The Munk Debates Podcast - Spring 2021 Munk Dialogue with Douglas Murray: Episode 3

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

COVID-19 has fast-forwarded us into a confusing and uncertain future. Nowhere are the accelerating forces of the pandemic more evident than in our democracy. We are being challenged by rising authoritarian regimes, a reckoning on race, and intense debates on cancel culture, identity politics and free speech. The Spring 2021 Munk Dialogues host some of the world's brightest thinkers for in-depth, one hour conversions on the fate and future of democracy in a world remade by COVID-19. This episode features Douglas Murray in conversation with Munk Debates Chair, Rudyard Griffiths. Douglas is a bestselling author and journalist based in Britain. His books include The Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity and Islam and his most recent global bestseller, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity. He is also an Associate Editor at The Spectator magazine. For more information on the Munk Dialogues visit www.munkdebates.com/dialogues. The Munk Dialogues are a project of the Munk Debates and the Peter and Melanie Munk Foundation. They are sponsored by Gluskin Sheff, Onex, Bond Brand Loyalty and Torys, LLP. If you like what the Munk Dialogues are all about consider becoming a Supporting Member of the Munk Debates at www.munkdebates.com/membership. For as little as $9.99 monthly you receive unlimited access to our 10+ year library of great debates, podcasts and dialogues, a free Munk Debates book, monthly newsletter, ticketing privileges at our live and online events and a charitable tax receipt (for Canadian residents).Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, Monk podcast listeners. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. The following is my monk dialogue with Douglas Murray. The monk dialogues are in-depth, one-hour conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers on the big questions of our time. The following conversation with Douglas Murray covers a whole host of issues from identity politics to the future of how we should talk to each other in a society that's more polarized than ever. Douglas Murray is an internationally. best-selling author of such big books as The Strange Death of Europe and The Madness of Crowd. He is an associate editor at The Spectator magazine, and he's all yours for the next hour. Enjoy. Douglas Murray, welcome to the Monk Dialogues. A pleasure to be with you. I've admired the Monk debates and the Monk Dialogs for some years now, and a number of my erstwhile friends have participated.

So it's a great pleasure for me to join you. Well, thank you, Douglas. wish that we could have done this in person with you here in Toronto, but this medium and this format is not second best. We're going to have an in-depth conversation with you over the next hour, really unpack your ideas and take questions from our monk membership. Douglas, how I wanted to structure our conversation with you to, again, allow us to kind of understand where you're at, what you're thinking is about the world, both before, during, and after COVID, is to play back to you a couple of quotes from your recent book, The Madness of Crowds.

And the first quote up on the screen now is, for me, a kind of Rosetta Stone to unpacking that interesting book. It goes as follows. The whole attempt to turn hardware into software has caused and is continuing to cause more pain than almost any other issue for men and women alike. it is at the foundation of the current madness. So, Douglas, what do you mean by hardware and software? And how are these terms, the foundation, the interplay between them, of this current kind of derangement that you've characterized as being the unfortunate state of our common public discourse? Yeah, well, you know, sometimes people say there's no guiding ethic in our societies.

I'm obviously, I'm from the UK. I know Canada pretty well, been there quite a few times in the eras when we're allowed to travel. But I think in countries like Canada and Britain, you hear this from left and right, really. More from the right, perhaps. People say, we don't have any founding ethics.

And that's actually not true. Our societies do seem to have some foundational ethics, which you can discern. And they're not by any means all bad. Perhaps the most commonly agreed upon is the one that I do. described as a hardware software thing. That is, hardware is something you just can't do anything about. And software is something that you could do something about possibly. You can upgrade

software. So that's the reason I use that analogy. Our era has decided that you should never judge or in any way take a negative attitude towards anyone who has a hardware issue. And what I mean by that is that you don't, for instance, one of the reasons why racism is so obviously reprehensible in our era is that, you know, nobody chooses their race. And so why would you negatively blame somebody or indeed praise somebody because of it? It's just a hardware thing. Same thing with being a man or being a woman. Same thing with being gay. Same thing with sexual preferences. Basically, everything has tried to get to this stage of saying, well, we don't look down upon people or judge people because of things they can't do anything about. And,

And I mean, to use an example, which is, I'm not saying this is the same as any of the examples I've just given, but an obvious one is, you know, our era quite rightly has the attitude that, you know, why would you be rude about somebody who had a disability? It's not why they chose to have a disability. And that's just a pretty much uniform ethic in our society. And I think a good ethic. But one of the consequences of that ethic is that there has been in recent years a sort of, of inclination of everyone to move whatever their thing is into being a hardware issue. I happen to be gay myself. I say in the opening chapter of Mance of Crowds, it's very striking the way that the gay rights movement made successes by saying this is hardware. It's not a

lifestyle choice. Now, in recent years, we've seen that argument extended to trans. And as the quote you said there gives a hint, I think that it's very complex. We don't know. We don't We actually don't know if gay is hardware. And we're not absolutely certain, pretty certain. We're not absolutely certain. And we really don't know very much about trans. We also don't know really what our attitudes should be in relation to hardware software about the sexes. And this is where a lot of the feminists and others are falling out at the moment.

But by the way, I mean, to give the example I just did of disability, we see this extended to other things. generally there's a push to make, for instance, a drug addiction, a hardware issue, alcoholism, certainly. And again, there may well be a very strong hereditary trend in it. But the point is that once it's hardware, you say to people don't judge. And so I think that's a very interesting current in our time, the sort of stampede to campaign to make things hardware, when in fact there should be a greater element of doubt is understanding. that people do it because it takes, as I say, judgment pretty much off the table, negative judgment anyway. But it suggests we know things we don't know. And it pretends that our era

is certain about things we're really not that certain about. Douglas, why not just give people the benefit of the doubt to say, look, you know, we may be confused. We don't know whether it's a hardware or software issue. But you as that person subjectively are feeling that it's a hardware issue. So let's be charitable. Let's give you the benefit of the doubt. Let's accommodate you generously. And let's all move on together. Yeah. I mean, it's a very appealing appeal. It's it's one that a lot of people have tried to follow. What's interesting to me is the moments where people say, I'm sorry, I can't do this anymore. I don't want to bang on about the trans issue. But it was very interesting to me in recent years that it was scientists of my acquaintance.

I noticed who, for instance, couldn't do what their employers and others were telling them to do in terms of saying that basically chromosomes didn't exist. Gametes didn't exist. They just couldn't do it because that's against the scientific method. They never been asked to say things that they just knew not to be true. So there is a certain way you can go with politeness. Absolutely. And politeness is very important. But there are places where politeness cannot trump.

I would say that politeness cannot trump science. It cannot trump provable fact. It certainly can't push them entirely out of the public arena. You know, the realm of manners is very important. But it can't take absolute dominance over the realm of fact, provable fact, for instance. And I think that you can tell that there is some uncertainty about these issues. because so many people, when they feel that they are being disrespected or in some way not given the kind of treatment they deserve or they think, say things like, you're doing me harm by your words, or you're making people kill people because of your words, or you're going to make me kill myself because of your words.

And this is not a tolerable way in which to go about public discussion, I think. So we do need to have respect, but respect is not the only sheriff in town. Let's just pursue this a little bit further. It's fascinating. Facts are undoubtedly important, especially in science. But many of these people who would like you or I or anyone to treat issues that may be disputed as to whether they really are hard. issues in terms of, let's say, the hard science would say, no, these identities, the identity that

I've adopted is constructed. And, you know, that's not a negative. It is my lived reality. It is my experience. My perception of the world is through an identity that I've constructed, regardless of whether it conforms to what you see looking down a microscope in a laboratory vis-a-vis my my chromosonal makeup, this is real for me. Perception is reality. Yes, this has been a very interesting slippage in my view of recent decades. You see it in the social sciences, which aren't sciences. But the social sciences make claims themselves along these lines where they pretend that

your personal reality can trump what we used to call reality, that lived experience. By the way, that's a particularly obnoxious. as if there's any other type of experience. Lived experience, to use this repetitive phrase, is more important than, for instance, data or facts. Much public debate in our era is conducted on those terms. One person comes forth with facts and data, and another person says, who are you with your code data and so-called facts? I've got my lived experience. There are several problems with this approach.

One of them is that, of course, we all have our experience. experiences. Positive, negative, all of our lives are made up of a myriad of different feelings, emotions, and setbacks. But if we decide that my lived experience cannot be understood by you and your lived experience cannot be understood by me, then there's actually no room for dialogue. We can't really find anything to talk about. We just all live in our unknowable solitudes. And by the way, one other quick thought on that is that one of the absurdities, of course, of the my truth, to use the Oprahism, the my truth, my lived experience thing, is that it always says simultaneously, I point this out in the manners of crowds, it simultaneously says, you can never

understand me, and you have to understand me. It says, if you devote your entire rest of your life to try to work me out. You'll never do it. I'm so complicated. I contain legions. And you got to. That's your principal pursuit. God damn it. I don't think that's a reasonable claim. Right. And just talk to us a little bit more because I think this is a really interesting idea that you believe that part of the madness, the derangement of this moment is that we have lost in a a common body of facts that we can agree upon and that without those facts, identifying, not just truth. I mean, that's a big lofty goal, capital T truth, but something much more simple,

which is the kinds of understandings and reciprocities that small L liberalism historically has needed to function. I talked to a little bit more about it. why you think that is such a kind of threat to the larger liberal project of human freedom. Yeah, I write about this in a strange death of Europe and matters of crowd. And I make it as an observation. I don't anyone think I'm sort of approaching this as a preacher or a recruiter or something. I make it as a historian of the present, an observation that we are clearly living in an era, which has lost its older guiding ethic, which is certainly in a country like Britain. And I think

in a country like Canada, the Judeo-Christian ethic, combined with a set of related inheritances, that's clinging on. Some people cling on to it very dearly, but it's clear that in the recent decades that has receded. It could come back, but it's receded. The question of what it is that is coming in in its place is very interesting. And because people tend to be either dogmatic about the fact that it's not happened or that it has happened and they know exactly what we should do next. We don't actually explore very much what is a huge question in our time. Now, of course, there has been an appeal, an attempt to enter into that void. The Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau is a rather good example of it.

A sort of what I would regard as a wet and fairly shallow type of offspring of liberty. liberalism that says, for instance, our values are about being diverse and tolerant and so on. These are very broad and wide claims. They're very broad and wide principles, but they're remarkably shallow. And I suggest that we need to think rather more deeply about these questions. You know, the whole question of liberalism, for instance, in our day is clearly up for grabs. A lot of people on left and right, and I'm more identified as being on the right, but a lot of people on left and right at the moment are giving up on liberalism or have given up on liberal are indeed identifying themselves as being post-liberal. You can tell also by the fact that left and right in our era use the word liberal as an insult. I was not brought up to regard the term liberal as an insult. And I know that it's a difficult word because it changes costume whenever it crosses a border. But liberalism is clearly under significant strain at the moment.

And again, because people are either for it or against it, we don't ask the questions of why, why this is the case, and what might be done to assert the good principles of genuine liberalism as it should be understood. Let's move on to the next quote of yours that I've selected. I'd like you to react to and help us understand. You write in the madness of crowds, The aim of identity politics would appear to be to politicize absolutely everything,

to turn every aspect of human interaction into a matter of politics, to interpret every action and relationship in our lives along the lines, which are alleged to have been carved out by political actions. So give us a sense here, Douglas, of what you see the costs of identity politics. to maybe that older liberal order that you were just discussing. Yes, well, Jonathan Hyde, I know you had on the Warrenel series, is very, very eloquent on this, perhaps the expert on it. But the concept of living with people who differ from you in their political opinions is, of course, absolutely fundamental in a democratic society, indeed in a liberal society.

You've got to lose the election sometimes. That's a given take of politics. And since you're going to lose sometimes, if there's a particular party you feel particularly strongly in favor of, you have to live with the people who are supporting of another party or a different political point of view. That seems in all of our countries in recent years, but obviously particularly in America,

to have become something which has become ever harder. Now, there are lots of reasons you might give for that. One is the obvious maddening effect of social media, which allows us all to go into our silos. And when we come out of our silos and we see the other people who share the common we of the national project, we find we can no longer tolerate them. This seems to be something which left and right and everything else in between is having trouble with at the moment. And I suggest one of the reasons for it is the advent of identity politics. Because identity politics says that your identity issues are the principal way in which you should be understood.

And I reject this from the very core of my being. I think it is among much else a deeply anti-human, deeply, deeply negative reductionist project this. Because, you see, again, if that was the case, if you could look at me and say, that I know what that white man thinks, then why? why would we talk? If you said, I know what that gay is going to say, why would we bother speaking? So these are not, these are not, apart from anything else, are very tolerable ways to analyze our fellow citizens? And more importantly, they make claims about us, which we know not to be true. It cannot be the case, for instance, that all views and world outlooks are

dictated by your skin pigmentation. I mean, it's very, very dangerous, by the way, if that was the case. That's one reason why I also dislike the identity politics project. I think it is, I think it does something it doesn't realize it's doing and it's going to cause something it doesn't know it's going to cause. But the same thing with sex. What kind of person would say, you know, oh, I know how women think. I know what women are going to say about that. That doesn't do it. And so why do we tolerate in our societies increasingly this discourse that presupposes that it knows everything about you, your alleged privilege, your alleged life experience, all of your views, and much more based on chromosomes, sexual orientation, and race.

I mean, those are the main ones that our era has decided to fixate on. I think it's totally inadequate. I think it's an inadequate way of understanding ourselves. It's a reductionist. And I think we're more complex than that. If it's so inadequate, why is it so powerful? Why has it succeeded so successfully as a way of helping people? I'm not going to be pejorative here because many people feel that it genuinely helps them understand and navigate the world.

Hence, their adoption of a lens of identity politics on themselves and their own identity and on their interactions with the rest of society. I mean, this is an incredibly fast movement that has emerged in a matter of years and has achieved widespread adoption and arguably political success in a way that we really haven't seen in movements in decades in the Western world.

Yeah, I think that's right. And this is a very, very interesting question. I don't know all of the answers to it, but I've got a few that I can throw out that. I mean, one is a very obvious thing that in our lifetimes, in the last, certainly in the last 70 years, national belonging has diminished as a legitimate sort of meaning in, for one, for better term, the Western democracies. For all sorts of reasons are too obvious to state. In the late 20th century, people know the downsides of extreme nationalism. And so all nationalism gets tainted by some association, all patriotism, interestingly, begins

the further and further away you come from the Second World War, becomes tainted with the same thing. Now, national belonging, of course, is something that can go badly wrong. We all know that, but everything can go wrong. I mean, national sentiment, nationalistic sentiment can certainly cause conflict. But as I always say, everything can cause conflict. You know, Trojan wars were started by love. Nobody tried to ban that yet, not even in Canada. So there's an interesting thing that happens.

If you say national belonging is something which is suspect, what you say to us is, so find other things to belong to. And at some point in the last 20 years in particular, there's something to belong to has increasingly be seen as being a different community. So the minority community status, the LGBTIQI plus community, a community that does not exist. You have the people talking about membership of a racial community,

as long as they're not white, membership of a racial community, speaking as a black man. That's it. Then you have belonging to sex, again, so long as you're not a male. So there are, certain inbuilt rules in it that you can feel pride and belonging and kinship in that not only are

acceptable but actually can elevate you to some extent. And I think that's at least the beginning of an answer to this question. But you're right, it's very interesting that it's run so far, so fast. And I don't know all of the reasons why that. I'd posit some of them in the book, but because we're living through the middle of this, it's hard. to see sometimes exactly where the whole thing kicks off. Dougus, would you ascribe part of the rapid acceleration of identity politics in our culture is the fact that many people experience those national identities, the patriotism of the previous generation is claustrophobic. They were identities that didn't allow for, you know, a diversity

of types of belonging. And really what we're witnessing here is an explosion of human freedom. It may be human freedom of a different flavor, a different quality, a different texture than what we knew in the past. But this is the ever-evolving, ever-fluid movement of humanity towards greater and greater self-expression, greater and greater difference. You may characterize it as atomization. Others may characterize it as a different form of belonging. I mean, what's your view on that analysis? It's a very important point. And I add just one other thing to it, perhaps I should have said just earlier as well,

which is that, of course, all of these particular forms of belonging that our era has started to obsess about come about from legitimate and understandable means. Because as I say in a man as a crowd, you know, nobody but a fool would deny that in the past, for instance, women have in our societies been denied access to jobs and much more, despite having, in many, cases a competency to do so and have been denied that simply because they're women. Nobody could deny that. It's in the memory of people still alive. In the same way, nobody but a fool could deny that we have not had a complete racial equality in our countries. And nobody even a fool could claim that, you know, the deal for gays has been great for a very long time. I mean, all of these things came out of fairly recent, fairly recent in historical terms,

subtenments that came out from mainly, of course, from the 60s onwards. That's very important because these were legitimate struggles. The interesting question in a right struggle, though, is when do you know you've won? When do you know that it's time to go home and get on with life? Now, I do suggest that one of the problems in all this is there are industries that created around this. There are people whose whole livelihood and their pensions. plan and much more relies on the revolution going on. I think we've seen this in LGBTQ as the

alphabet gets ever longer, longer in the end than the normal alphabet. And we see it with the attempt to add more and more things on, now non-binary. I think this is largely a ruse. I think it's largely a business. I don't think it's very sincere at this point, actually. And you do see this in the feminist argument as well, there are some feminists who like to portray the situation today in a country like Canada or Britain as, you know, worse for women than ever. And that's just a wrong analysis, totally wrong analysis. And I think that some people are doing it because they don't like giving up the fight. But then there's that question that comes from that, from your question of, as it were, the freeing up effect, which is,

what exactly are we going to be able to gain by it? Here's a proposal of mine, which is that we should, I think, and can agree across political divides that the aim of our society at the moment appears to be to ensure that all the latent talent in our society is able to be released as completely as possible. So to put it another way, nobody should ever be held back from achieving whatever it is they can achieve in their lives simply by dint of a characteristic over which they have no say. That's my own belief. I have my aspiration.

I think it's a very noble aspiration. And I think pretty much across the left and right, we could agree on it. There is a meaningful disagreement about how you achieve that, the extent to which you can put your foot on the accelerator without causing other problems in the engine, should we say. but it is almost completely agreed upon aim. But what is it beyond that that we're going to seek to achieve? National belonging is interesting because it's, as the late philosopher Roger Scruton said, it's the widest application of the first person plural, of that we,

where you can claim ownership of things you didn't actually do yourself, that you feel at work something that came, that are somehow yours. You can flip the other way around. The we can be the widest application of something that you didn't do yourself, for which you feel shameful. The nation can encompass that.

It's just not clear at the moment the extent to which these identity groups can do that. I mean, for instance, it seems to be capable of doing it if it's a positive, but it's not able to do it if it's a negative. It would be, for instance, deemed rather unsavory to go to any particular identity group and ask them all to apologize for a thing done by some of its members. You know, that would be deemed very bad manners.

But the opposite is possible. Everyone is expected to take some pride where it's an achievement that's deemed to be good. So we're sort of feeling our way with that one, but I'm always suspicious of, of claims where there's a sort of fair weather claims. You know, we're all together as long as it's good, but we'll disperse the moment there might be any blame going around. Thank you, Douglas. Before I go to my next quote for you,

I want to just remind our viewers that if you're enjoying the monk dialogues and you appreciate these types of conversations, please consider becoming a monk member. As a monk member, 10 years of streaming, audio, and video of all of our podcast, dialogues and debates, You get advanced ticketing privileges at our online. And yes, we hope a return to physical debates this autumn, a charitable tax receipt if you're a Canadian resident,

and 20% off for a limited time right now with the promo code, monk 20. So you can access all that on our website, monkdebates.com. Douglas, let's go to our next quote board from you, again from your latest book, The Madness of Crowds. It is the following. The purpose of large sections of academia has seen, to be the exploration and discovery and dissemination of truth. The purpose has instead become the creation, nurture, propagandization of a particular and peculiar brand of politics. The purpose was

not academia, but activism. I want you to talk a little bit, Douglas, about your views on the role of academia. It's links to identity politics and the extent to which it, you believe, is one of the places to focus on to try to understand where this movement came from and possibly back to what we were just talking about, why it has been so successful so quickly in shaping people's views of how their own identities are constructed and how society itself functions. Yeah, I mean, I'm one of many people who laments the degrading of the universities as an institution in our countries. I think universities are exceptionally important, not just for the generation of ideas, but for the content of the country's character for its pursuit of truth.

That's what the university fundamentally is there for. The universities in all our countries have in recent years become businesses to a very considerable extent. They always had an element of that, but it's got more so the more that the demand for access to universities has increased. And again, demand for access to universities is not an unloid good or an unloid bad. But in the UK, for instance, the majority of young people now go to university, over 50%. And that's a very significant thing that happens there, because obviously it means that some of those universities are certainly not at the standard that they were when a much smaller number of people went. And you can

say, well, there's greater access. So that's just a downside from it. I think we do pay a price, those societally when that is the case. When they move from, again, in a non-pejorative sense, elite institutions, to actually completely non-elite institutions. You just can't claim that institutions where the majority of people go are any longer

in any serious use of the word elite. So that's one thing that happens. Another is, of course, the fact that as I chart a bit in Mads of Crowds, the denigration of a number of There are some that have held out or are trying to hold out. But the denigration, pretty much of the humanities in particular, into campaigning entities, is almost complete. Speak to anyone in academia and nobody will say to you that the people coming in to chairs know more and more every year.

The experience rather tends to be exactly the opposite. that a colleague retires who was an expert in a really important deep and wide-ranging issue. And partly because of hyper-specialization, the person who replaces them, you know, is on one of those offshoot cul-de-sacs. So, I mean, I don't, maybe I'd be careful about naming names. There are universities I know where, for instance, the philosophy department has had nobody to teach the major 19th century philosophers because everybody in the department is stuck on very minor, very minor coldest acts of recent thought.

And there was a period where everyone thought this had only happened in the discipline they knew most about. One of the disturbing things of recent decades has been the realization the same thing has been happening in discipline after discipline. And then that it has entered the sciences engineering and more STEM, as they call it, in America. I think this is deplorable for lots of reasons, but just as I say, one of them is the point of the pursuit of truth is you have to take the risk of pursuing the truth irrespective of where it leaves you. In other words, if you decide there are places you will not be led, cannot be led, then what are you doing other than some kind of territory pissing propaganda? If you've decided, we will not allow this thought to be considered.

You've already done something which is anti, one of the most fundamental issues in academia, which is pursuing truth wherever it leaves. And by the way, that really was where the universities play such a vital role in the society. If you understand, and again, some of it, this can sometimes come out badly to a large audience. But if you understand that part of the purpose of universities is that they are placed, that can bear to follow through thoughts that may not work in wider society. For instance, a first-year philosophy seminar might consider the question of, you know, why it is morally wrong to eat babies?

It's a fairly standard, you know, early philosophy discussion. An outside group hearing that might think, what are this group of people doing? They don't even know it's wrong to eat babies. The point is the debate is going on because it's a small and select group. of people having a debate they know the terms of and trusting themselves to lead into a fruitful set of conclusions and further inquiries. They're meant to be places that do this sort of thing, that think about things that follow right to the end point. I think it's now, there are so many cases. Canada has obviously become famous in recent years in some ways for the degradation of

its universities. America leads the world in this degradation, but my own country comes not far behind. I think it's enormously regrettable when the language of politics and activism tramples across the academy. There are, for instance, there's a very good example if I give you one from Oxford University, my own alma mater. There has been a lot of debate recently about the history of empire. And I think, by the way, it's a very fruitful discussion. I think we can learn a lot by going over some of this territory in a more nuanced and interrogative light. However, that hasn't been what's been happening. There's been a debate about Cecil Rhodes, a benefactor to the university,

and many of the detractors of the Rhodes Scholarship Program have simply seized things they claim he said and then made assertions about empire. We have a professor at a university in the UK who claims now that the British Empire was not just as bad as, but worse than what his. Hitler did to the Jews in Germany. And these sorts of assertions are made, whereas when an attempt was made a few years ago to set up a program at Oxford to study the ethics of empire, study it, it wasn't, let's conclude that empire was wonderful.

It did no such thing. It was an attempt to set up a study of the ethics of empire. It was trounced upon by everybody who claimed that even trying to look at this in a neutral light would be too dangerous, too likely to become a jingoistic exercise. And before you know, you know, people would be setting boats out from Britain and trying to conquer the empire again. I mean, this is, I say, this is a very frustrating level of thought because it says we can't trust the public with certain discussions and ideas. And we can't trust academics with certain discussions and ideas. We just can't trust anyone. So we'll have to fall back.

on being told exactly what to think, say, and right for the rest of our existence by a group of activists, so-called scholars. And I reject that, and I deeply resent the attempt. Let's go to the final quote board for you before we take our audience questions, because this Douglas kind of gets the future and where all of this might go from here. You write, we face not just a future of ever greater atomization, rage and violence, but a future in which the possibility of a backlash against all rights advances, including the good ones, grows ever more likely. So what is your concern here, Douglas? And do you see some kind of symptomology evolving that would suggest that there is a dangerous trend that could emerge out of our current

social conversation and debate as it stands today? Oh, I'm sure of it. You hear it everywhere. Multiple examples that one can give. I mean, we're having this discussion now, but there will be people who will say, why aren't you women? Why aren't you different colored skin, different race? This doesn't happen the other way around, by the way.

And I notice, as this goes on, that it is causing more and more resentment. I don't like to give the example of the only crampon I have on the wall of so-called social justice. And I don't think social justice is social justice. I think that Nietzsche says somewhere, the people talk of justice and they mean revenge. But take the one crampon I have on the edifice of social justice. I don't like the way in which people talk about heterosexuality today, and particularly about heterosexual men. I don't like the weird way in which it's perfectly possible to denigrate this group.

of people. I don't like the way it happens with men in general. I don't like the misandry that's allowed in our age. Our age is quite rightly disturbed, deeply disturbed by misogyny, but man-hating gets a freer pass. I don't like the way people are told, I don't need to listen to you because you're white. I think that would be reprehensible whichever way you did it. I think it's reprehensible on that as well, even if white people are the majority in the society in question. And I don't like it being done in the identity politics realm of sexual orientation either. We are in the midst of a very strange experiment because it seems to me that what is happening is there are people who think that the way to social justice, as they call it, is to overcorrect. That is, because women were prejudiced against in the past, we will be prejudiced against men for a period.

and then the sort of the dial will come to even. That because there has been racism against black people in the past, we'll be racist against white people for a period because that'll sort of even the ledger. And because gay people have had a bad time in the past, we will give it to the straits of it. You know, we'll make it sound like they're kind of boring and don't have very much to add to society.

It really should shut up, you know, sort of squares. I think all of these things are really ugly, reprehensible. And I think that the people who are doing that, who are taking part in an overcorrection should be asked a set of questions, such as how long does the overcorrection go on? How many ruined lives are you willing to tolerate? And when would you know you've done it for long enough, for instance? So I would rather that we arrived at a stage where we agreed that any denigration of people because of these innate characteristics and others was just not something we did, whatever direction you want to do it in.

And I think the reason I hint there at the possibility of backlash is because I think backlash at some point is inevitable. And I think the most likely one is on race. I say in the Mads of Crowsy. I'm very, very worried about this. I think one of the points of being an author is you have a sort of one less layer of skin than other people and try to pick up trends slightly ahead of the moment of which they happen. But I can pick up that trend. I think that the talking about racial rights and going on only about the negatives of white people,

only the positives of ethnic minorities. It's a dangerous game. It would be anyway, but it's a particularly dangerous game when you're doing it against the majority. You know, it's a very strange thing to do and not to expect at some point there to be a sort of a backlash. But by the way, let me give a quick example.

In my last book, one, the strange death of Europe, one of the things I was thinking about a lot when I was traveling across the continent of North Africa and Middle East and much more. But particularly when I was in Germany, I would think always this one thought in particular, which is we're quite a long way on from the war now. What is the rationale of treating the new generation of Germans? One is that, you know, I'm now my 40s, but, you know, there were people born in the 2000s who were perfectly able, you know, to speak and think and, you know, and much more. What is the rationale of judging this generation is in some way guilty? And as I say in the strange death of Europe, it's extremely difficult question because there is a sort of agreement in Europe that Germans do still bear some kind of moral brunt.

At the same time, it feels, I think rightly, like an very ugly imposition on people who have no connection to the horrors of the past. So where do these things begin and end? We don't really know. We don't know. And we have to be very careful about the apportioning of, for instance, hereditary blame. And that apportioning of hereditary blame is, as I say, in the Mads of Crowd, it's particularly dangerous.

When we don't know who can accept the apology, we don't know who can give an apology. We don't know whether it should be accepted or should be given. And we have no mechanism in our apology. societies for forgiveness. The biggest flaw that the social justice movement has is that it has spent zero time thinking of forgiveness. Fascinating. Let's go to audience questions for you, Douglas. There were many we've selected what we consider were the most interesting to help move this dialogue along. So the first of those comes from Mary. She says, what should the rules of free speech be

in contemporary society? Are there limits? And if so, what principles or ideals should inform the restraint of speech? I'm almost an absolutist on this. I think that we have actually had good laws on this in our recent past. Imgrird. And incitement, to my mind, is the one place where free speech has to give. But incitement is also incitement from somebody with a plausible likelihood of carrying it out or persuading others to carry it out. In other words, to give the famous example, you know, you have to be standing outside a house with a mob with torches telling them to attack the house.

It is not acceptable to regard everybody in society as effectively in the position of somebody standing in front of a house with the crowd. bearing torches ready to attack the house, is one of the things we've landed in. The idea that the citizenry is sort of going to start lynching at any moment unless the Canadian authorities in their brilliant wisdom intercede in stopping them. And I think this is not desirable, and it's not a fair summary of the situation that the Canadian citizenry is in. So I think that the strange spillover of incitement laws into anything mean that people say that can be said by somebody else to be, you know, very bad against them. I'm pretty, I mean, I know that there's a difficulty, which is, of course, with the young people, but I know I'm pretty strong

back on this stuff myself. You know, I put stuff out there, so I know I get it back. And I think I think we do sort of have to strengthen up a bit. Now, as I say, there's an interesting question, a complex question about young people navigating this space because, you know, somebody who says something vile to me, well, that's fine. Now, my character is formed. I've got good friends, good family, loved ones.

I can look after myself. If I was a teenager growing up in that society, that could be different. And there are interesting questions about that. But that comes down to us. to certain forums or should be advised or otherwise to access certain forums. It does not mean that the Canadian authorities

or the British authorities should limit the speech of the citizenry to get around, for instance, bullying. And as I said, there is a strange way in which we've all been put into the playground in recent years. Because we don't know what to do with the playground in the social media era, we're all being treated in these terms.

I don't want us to be. So I do think we have to toughen up on this. But as I say with that caveat, it is a question what the young do. Yeah, a great segue to another question we got from you regulating the internet. Julie is asking, I would love to hear Douglas's thoughts

on the proposed Bill C-10 in Canada. Does regulating content producers, including the big social media platforms, create prospects for more civil public discourse? or is it a threat to free speech and free societies? Douglas, I don't want to hold you to account here to understand the nuances of Canadian telecommunications regulation. So maybe just to pull this back a bit and have you reflect a bit on, you know, what do we

do regarding social media? You, Jonathan Haidt, others identify that it is part of the kind of the maddening effect that we've seen in our culture. But there are implications. There are implications for free speech, for individual freedom. What's the balance that you want to see? Give us your sense of your subscription here. My understanding is the Bill C-10 issue has come down to whether people who post,

for instance, be caught up in this as well. Am I right? I think that's that's... I mean, the government claims that it won't, but there's nothing in the law that seems to exclude the possibility that the government could indeed regulate and examine and assess the posting of social media content. For me, the moment at which the thing became concerning, because that is limiting the right of the common, the right of a citizen-regged common.

That said, by the way, I mean, on all to stress that, in a way, it's funny seeing governments trying to deal with this, because, I mean, this horse bolted a long time ago. It's out of their control. I mean, there are things they can do to get it back. But first of all, if it came to speech, I would not trust any Canadian apparatchic to be able to decide what you should or should not say. I think that history of free speech debates in Canada

in recent years has shown that perhaps in Canada, in particularly, you don't have. I mean, look, nowhere has people who should make these decisions. The bureaucrats in our governments can do many things, but deciding what you or I can or cannot say does not seem to be remotely in their purview or should be in their purview. The really interesting one is, as I say, the horse has bolted, is that the social media companies do this on their own. I mean, they do it without government help.

Look at the most famous case in the last year. Twitter decided that the American president couldn't be on Twitter. And in a moment, took away his best means of access to his own voter base. Now, you may agree with that decision. You may disagree with that. But that was Silicon Valley decided over the most important person in the world at the time. It's the same with all of the Internet regulation issues. These decisions are being made by small numbers of people in Silicon Valley,

generally with an extraordinarily specific and unified political viewpoint. And watching governments and others trying to catch up with this, you know, I'm delighted if the Canadian government gives the Canadian populace the right to post what it thinks on social media. However, Mark Zuckerberg and others may decide you don't have that right. So we now live in this world where some rights are granted by your government. but there are larger rights that are given or taken away by, as I say, a few square miles in California. Let's take our last audience question for you. It's from Laura. She is asking, her question is as follows. Competent, non-extreme people are losing their public reputations and livelihoods because of cancel culture.

What advice would you give someone whose research, writing, or ideas run counter to the current orthodoxy and her risk? themselves of being canceled. You've kind of put yourself repeatedly into the breach here, Douglas, with your books and writing. So maybe there's some kind of individual personal lessons that you could share with people who might want to be a little more heterodox, who might feel, as we've talked about, you know, scientists in an exceedingly difficult position where they are following empiricism. And empiricism may conflict deeply. some of our currently held beliefs about issues that are exceedingly hot tripwires, as you characterize them in the madness of crowds.

Yeah. The main thing is don't be in a position where you have somebody above you in employment terms who's weak. That's how it works. I don't like the term canceled culture particularly. I don't like the term canceled in relation to it. I know what it means. it's not as accurate as I'd like it to be.

For instance, there are people who are allegedly cancelled who do still go on to do things. There are some people who just can never work again, would never go out to make a crust again. But I think there's a growing sense in which people who are so-called cancelled, many can survive and have another act to use the F. Scott Fitzgerald analogy. And there can be a second act in the life of a cancelled person. But the first thing is don't be in a position where you've got a boss above you or anyone in position above you who is weak because those people are so dangerous to you.

You know, you don't even have to, as happened recently at Apple. You don't even have to have done anything wrong at all. You've just got to get some crowd stampede against you for something that the crowd claims you said. This happened at Cambridge University in the case of Noah Carl. It's not even something you've done. The mob says you've done something. you are then held guilty and fired because the boss can't put up with the pressure coming from the dishonest and ill-informed crowd. That is a very dangerous position.

That's a dangerous position to be in. I've constructed my life in such a way that I'm not really answerable to any. I'd like to say I'm answerable to my readers, but, you know, it's not like I write things in order that my readers are happy. I write what I think and I'm pleased that I inform and please some people. But to that extent, I'm not even beholden to my readers. And that is terribly good for me. I'm very blessed to be in that position. And I don't underestimate that for a moment.

I also don't underestimate the fact that not many people can be in that position. Teachers, for instance, will be vulnerable to whether their head teacher or board of governors is able to be stampeded against. People in small or medium-sized companies, great big companies, same thing. what I do want everyone to do is just to take a bit more of a step forward. It would all get a lot easier on some of the difficult issues of our day. If everyone took a bit more of a step forward, I think it's quite wrong to encourage acts of kamikaze like bravery.

I wouldn't want to tell people just go straight out there and lose your livelihood and much more. But I do think if everyone was a bit braver, some of the problems could be solved. For instance, you know, just saying, I don't know how I go along with that. That's a very good one. You know, the one of the examples I keep getting people approaching me about recently is so-called implicit bias training. You don't have to run completely against it. There are very intelligent questions you can ask if your office tries to make you perform this crock, modern voodoo. You know, there are things you can do.

There are questions you can ask. intelligent questions undermine the voodoo you're being told to take part in. So that's what I would say. But if you are in a position to speak your mind, you know, for instance, if you're retired or, you know, for whatever reason you feel able to, you really should. Not just because it's good for society, but because it's good for you. I notice all the time the demoralization that people get into when they have to agree to lies. It's very, very bad for individuals, as it's bad for society. But we have to be able to trust ourselves and each other.

That's one of the absolutely guiding thoughts I have at the moment. I think that one of the reasons why the council culture thing happens, why the shutting down of discussion happens, is that really people think we can't trust ourselves or each other. And I don't think we can trust each other or ourselves completely. But we can't do anything very much if we distrust ourselves completely. If we think we can't be trusted with ideas, we can't be trusted with speech. We're always going to fall into fascism at any moment.

We can't do very much if that's our presupposition about our societies. So I think we should trust ourselves more to be grown up, to be able to cope with. things and to be able to discuss and think like grown-ups. And that's something we can all do a bit more. Thank you, Douglas. You've been very generous with your time. We're up against the proverbial clock, but I want to squeeze in your two book recommendations. Each of these dialogues, we ask our contributors to suggest two books to help us kind of understand the moment that we're in and give us hopefully some new perspectives. Your first book is clinical theories, the second self-portrait in black and white. Why are these two books that you would recommend we break the backs on?

There are both books that have come around the same time as the manse of crowds. A cynical theories by Helen Plotcrow's James Lindsay is a dense, but very, very important book on the critical theory that has roared through the academies and now out into the workplaces and much more in North America and across Europe. It's a very brilliant demonstration of the fact that there There has been no conspiracy, suddenly no secret conspiracy, that these theories that now wash through our lives were carefully cultivated from roughly the 1970s onwards. They show chapter and verse. It's a very, very disturbing read, but very, very accurate and impressively researched the book.

Self-portrait in black and white, I chose, I've just done a jacket quote for it in its English edition. Unlearning race by Thomas Chaston-Williams. It's a very moving memoir about what it is to be mixed race. And reflections on race that Thomas Chaffin-Williams American writer, I believe now resident in France, what I found moving and impressive about this book was it really took the conversation forward. He doesn't slip into the sort of racialized thinking that we're all being urged to slip into at the moment. And in particular, I was very moved by his appeal in the book that basically what we need at the moment

is a coalition of people across the political and social and racial and other divides who can find common cause in a way that does not rely on these identity politics, hate mongers and fear mongers. I was very moved by the book. I think it's a beautifully written book. a very important book in saying there's something has happened. The whole rubicon is everything's been shifted around and not least by COVID, but also by

the whole slew of identity politics claims. So we need to think about this in new coalitions of people. And we're going to have to find the other people across all the imaginable divides, some of which have been put up in order to obstruct us, find the other people who are willing to look beyond race, look beyond sex, look beyond sexual orientation and all of these things. and try to move forward rather than being caught up to the rest of our lives in a discussion that is, as I say, in the final analysis, not just reductive, but anti-human. Well, thank you, Douglas Murray, for coming on the monk dialogues. You've been provocative, stimulating everything that I had hoped to get out of this conversation for the benefit of our monk community. So thank you so much for being your usual heterodox.

challenging self. We really appreciate some fresh views and fresh perspectives. It's much appreciated. I hope that I can see you all in cover sometime soon. Let's do it, Douglas. Well, that wraps up tonight's monk dialogue with Douglas Murray. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Just a reminder that our next monk dialogue is up in two weeks' time. We'll be featuring Nazarene Malik, also from the United Kingdom. She's a guardian columnist with a whole set of ideas very different than Douglas. Murray's. We'll get that different perspective on June 3rd. Coming up, 8 p.m. Eastern tune-in for Nazareem Malik's Monk Dialogue. Also a reminder that if you're enjoying the Monk Dialogues,

our podcasts, our debates, everything the Monk debates is about, consider becoming a monk member. As a monk member, you get audio and video streaming of our last 10 years of debates, podcasts, and dialogues, advanced ticketing privileges. And yes, hopefully a return to physical events soon. You'll get some special perks there to access seats to those sold out events here in Toronto, a charitable tax receipt if you're a resident in Canada and 20% off for a limited time with the promo code, Monk 20. Thank you to the lead project supporter for the Monk Dialogues of Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundation. Also, our lead donors, Gluscan Chef and Onyx. Thank you guys. and our presenting supporting sponsors include Bond Brand loyalty and Tori's LLP.

Thank you also to our friends at Facebook, our exclusive social media partner for these The Monk Dialogues. Production facility is provided by Amber MacMedia and Creative Harbor. Thank you both for all your help. And that wraps up today's show. Be well, be safe. We'll do this all again in two weeks time with Nazarene Malik. I'll talk to you then. Good night.