesting to me was that
you were talking about not having a collective
identity. What do you
call a nation? Are you Canadian? Are you Canadian by yourself? Are you an
individual? Are you part of a group? When America formed its union, it
did so in opposition to
another group.
So the reality is that
those who are part of group of identities in politics deny the legitimacy
and validity of those groups and the fact that they have been created
thusly, and then have
resentment against others. All I'm asking for is
the opportunity.
The quotation you talk about — the difference
between equality of outcome and equality of
opportunity — that’s a staid
and retried argument, hackneyed phrase, derived from the halcyon days
of
the debate over affirmative action. “Are you looking for outcomes that can be
determined
equally, or are you looking for opportunity?”
If
you free a person after a whole long time of oppression and say, “Now you are
free to survive,”
if they have no skills, if they have no quantifiable
means of existence, what you have done is
liberated them into
oppression. And all I'm suggesting to you — as Lyndon Baines Johnson, one of
our great presidents, said — is that if you start a man in a race a
hundred years behind, it is
awfully difficult to catch up.
So I don’t think Jordan Peterson is suffering from
anything except an exaggerated sense of
entitlement and resentment, and
his own privilege is invisible to him, and it’s manifest with
lethal
intensity and ferocity right here on stage.
Rudyard
Griffiths:Jordan, I'm going to have to let you
respond to that if you will.
Jordan
Peterson: Well, what I derived from
that series of rebuttals, let’s say, is twofold:
the first is that
saying that the radical left goes too far when they engage in violence is not
a
sufficient response by any stretch of the imagination, because there
are sets of ideas in radical
leftist thinking that led to the
catastrophes of the twentieth century, and that was at the level
of
idea, not at the level of violent action.
It’s a very
straightforward thing to say you're against violence; it’s like being against
poverty;
generically speaking, decent people are against poverty and
violence. It doesn’t address the issue
in the least.
And with
regard to my privilege or lack thereof, I'm not making the case that I haven’t
had
advantages in my life, and disadvantages in my life, like most
people. You don’t know anything
about my background or where I came
from, but it doesn’t matter to you, because fundamentally I'm a
“mean
white man.”
That’s a hell of a thing to say in a debate.
Michael
Dyson: Let me just say that
the “mean white man” comment was not predicated upon my
historical
excavation of your past; it’s based upon the evident vitriol with which you
speak, and
the denial of a sense of equanimity among combatants in an
argument.
So, I'm saying again, “you're a mean, mad white man,” and
the viciousness is evident.
Rudyard
Griffiths: Okay, we should change the decks here.
Let’s talk about another big factor
of the so-called politically correct
movement right now, which is the Me Too movement and the
extent to which
we’ve seen this resurgence, this awakening, around what had been a horrible
series
of systemic abuses and injustices towards women.
Some
people, though, Michelle, would say that we’re in a cultural panic now, that
the pendulum has
swung too far and that there is a dangerous
overreaction going on, where people’s rights,
reputations, and due
process have been thrown to the wind. How do you respond to that?
Michelle Goldberg:Well, first, people
started saying that within two weeks of the first Harvey
Weinstein
stories breaking – the minute Harvey Weinstein and other men started actually
losing
their jobs. This was something quite new, that men with histories
of really serious predatory
behaviour were suddenly losing their
jobs.
You know, everybody had known about it for a long time and
there had been a sort of implicit
impunity, and suddenly that was taken
away, and it created this cultural earthquake. And as soon as
it did, it
created a lot of anxiety. “What if this goes too far?”
You know,
the Me Too movement was only a couple of months old when my newspaper started
running
columns from people saying, “Why can't I criticize Me Too?”
which they were doing, in my newspaper?
So on the one hand, yes, of
course. Is due process important? Obviously. I think that when you look
at who has actually lost their jobs, who’s actually lost their
livelihoods, look around. It’s not
people in general on a McCarthyist
rumour; it’s people who took their dicks out at work; it’s
people who
got tens of millions of dollars of settlements, and lost their jobs for four
months, and
now they're staging comebacks.
Bill O’Reilly is
about to get a TV show on a new network. So, the idea that men everywhere feel
like they can't talk anymore, and everybody’s walking on eggshells,
maybe that’s true in your
offices, but it’s not true where I live.
And
the Me Too movement has been particularly active in media. I don’t know how
many of you guys
read about the “Shitty Media Men” list? A woman started
the sort of open-source document, where
women could list men in media
that everybody knew about but nobody had ever done anything about.
And
it very quickly went public.
But there was something disturbing in
it. You don’t like these anonymous accusations floating
around. Most
feminists I know, including myself, were kind of freaked out by it and thought
it was
unfair to have people’s reputations held up like this.
But,
if you look at what happened to the men on the list … nothing. They still have
their jobs. I
know men on that list; I work with men on that list. As
far as I can think, the people in media who
have actually lost their
jobs and lost their careers, have done so for extremely serious misbehaviour, documented by multiple
women who had corroborating witnesses.
And so, I understand this
anxiety that relations between men and women are changing. Of course that
causes a lot of cultural anxiety. But I don’t know that it’s rooted in
anything real.
Rudyard Griffiths: I'm going
to bring Stephen in here and get his view on this. Are we in a
cultural
panic? Is the response commensurate with the moment?
Stephen
Fry: I'm very confused by this. Of course I recognized the bestiality of
Weinstein and the monstrosity of his behaviour, and it was shocking to
me. I actually worked for
him — script-doctoring, as it’s called — and I
never had the bathroom towel, but for pretty obvious
reasons.
But it’s grotesque, and I can't imagine how vile it
must be for such a powerful man. And he was. We
used to play a game at
the Cannes Film Festival in his years of power. We would walk from one hotel
at the end all the way up to the Palais des Festivals. You would get ten
points every time you
heard the word “Harvey.”
Usually, in a
ten-minute walk, you’d have three hundred points, because it was, “Yeah,
Harvey’s got
the script … Harvey’s got it
… Yeah, I’ve got a
meeting with Harvey at the Majestic in the afternoon.” He was immensely
powerful, and I think it’s obvious that someone in that position abusing
and threatening and
hindering the livelihood of women is grotesque in
the extreme.
But I have to tell you, there is genuine feeling
amongst many people I know, that “Shhh,” we can't
speak our minds, that
we can't actually speak to the true nuance, the true depth of sexual romantic
feeling between men and women. It’s not a subject I'm absolutely expert
on, but it counts between
men and men as well, though I know that when
it’s men and men, you might say, “Well, that’s
different, because women
have had a different experience in history,” and I don’t want to enter
that particular field.
But I would say that there is real
fear. In my business, where this all started — show business,
acting,
and so on — people are rather afraid to speak about a piece of publicity
that’s come out,
or a statement that’s been made. You just go, “Yeah,
absolutely,” and wait for the people to leave
the room before you can
speak honestly with your friends.
And I’ve never experienced that in my entire sixty years
on this planet, this feeling that — and
I'm not characterizing feminists
as East German — but it’s like the Stasi listening: you’d better
be
careful; they're listening.
And that’s a genuine feeling. I'm
saying that with my hand on my heart. I'm not saying it to make a
point
other than the fact that it’s true and it’s worrying. But the sexual
misadventure and horror
experience is worrying too; so there are two
worries, and they're not solved.
Rudyard
Griffiths:Let’s bring out Jordan on this, because
you've written and commented about a
lot. But Stephen, thank you for
that.
Jordan Peterson: Well, I think I’m going to point out two things again. The first is that my
question about when the left goes too far still hasn’t been answered.
And then the second thing I'm
going to point out is that, it’s
conceivable that I am a mean man — maybe I'm meaner than some
people,
and not as mean as others (although, I think that’s probably more the case).
But I would
say that the fact that race got dragged into that particular
comment is a better exemplar of what
the hell I think is wrong with the
politically correct left than anything else that could have
possibly
happened.
Michael
Dyson: Imagine the hurt, the
anxiety, the insult that you might genuinely feel,
according to what I
felt was an appropriate comment of description at the moment of its
expression.
But imagine now, those hurt feelings and—
Jordan
Peterson:I'm not hurt.
Michael
Dyson:Okay, you feel great!
You feel great about it!
Jordan
Peterson: That’s really different.
I'm not a victim. I'm not hurt. I'm appalled.
Michael
Dyson: You're not hurt, okay.
You wouldn’t be a victim. So what’s interesting is
that whatever
non-traditional feelings of empathy you endure at this particular point,
imagine,
then, the horrors that so many other “others” have had to put
up with for so long, when they are
refused an acknowledgement of their
humanity.
Now, I take your point, seriously. What I'm saying to you
is that, when you said you were upset
that I added the element of race
when I said, “mean, mad white man,” what’s interesting is that you
may
have felt that you were being ascribed a group identity to which you do not
subscribe. You may
have felt that you were being unfairly judged according to your particular race. You
may have felt that your individual identity
was being besmirched by my
rather careless characterization of you.
All of that qualifies as a
legitimate response to me. But it also speaks to the point we’ve been
trying to make about the refusal to see our individual existence, as
women, as people of colour, as
First Nations people and the like.
My
point simply has been: the reason I talked about race in that particular
characterization is
because there’s a particular way in which I have
come to a city — I don’t know if there are a lot
of black people out
here … I'm not sure. But I constantly come to places and spaces that are not
my
natural habitat — other than for intellectual engagement and the love
and the fury of rhetorical
engagement, yes.
But I often go
into hostile spaces, where people will not vote in favour of my particular
viewpoint, because I'm interested, as an individual, in breaking down
barriers so that people can
understand just how complicated it is.
So,
what I'm saying to you is that I would invite you, in terms of the surrender
of your privilege
— to give you a specific response
— to come with
me to a black Baptist church. Come with me to a historically black college;
come
with me to an indigenous or First Nations community, where we’re
able to engage in some of the
lovely conversation, but also to listen
and hear.
And when I added race to that, I was talking about
people’s historical inability to acknowledge
others’ pains equally to
the ones that they are presently enduring.
So, as a human being, I
love you, I promise, but I stand by my comment.
Jordan
Peterson: Well, I’ve seen the sorts
of things that you're talking about. I happen to
be an honorary member
of an indigenous family, so don’t tell me about what I should go see with
regard to oppression. You actually don’t know anything about me.
Michael
Dyson: You asked me a
question, I gave you a response.
Jordan
Peterson: Yeah. You gave me a
generic response, a generic race-based response.
Michael
Dyson: It’s tailored towards
you. Jordan Peterson, I would like for you to come
with me, Michael Eric
Dyson, to a black Baptist church. You've been to one of those?
Jordan
Peterson: I would be happy to do
that, but —
Michael
Dyson: Okay, all right, I'm
going to hook you up, I'm going to hook you up.
Rudyard
Griffiths: Okay, good, and make sure that happens.
One
more quick round, then we’re going to go to closing statements.
Stephen
Fry, I want to get your response as to whether, a generation from now, looking
back on this
debate, we’re going to see this so-called politically
correct movement in the same way, let’s say,
that we now understand the
positive contributions of the civil rights movement.
That was a
movement that advanced a series of ideas about human dignity to people who
previously
didn’t have that dignity. We’re now having another debate,
another social debate, about different
groups and communities — that
we’re trying to convey a sense of new dignity to them. Why won't this
be
looked back upon as something positive, a generation from now?
Stephen
Fry:
I think people will look back on this debate and wonder why political
correctness wasn’t discussed.
I said it was slippery. It’s
interesting to hear talk about race and about gender and about
equality,
and it’s something that I’ve thought about a lot and I can learn a great deal
about, but
that’s not why I came to this debate.
I was
interested in what I’ve always been interested in: the suppression of language
and thought,
the closing down, the rationalist idea that seems
beguiling, that if you limit people’s language,
you may somehow teach
them a different way of thinking, something that delighted the inventors of
George Orwell’s Newspeak, for example.
And it seems to me
that it’s just implausible, that it doesn’t work. And that’s what I mean by
empirical. It doesn’t stand an empirical test; it isn't experientially
validated, as we see from
the political landscape now and I worry that
we may in the future.
So, I'm sort of disappointed that the subject has just
revolved around academia, which was
predictable, because that’s the sort
of crucible in which these elements are mixed. But even more
disappointed that really, I haven’t heard from Michelle or from
Professor Dyson, as to what they
think political correctness is. Because
what they’ve talked about is basically saying, “Progress, in our view, is
progress.” Well, I agree. Yeah. So it is, too. And good on progress!
But
how is it that what we call political correctness, you call progress? That's
what you're
supposed to be arguing. I want to know what you mean by
political correctness.
Michelle Goldberg: Well, again,
a few months ago, when you, Rudyard, contacted me and asked if I
wanted
to do a debate about identity politics and presented me with this resolution,
I said there
are a lot of things that people call political correctness
that I'm not going to defend.
But then I realized who I was
debating, and saw that there were a lot of things that you, Jordan
Peterson, call political correctness that I call progress. And to some
extent, you too, Stephen
Fry. You know, when you talk about it being
outrageous — or not “outrageous”; I won't put words
into your mouth —
but that we shouldn’t be tearing down statues of notorious racists; that we
should just instead be throwing eggs at them. Those sorts of things, if
you call them political
correctness, I call them progress.
Now,
as for this feeling of being silenced, which I understand, although it seems
very vague: you
are not quite putting your finger on who is silencing
you, except for a vague fear that if you say
something untoward, you're
going to be the subject of –
Stephen
Fry:
Shaming, yes.
Michelle Goldberg: Shaming is a right
too, but by what? By the internet?
Stephen
Fry:
I'm not going to tell you the names. That’s the whole point, I'm scared.
I wouldn’t. That’s the point. It’s a culture of fear.
Michelle
Goldberg:You're right, I understand there’s that element of
fear. What I'm saying is
that it’s a feeling that is the intangible
result of—
Stephen
Fry: Okay, but we’ve all seen the sort of show trial thing, where the person
then apologizes — “I have so much to learn about sexual politics, I am
really sorry.” Signed … the
lawyer. Crossed out … the name of the
person.
The real mistake of our Left is that we underestimate
the Right. The Right isn’t as stupid as we’d
like them to be. If only
they were. If only they weren't so cunning, so sly, so smart, so aware of
our shortcomings.
And I just fear that political correctness
is a weapon that they value; that the more we tell the
world how people
should be treated
— how language should be treated, what words are
acceptable, what attitudes are acceptable, what HR
meeting is going to
tell you in a long bullet-pointed list about how you look at people — all of
this is meat and drink to bad people, to malefactors, to bad actors.
I'm
not including myself as one of those “bad actors” in that sense; I mean “bad
actors” in the
other sense!
Michelle
Goldberg: There are a lot of ways in which I agree with you,
although, to turn it back
on you, I’d like to hear you say what are the
words that have fallen into disrepute that you think
we should be
resurrecting. To me, this is the area of hotly contested social change right
now,
where a lot of people feel’—
Stephen
Fry: I have to say this about words that have gone into disuse: it’s very
often phrases, jargonistic slogans, “heteronormative,” “cisgendered,”
those kind of things. They're
just an insult.
Imagine you're
a young student arriving at university and someone’s bombarding you with this
preposterous hermeneutical nonsense from misread textbooks and misread
Foucault, if I may say — a
misread Derrida, and so on. Because, you
know, I was at Cambridge, England, doing literature. We
had our French
phase, and there’s value in that. It’s an interesting game.
I think
I’ll just say that the ghost hovering over for me is a letter Oscar Wilde
wrote, and he
said to Bosie, his lover, “The fact that you didn’t get
the degree is nothing, but you never
acquired what is sometimes called
the Oxford manner.” And I’ll say to that, the university manner.
Oscar
said, “I take that to mean the ability to play gracefully with ideas.” I think
that’s
disappearing from our culture, and I think it’s a terrible
thing.
Michael
Dyson: It’s hard to be the
self-deprecating Englishman, isn’t it? Stephen Fry:
You’ve no idea.
Michael
Dyson: But no, I got a pretty
good idea here today. All of us have studied history,
but what’s
interesting is that I don’t recall these debates about political correctness
happening
when people who were in power were in absolute power,
unquestioned power.
Stephen
Fry:
Yeah, yeah, there were definitely—
Michael
Dyson: Political correctness
becomes an issue when people who used to have power,
or who still have
power but think they don’t, get challenged on just a little bit of what they
have
and don’t want to share toys in the sandlot of life. So, all of a
sudden it becomes a kind of
exaggerated grievance.
Now, the
things you named — the bullet-points and the cisgender and the
heteronormativity and the
heteropatriarchy and the capitalist resurgence
and the insurrection of subjugated knowledges, to
give Foucault some
more love, or the Derridean deconstruction — all that stuff; the French phase
is
still going on with the French fries in America.
What’s
interesting is that I didn’t hear many complaints of political correctness at
the height of
the dominance of one group or another, but when Martin
Luther King Jr., who argued for group
identity, as a black person, to
provide an opportunity for individual black people to come to the
fore,
they began to make that claim.
Now, they didn’t call it political
correctness. “You're siding with those who are against free
speech;
you're siding with those who don’t want me as a white person to be recognized
in my
humanity.” And what I mean by political correctness is the kind of
politics of ressentiment that
are articulated by various holders of
power at certain levels, at various levels.
One of the beautiful
things about Foucault that I take, as opposed to Max Weber, is that Foucault
said power breaks out everywhere. I would think a person who is critical
of political correctness
like you would appreciate this. As opposed to
Max Weber, who said that power is over there in a
hierarchical
structure, where subordination is the demand, Foucault said, “No, power breaks
out
even among people who are disempowered.” So you can hurt
somebody in your
own community.
What’s more politically incorrect than a black
Baptist preacher identifying with a first-century
Palestinian Jew and
still loving atheists? What’s more politically incorrect than a black
intellectual going on Bill Maher and defending his ability to
continue to have his show, despite using the N-word.
I, sir,
believe in a politically incorrect version. When I go as a black Baptist
preacher to
chastise my fellow believers about their homophobia, that
goes over like a brick cloud. When I come
into arenas like this, I
understand that my back is up against the wall, but—
Stephen
Fry:
Then come and sit over here!
Michael
Dyson: So, what’s interesting
is that when we look at what is seen as political
correctness in our
societies — in a free Canadian society, in a free American society — when I
look, to me it has been a massive jumble that has been carved together
out of the politics of
resentment that powers once held are no longer
held; freedoms once exercised absolutely must now be
shared.
So I am in agreement with both of the gentlemen to my
right, who believe that political correctness
has been a scourge, but
not necessarily the way you think so. I think it's been a scourge because
those who have been the deployers of power and the beneficiaries of
privilege have failed to
recognize their particular way.
And
at the end of the day, I think that those of us who are free citizens of this
country, and of
America, should figure out ways to respect the humanity
of the other, to respect the individual
existence of the other, and also
respect the fact that barriers have been placed upon particular
groups
that have prevented them from flourishing.
That’s all I mean by
political correctness.
Rudyard Griffiths:
Okay. Before we go to closing statements, I’m going to give the final words
on this topic to Michelle and then you, Jordan.
Michelle
Goldberg: So I think part of the frustration here is that
both of you have radically
different ideas of what we’re talking about
when we talk about political correctness. It seems to
me that when
you're talking about political correctness, you mean the kind of feeling of
anxiety
that a lot of people feel, because we all live now in this
terrible crowd-source panopticon that
makes you worry that any straight
phrase you utter might be used to defame you, right?
And I think that a lot of people feel that anxiety. I
disagree that that is something that is being
solely perpetrated against
institutions — kind of Oscar Wildean figures, by a censoring left-wing
core, because it’s coming from all directions. This phenomenon, which
sucks, is all over the place.
I mean, I get it when I write something
critical of the way that the IDF behaved in Gaza.
It’s coming at
everyone, and I think that there is a way in which, when it comes at a certain
sort
of figure and there’s a certain set of complaints, and you feel
unjustly criticized, and you feel
silenced
— which again, I think
is really different from being silenced — you call it political
correctness.
And I would also like the culture to be more
free-wheeling. You're not going to get the left to put
an end to this,
because it is much more of a mob social-media phenomenon than it is some
diktat
coming up from on high.
And so, really, the only way
to break through it is to say what you are — what you say that you're
afraid to say, right? I mean, that’s the only way to sort of pop this
bubble, or end this anxiety,
or at least diffuse it a little bit.
What
I hear Mr. Peterson talking about as political correctness is something much
broader, and much
more fundamental to social change. And you want me to
define — or one of us to talk about when the
left goes too far. And I
certainly don’t want to be a woman putting words in your mouth, but if I
hear you correctly, what you're saying is that you want me to renounce
Marxist categories, or to —
Jordan
Peterson: It’s up to you. I just
want you to do it. I want you to define when the
left goes too far. You
can do it any way you want.
Michelle Goldberg: I
think that the left goes too far when it is violent or censoring, when it
tries to shut people down, or “no-platform” them, or when it acts
violently. I'm not sure what you
expect beyond that.
Jordan
Peterson: Something deeper. Michelle
Goldberg: Something deeper? How?
Jordan
Peterson: Well, I’d like you to
contend with the set of left-wing ideas that produced
all the left-wing
pathologies of the twentieth century, and to define how you think standard
left-wing thinking, which has a valuable place, goes too far, since it
obviously does.
Michael
Dyson: Has the right gone too
far?
Jordan Peterson: Of
course the right has gone too far. Michael
Dyson: How? Tell us how?
Jordan Peterson:
Well, how about Auschwitz?
Michael
Dyson: I mean … what else?
More recently, what has gone wrong with the right?
Jordan
Peterson: Look, I don’t like
identity politics players at all. I don’t care whether
they're on the
left or the right. I’ve been lecturing about right-wing extremism for thirty
years.
I'm no fan of the right, despite the fact that the left would
like to paint me that way, because
it’s more convenient for them.
Michael
Dyson: How have they gone too
far recently?
Jordan
Peterson: Well, where? It’s
threatening to go too far in identitarian Europe, that’s
for sure. It’s
gone too far in Charlottesville; it went too far in Norway. How long a list do
you
want? And why am I required to produce that? To show you that I
don’t like the identitarian right?
Michael
Dyson: You asked me, so I just
thought I’d ask you.
Jordan
Peterson: I was actually asking you
a question. So your assumption is somehow that I
must be on the side of
the right. Look, the right hasn’t occupied the humanities and the social
sciences. It’s as simple as that for me. If they had, I’d be objecting
to them.
Michael
Dyson: Say that again, I
didn’t hear.
Jordan
Peterson: The right has not occupied
the social sciences and the humanities, and the
left clearly has — the
statistical evidence for that is overwhelming.
Michael
Dyson: So what about IQ
testing in terms of genetic inheritance?
Jordan
Peterson: Sorry, we’re here to talk
about political correctness, and we’ve done a
damn poor job of it.
Michael
Dyson: Oh, I see. I gave you
an example and you can't answer. Okay, all right.
Rudyard Griffiths: Okay. Let’s all redeem ourselves with
our closing statements. I'm going to put
three minutes on the clock, and
we’re going to go in the reverse order of the opening. So Stephen,
you're up first.
Stephen
Fry: Oh, lordy, lordy. Here we
are. Well, I’ll hide behind the lectern in that
case.
Well,
I’ve been fascinated by this conversation. There’s been an enormous clash of
cultures in the
conversation. We’ve had classic, if I can call it that,
huckstering, snake-oil pulpit talk. It’s a
mode of discourse, a
rhetorical style that I find endlessly refreshing and vivifying, but I'm not
sure that we actually focused on the point in question. And my objection
has always been towards
orthodoxies
— I'm a heterodox and a
contrarian, and I can't help myself.
And I think there’s been an
underestimation of the fact that language does affect people. It does
make the young, in particular, very anxious, as they're starting out on
their educational, or their
work careers. It makes them very angry, very
upset, very alienated to feel that they don’t know any
more how to
operate in the world, how to engage in relationships, how to think
honestly.
So they accrete more and more to their own mini-groups.
And I think that’s dangerous and unhappy
for society. I think it’s
reflected in a paucity of cinema and literature and art, and the culture
generally is that there’s a fear that’s pervading it. And while people
can talk to academics and
they’ll say, “You should come and see our
lessons; our lectures are open and free, and ideas are
exchanged,” I'm
sure that’s true.
I'm sure it’s true, but I don’t think we should
underestimate how much this feeling is prevalent in
the culture of …
It’s a strange paradox, that the liberals are illiberal in their demand for
liberality. They are exclusive in their demand for inclusivity. They are
homogenous in their demand
for heterogeneity. They are somehow
un-diverse in their call for diversity — you can be diverse,
but not
diverse in your opinions and in your language and in your behaviour. And
that’s a terrible
pity.
So, I would say that I'm sorry that
it got a bit heated in places, because I was hoping it
wouldn’t. I was
hoping it would be a shining example of how people of all different kinds of
political outlooks can speak with humour and wit and a lightness of
touch. As G. K. Chesterton
said, “Angels can fly because they take
themselves lightly.”
And I think it’s very important for us, who are
privileged — all four of us, privileged to be here,
to be asked to be
here — to take ourselves a little bit more lightly, not to be too earnest, too
pompous, too serious. And not to be too certain.
It’s a time,
I think, for really engaging in emotionally fulfilling, passionate and
positive doubt.
That’s what I would urge. Thank you.
Rudyard
Griffiths: Michael, I'm going to put three minutes on
the clock for you.
Please, your closing.
Michael
Dyson: Thank you so much for
that compliment, Brother Fry. I'm used to not
exclusively white men, who
see black intelligence articulated at a certain level, feeling a kind of
condescension. But a kind of verbal facility is automatically assumed to
be a kind of hucksterism
and snake-oil salesmanship. I’ve seen that. I
get it. I get hate letters every day from white
brothers and sisters who
are mad I'm teaching their children. “You are just trying to co-opt our
children; you are trying to corrupt them.” Yes, I'm trying to corrupt
them so that they will be
uncorrupted by the corruptibility that they’ve
inherited from a society that refuses to see all
people as human
beings.
The death threats I have received constantly for simply
trying to speak my mind. it’s not about a
politically correct society
that is open-minded and that has some consternation about my ability to
speak, I'm getting real, live — you want empirical — death threats that
talk about killing me,
setting up to hurt me and harm me, simply because
I choose to speak my mind.
I agree with my confrères and my
compatriots that we should argue against the vicious limitations
and
incursions against speech. I believe that everybody has the right to be able
to articulate
themselves. And the enormous privilege we have to come to
a spot in a space like this means that we
have that privilege and we
should be responsible for it.
No matter where we go from here, me
and Brother Peterson will go to a black Baptist church. I'm
going to
hold him to that; he said it on national TV. We’re going to go to a black
Baptist church
and have an enlightening conversation about the need for
us to engage not only in reciprocal and
mutual edification, but in
criticism — even hard and tough criticism. But in a way that speaks to
the needs and interests of those who don’t usually get on TV, whose voices are not usually amplified, whose ideas are not
usually taken seriously.
And when they get to the upper echelons of
the ability of a society to express themselves, they are
equally subject
to vicious recrimination and hurtful resistance.
There’s an old
story about the pig and the chicken going down the street and saying, “Let’s
have
breakfast.” The chicken just has to give up an egg, the pig has to
give up his ass in order to make
breakfast. We have often been the pigs,
giving up our asses to make breakfast. Let’s start sharing
them asses
with everybody else. Thank you.
Jordan
Peterson: So, I'm not here to claim
that there’s no such thing as oppression,
unfairness, brutality,
discrimination, unfair use of power — all of those. Anyone with any sense
knows that hierarchical structures tilt towards tyranny, and that we
have to be constantly wakeful
to ensure that all they are isn’t just
power and tyranny.
It’s interesting to hear Foucault referred to;
it’s unfortunate, but it’s interesting, because
Foucault, like his
French intellectual confrères, essentially believes that the only basis upon
which hierarchies were established is power. And that’s part of this
pernicious politically correct
doctrine that I’ve been speaking about —
that when a hierarchy becomes corrupt, then the only way
to ascend it is
to exercise power — that’s essentially the definition of a tyranny.
But
that doesn’t mean the imperfect hierarchies that we have constructed in our
relatively free
countries, which at least tilt somewhat towards
competence and ability, as evidenced by the
staggering achievements of
civilization that we’ve managed to produce. It doesn’t mean that the
appropriate way of diagnosing them is to assume, without reservation,
unidimensionally, that
they're all about power, and as a consequence,
that everyone who occupies any position within them
is a tyrant or a
tyrant in the making. And that is certainly the fundamental claim of someone
like
Foucault. And it’s part and parcel of this ideological catastrophe
that is political correctness.
I'm not here to argue against
progress. I'm not here to argue against equality of opportunity.
Anyone
with any sense understands that, even if you're selfish, you're best served by
allowing
yourself access to the multiplicitous talents of everyone; and
to discriminate against them for arbitrary reasons unrelated to their
competences is abhorrent.
That has nothing to do with the issue at
hand. It isn’t that good things haven't happened in the
past and
shouldn’t continue to happen — that’s not the point. The point is the point my
compatriot
Fry had made, which is: well, we can agree on the catastrophe
and we can agree on the historic
inequity, but there’s no way I'm going
to agree that political correctness is the way to address
any of that.
And there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, some of which I would say was
displayed quite clearly tonight.
Michelle
Goldberg: I think that one of the irresolvable issues that
we’re all coming up against
is the role of feelings, right? Stephen Fry
has asked us to recognize and empathize with his
feeling of being
silenced, of being threatened, and I do, and I get it.
I feel it
sometimes too in my columns. I hate it when I write something that then gets
an irate
Twitter mob after me. But if, say, I stood up here and said:
recognize how threatened so many women
feel when one of the best-selling
and most prominent intellectuals in the world right now, says in
an
interview that maybe the Me Too movement has shown that this whole experiment
of men and women working together is just not working?
Or,
you know, that maybe, if women don’t want the workplace to be sexualized, they
shouldn’t be
allowed to wear makeup?
Jordan Peterson: I
didn’t say that. Michelle Goldberg: Well, Google it. Jordan
Peterson: I
didn’t say
that.
Michelle Goldberg: So, if I say I feel
threatened, then I'm being “politically correct and
hysterical.” So much
of the debate about political correctness, so much of the condemnation of
political correctness, is about people saying, “respect my feelings, or
accommodate my feelings.”
And to some extent we can accommodate
everyone’s feelings.
But there’s one group that really does think
its feelings should be accommodated, and that is what
we keep coming up
against. There is a group of people — and to some extent I'm part of it — that
feels uniquely that our feelings of being silenced, marginalized,
censored need to take primacy;
that we can sneer when these other groups
ask us to take seriously their feelings of being
threatened, or their feelings of being marginalized. Then we call those
demands “political correctness.”
And I would finally say that I
think there’s a fair amount of research that people become more
close-minded, more tribal, when they feel threatened, when they feel
that their group identity is
at stake. And so, as much as you want to
blame the left for the rise of the right, I think that the
rise of the
right – the rise of people who are questioning the fundamental ideal of
pluralistic
liberal democracy – the more those views are mainstreamed,
the more people are going to shut down
in response, because people are
really scared.
Rudyard Griffiths: Thank
you. Well, first of all, I think on behalf of all the debaters, I
think
we want to thank the audience. You were engaged, you were mostly civil and,
not so civil in
ways that I think we enjoyed. So on behalf of the
debaters, everybody, thank you, audience. This
was a challenging topic
and you did a great job.
Also a big thank you to our debaters. You
know, it’s one thing to give regular speeches, as you all
do, but it’s a
very different thing to come on a stage in front of a live audience and a
large
television audience, and have your ideas contested in real time.
So again, to all four of you,
thank you for accepting our invitation to
come here tonight.
So a few final notes: first, thank you to the
Aurea Foundation and the Munk family for once again
convening us here at
Roy Thompson Hall. We’re going to do it all again this coming autumn.
All
of you here in the hall have a ballot — you can vote on your way out. We’ll
probably have those
results for you soon after 9:15.
And
let’s just quickly review where your opinion stood at the beginning of
tonight’s contest. On
the motion, “Be it resolved: what you call
political correctness, I call progress,” 36 percent
agreed, 64 percent
disagreed. And again, we saw a large percentage of you willing to change your
mind — 87 percent.
So let’s see how tonight’s cut and thrust
affected your voting here. You’ve got your ballots, and
again, to those
of you who are watching online, we are going to have all these results for you
on
our social media feeds around 9:15.
So enjoy the long
weekend. Happy Victoria Day everyone. Thanks for coming out to the Munk
Debates.
Rudyard
Griffiths: We’re going to go right now to Stephen Fry
and Jordan Peterson, to get their
thoughts on how the evening played
out. Some hotly contested moments here, so we’ll be curious to
see what
happens with the audience vote over the course of the next few minutes.
And
also, for those of you watching online, we have had a running poll. That poll,
again, was
www.munkdebates.com/vote, so go there, check it out, see how
each of these debaters did in terms of
their opening statements, their
rebuttals, the moderated section, and the closing statements. Did
we see
any changes there?
Gentlemen, thank you. We’re just going to do a
quick discussion with the online audience watching
right now, just to
get your reactions to the debate. And maybe we’ll just start with you,
Jordan.
There were some heated moments here. Did that surprise you,
the exchanges that you had with Michael
Eric Dyson?
Jordan
Peterson: Well, I wouldn’t say it
surprised me … well, I suppose it probably did. It
just didn’t seem like
a very good tactical move, you know, and I stand by what I said. I don’t see
any reason at all that my racial identity needed to be dragged into the
discussion, independent of
my personality proclivity.
I would
say what I just said to Mr. Fry here, is that it was a pleasure sharing the
stage with him.
I’ve rarely heard anyone ever deliver their convictions
with such a remarkable sense of passion and
wit and forbearance and
erudition — it was really something.
Rudyard
Griffiths: And Stephen, a challenging debate, because
in a sense we were trying to mesh
two different views here, two
different world views, one very focused more on identity politics,
group
identity. You, in a sense, having an argument really more about the larger
culture itself and
the tenor and tone of the conversation.
Stephen
Fry:
Yes, I worried that I was being a little scattergun really, but
scattergun and too specific — that I had just taken very literally the
popular idea of political
correctness as being a kind of control of
language and a shutting down of certain phrases, or an
introduction of
others. And the kind of day-to-day human resource departments of corporations and that sort of thing. So I was
slightly disappointed that it just became a debate
about race and about
gender and so on. But that was natural, I guess. And the fact is that I'm
still a leftie, but a soft one.
Rudyard
Griffiths: You're not too soft!
Stephen
Fry:
I'm flabby and squashy in every sense. And I realize that that’s not a
political point of view; it is a personal one.
Rudyard
Griffiths: Right.
Stephen
Fry:
And the gap between the personal and the political, which is a space
you're obviously very interested in as a psychologist, is one that is
rarely explored. People are
either so personal that it has no
application in the outside world and the organization of human
affairs.
Or, they're so political and so much to do with structure and distinction
between
hierarchies and networks and so on, that they forget the
individual.
And that’s the space in which the impassioned liberal
lives, and it’s not easy to do, because you
often do sound rather wet.
And I'm aware that I did. But I enjoyed it.
Rudyard
Griffiths: No, no, no. Yeah, thank you for coming. Just finally, before
I free you both to
a well-earned drink, is there anything you felt was
left unsaid, Jordan? Any point that you wanted
to make that you didn’t
feel you had the time or the opportunity for?
Jordan
Peterson: No, I don’t think so. I
said my piece. Rudyard Griffiths: Same question
to you, Stephen?
Stephen
Fry:
No, I think I got across — I mean, there’s so much you can talk about in
that field, and I just wanted to leave the point that I do want — like
everybody, it's a no-brainer
— we want the world to be fairer, juster,
sweeter, kinder.
But it’s a question of how you get there, and I
felt that wasn’t really addressed.
Rudyard
Griffiths: Okay. Well, gentlemen, thank you both very
much. From our online audience, a
big thank you also, I know, to Jordan
Petersen and Stephen Fry for participating in a debate with
some stakes
on the table, for sure.
Thank you gentlemen, I’ll see you in the
reception room.
Several:
Thank you, yes.
Rudyard Griffiths: Again,
online viewers, we now have Michael Eric Dyson coming into the camera
range here, with Michelle Goldberg, to get their reactions to the
debate.
So Michael and Michelle, thank you for being part of
this.
Michelle Goldberg: Thank you.
Rudyard
Griffiths: You know, it’s a complicated subject, it’s
got a lot of different moving
pieces and elements. I think we addressed
some of the constituent parts. Maybe we can start with
you, Michelle.
Was there something that you wanted to say on stage that maybe we didn’t have
the
time or the opportunity for? Now is your chance.
Michelle
Goldberg: Well, the only thing I can think of is that I wish
we could have drilled down
a little bit more into the gender piece of
this. And again, particularly with Mr. Peterson, what we
were really
arguing about, and the kind of range of feminist progress that he considers
political
correctness.
I think part of the frustration is
that he and Stephen Fry are talking about and defending a fairly
discrete set of ideas with some overlap. And one of the difficult things
about political
correctness is that it’s a slippery term that’s deployed
to talk about a whole range of phenomena.
Rudyard
Griffiths: Yes, and close-down conversation and
open-up conversation.
How did you feel, Michael? There were some
points there, some points of sharp exchange. We
appreciate that at the
Munk Debates; this is not a place for shrinking wallflowers. But do you have
any unsaid thoughts, anything that you want to put a point on now?
Michael
Dyson: Well, I think you have
to hold people intellectually accountable, and for
Mr. Peterson to deny
to Michelle some of the things that he said, and to present himself in a
certain way, without saying some of the abhorrent things he has said
about women and other
minorities, I think demands an engaged response to
him.
And, I think, the frustration, as Michelle and I said — and
Mr. Fry talked about — that we talked
about everything but political
correctness. Well, the reality is that political correctness rests
upon
some serious political work in this culture in Canada and in America that
needs to be done.
And what I tried to express was that we didn’t have
political correctness as long as white straight
men were in charge.
There was no argument about “Let’s get this right.” But when people who no
longer exercise absolute power still have predominant power, then
there’s an argument.
And to Michelle’s point — about gender, the
workplace, race, sexuality and the like — I just think
that it was an
unnecessarily vigorous, and sometimes sharply worded debate between us all.
Rudyard
Griffiths: Michelle, final word to you?
Michelle
Goldberg: Well, if you are curious about the quote that I
mentioned about how this
experiment with women and men working together
is maybe not working, I mean, please do Google it.
Rudyard
Griffiths: Did you put him on your account?
Michelle
Goldberg: I don’t know. But I guess Stephen Fry and I could
probably have sat on the
same side of another debate. But again, I feel
like the phrase “political correctness” has expanded
to cover a whole
range of challenges. I found it was really interesting how much people were
talking about their feelings, because when women talk about their
feelings, that is “politically
correct excess.” And when men talk about
this feeling that they can't empirically define, we should
all change in
deference to that.
Rudyard Griffiths: Okay,
guys, great thoughts. Let’s go get a drink in the reception.
Michelle Goldberg: Thank you.
Michael
Dyson: Let’s do that, yeah.
Rudyard
Griffiths: Online viewers, thank you for being part of
this Munk Debate. As I
mentioned, these debates are semi-annual, we’ll
have another one this fall. We’ve got a whole
archive of past debates on
our website, on a whole range of topics, going back over a decade now.
And
you can access those debates free simply by becoming a member at
www.munkdebates.com. Go to thenbasic membership; it’s free. And we have
a rock-solid privacy policy there; we respect your
privacy.
So finally, check us out on Facebook. Thank you for
the twenty-six thousand new follows in the last
ten days. We appreciate
it. This debate will be archived on our website for the
next while, again, for
free, so share it with friends and family.
I'm
Rudyard Griffiths from downtown Toronto, Canada, at the Munk Debate on
political correctness.
