The Munk Debates Podcast - Spring 2021 Munk Dialogue with Nesrine Malik: Episode 4

Episode Date: June 7, 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 Nesrine Malik in conversation with Munk Debates Chair, Rudyard Griffiths. Nesrine Malik is an award-winning British Sudanese columnist and features writer for The Guardian, and the author of We Need New Stories: The Myths that Subvert Freedom. She was born in Sudan and grew up in Kenya, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. She received her undergraduate education at the American University in Cairo and University of Khartoum, and her post graduate education at the University of London. 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, Munk podcast listeners. Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. The following is my monk dialogue with Nazarene Malik. Nazareen Malik is a columnist with the UK Guardian newspaper, a nominee for the prestigious Orwell Prize, and the internationally bestselling author of the book, We Need New Stories. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Nazarene, focusing on the state and future of identity politics, and how we find common understanding, common ground, and are increasingly polarized and divided society. Nazarene, welcome to the Monk Dialogues.

Terrific to be in conversation with you today. Thank you very much. I love these introductions. I always feel far more accomplished than I am. Well, you are, I think, a really creative, original thinker, so a perfect voice for us to feature on these dialogues. and what we're going to do for the next hour because we have this luxury of really being able

to spend some time with you is to try to unpack some of the key issues and ideas in your latest book. We Need New Stories. And to do that, I want to put to you a series of quotes from the book that really spoke to me that kind of got me thinking

in new and different ways about the challenges that our democracy, our society faces right now. So if that's okay with you, I'm going to put up our first quote. Here it is. myths are hierarchical stabilizers. They keep power structures standing, creating the illusion of status by concentrating on relative status. If attention can be maintained on how you are better off

than someone below you, it can be diverted from the fact that there is someone above you who is either exploiting you or enjoying more unearned privileges than you. I chose this quote, Nazarene, because your book is about confronting the myths that kind of govern our society, that govern popular discourse and conversation. I thought that quote is a kind of interesting starting point for us to kind of unpack your broader thesis about the nature of myths and their role in society today. So please kick off the conversation by reflecting on that quote and what were you getting out when you wrote put those words to paper. I'm really grateful that that's the quote.

you started with because that's really the sort of momentum behind the thesis, that myths or political myths are damaging, not because they victimize marginalized people or certain kind of peripheral identities, they are bad because they benefit a tiny, tiny group of people at the top. And the people at the top are the ones who propagate and preach and essentially, establish these myths. So when I think about the world and the way I think about sort of political instability in general, is not in terms of right and left or Republican and Democrat or socialist and conservative. We are stuck in these sort of binary ways of thinking about the world in terms of our ideology on different parts of the spectrum. But really the more important distinction

is the one between the people at the center and the people on the peripheries, the people at the top of the pyramid and the people at the bottom of the pyramid. You get the idea. It's all about kind of insiders and outsiders. And the insiders need to create an illusion that this world that they control,

not to sound too conspiratorial about it, but this world in which they have disproportionate power, shall we say, is a fair and equitable one. It's one where everyone kind of has a fair shot. It's one where people are in different levels of status because they have earned their way into that status. And so what the myths that they send out do is they give the impression, it gives the sense of stability, of a fair hierarchy, of a world in which there are no people who are getting away with not paying tax, for example, with hoarding political capital, with disenfranchising voters, with maintaining political power within a tiny elite or media power within a tiny elite.

What they do is they divert attention to the people at the bottom of the spectrum, the people at the bottom of the pyramid, the complete outsiders, the immigrants, the people of color, the working classes, people who need benefits, people who need healthcare subsidies, people who need subsidized subsidies from taxpayers money. So the way they focus attention on them is to create the impression that they are encroaching upon the rights of the sort of virtuous middle who are just going about their business,

you know, trying to earn a wage, paying tax. And so we are therefore constantly having these discussions about the undeserving trying to get something from those who are working very hard and not focusing on the other undeserving, the ones who get away with a massive heist at the top because they own the means of cultural and media production. And so we don't talk about tax avoidance.

We don't talk about voter disenfranchisement. We don't talk about media recruitment policies. We are fixated on immigrants, on illegal asylum seekers, on single mothers, on Black Lives Matter activists, all of the people that really have very little capital and very little power. And what that does, that kind of ermith, if you like,

is it stabilizes the status quo. It stabilizes the hierarchy because people are not looking up. They're looking down all the time. What you've just described in some ways, it seems like an almost... perfect representation of the politics of social division in Trump's America, that there was a very effective strategy or approach to say to many Americans who were poor, who were not thriving under an American political system for a generation or more,

that in fact there were other people who didn't look like them, who probably came from parts of the country, that were different from where they lived, who were responsible for the decline of their society. Am I right to extrapolate that what you're saying is in effect, you know, not just a myth for how we should think about how society operates, but also in some ways, a hallmark,

a character of populist politics and ideology today. Absolutely. So one of the things that I talk about very early in the book, is that myths are not generally or are not at heart toxic. We all need myths, either as people, as individuals, as families, as tribes, and as nations. We all need myths to give us a sense of kind of common identity, to give us a sense of a little bit of exceptionism. We all like to feel that we're special.

And a politics that works well, a political system that works well, creates benign myths, creates myths that give people a sense of shared destiny, of a shared past, of a shared purpose, and a certain kind of exception of identity, where they feel there is something about them that is different to other people, but not a supremacy, so to speak. In populist politics, myths become corrupted. These myths that we use to stabilize political systems then become toxic and they become about maintaining divisions between people as opposed to about creating a common goal or a common destiny that the country faces. So what myths do or how myths operate in a populist political system is that they gain velocity, right?

What we saw in the Trump era was fascinating. One of the reasons why I wanted to write this book is because we saw how quickly these myths become mainstream once populist politicians release them into the water because they're so powerful. And so what we saw is, like you said, white working class people voting for Trump on the basis that they were scared or they were given the justification to vote for someone

who actually promised them very little, but scared them into thinking that even the little resources that you have, Even the little cultural capital or physical capital that you have is under threat. Because even though you think that you're on the bottom of their own, there are people that are lower than you who are going to come and grab your resources. And I'm going to protect that. So populist politics has predicated, rooted, in fact,

in convincing the weak, the powerless, the disenfranchised, that there is a sort of basement, so to speak, that there is a subterranean layer of competition that they're going to face if they don't hire this bodyguard, so to speak. So it's not about people thriving. That's why populist politics is so negative. So it's not about people thriving.

It's about people hiding, hunkering down, and protecting the little assets that they have. Thanks, Nazare. That's really an interesting analysis that I think speaks directly to the current political context. I next want to move on to one of the specific myths that you address in the book, which is, as you characterize it, the myth of identity politics. And I think this is so interesting because we're having a very freighted debate at this moment in Canada,

really across the Western world, about the nature of identity politics, the role it plays in the public conversation today. So this is your quote. This is the myth of harmful identity. politics, that group behavior to secure rights denied on racial grounds is corrosive, restricted to non-majority white groups, and is offensive rather than defensive. So a lot to unpack there, but I chose that because I think it gets at, from what I took away from the book, which is a really different and frankly, I think novel way to think about

identity politics, that there are different varieties of it, and they are deployed in different ways by different groups to achieve different ends. So give us your analysis. So identity politics is, again, like myths, not always a negative thing. We have imbued it with sort of negative connotations because race in general has become such a fault line in contemporary society. But in researching the history of identity politics, the most powerful, well-organized, and most storied is white identity politics. So if we think about the settlement of North Africa, the settlement of North America, the importing of slaves from North Africa, the importing of Africa and West Africa to the Caribbean.

These were actions enacted by white majoritarian societies who looked to establish themselves at the expense of natives and on the backs of the imported. And we don't tend to think of that as identity politics, even though its purpose is really strictly to advance the financial and sort of physical well-being of a certain race. that held from Western Europe.

But because there is this sort of anxiety about race and anxiety about, I guess, ethnic minorities and immigration in North America in general, we have tried to think about identity politics purely in terms of this sort of new and aggressive form of politicking that is people of color constantly trying to fracture the political scene, So I think about it in two ways.

There are two types of identity politics. There is an aggressive identity politics, and there is a defensive identity politics. The latter occurs in response to the former. Defense of the identity politics does not exist of its own accord. So black people in the U.S. We're never going to have a 1960s movement involved riots and protests if their civil rights were not denied in the first place. place. You were not going to have a Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020. Have there

not been rights regarding policing, incarceration, and the unreasonable use of police enforcement against people of color, there was not going to be a protest if those things did not exist or had not been withheld from black communities. And so we have a slightly, we think about identity politics when it's enacted defensively as something that started from nowhere. Like it wasn't triggered, it wasn't provoked, it's just a sort of hissy fit or tantrum by people of color to get extra rights when actually the thing we should be focusing on is how white identity politics, aggressive identity politics, disenfranchised, created different ethnicities and different races, by treating them unequitably, politicize them,

and then once they began to ask for the rights that were withheld from them, then said, oh, no, this is really bad, this is bad identity politics. What it's doing is it's fracturing our common causes. So what I'm really keen on doing is kind of excavating and highlighting the very successful history of white identity politics and seeing it as that,

seeing the behavior of white voters, particularly in the United States, as related very closely to advancing their racial interest. And if you see, we touched on Donald Trump earlier, one of the first things that we saw when there was a surprising turnout in support for Donald Trump is that the analysis was not about race. If you recall, it was all about the economy.

It was all about the left behind. It was all about the sort of virtuous figure of the coal miner with his face streaked with coal dust, trying to kind of find his way in a world where he had lost his living and lost his community. And then a couple of years after Trump was elected, people caught up and realized that the common denominator between people who voted for Trump at the top end of the income bracket and at the bottom end of the income bracket, was that they were white, because Trump was seen as someone who would restore or maintain white capital, not necessarily white power, but white capital. And because we don't talk about this in terms of identity politics,

we pathologize the behavior of, say, Black Lives Matter, because we think that when white people behave politically, that that is neutral. It is a default state of benign, calculation that's about the economy, about foreign policy, about health care, but nothing is vulgar as identity. Anything as vulgar as race when in fact it is the prototypical form of identity politics. Well, that's exactly the quote that I wanted to go to next, Nazarene.

So we're kind of following each other here, which is terrific, because this quote, I think, really... It means my argument is coherent. This really, I think, this following quote, I think, really pushes us all to to think through some challenging ideas. So you write, crucial to the pathologizing of non-white identity politics is the belief that whiteness is the default.

So much of mythology is due to this defaulting of certain identities being white, a certain sort of masculine, hailing from a certain class, and being a specific form of straight as base case neutral, unmotivated by anything, as you just said, as vulgar as color or gender.

So that's, I think, yeah, really challenging idea here that this tension, this debate over identity politics, as you say, isn't so much about the centrifugal force isn't so much the claims of these minority groups. It's the kind of gravitational pull of this pre-existing whiteness that is assumed to be the default normal, the default status quo,

the pro forma that all culture should conform to. Do I have that right? You do, and it's a very difficult thing to unwire or rewire because it's actually an impulse that is innate in all of us. There is a bit I talk about in the book. I grew up in Saudi Arabia as well as other parts. of the Middle East and North Africa. And one of the things that I experienced in Saudi Arabia

was a reluctance when it comes to, for example, Islamic terrorism, a reluctance on the parts of Saudi authorities to pathologize it. So there was a real fear or a real unwillingness to think of Muslim terrorism as something that had arisen because the Saudis or Arabs had done anything wrong. And so it was always framed as a sort of alien influence that had come from Iran or had come from Yemen or it was kind of a rogue influence. They even had a name for terrorists. They never called them terrorists.

They called them those who had lost their path because they were of us. They were kind of of the native people. And so they were either exploited, they had lost their path. they reflect nothing bad about us. And there is something similar about that and how North America, particularly the US, talks about white terrorism. So the way in which we,

one of the best examples to jar people into realizing that they pathologize non-white behavior and accept, I call it the accepting of whiteness, and accept white behavior from these pathologies, is if you look at how we talk about white terrorism or the actions of far-right terrorists, there is always, always an impulse to try and understand where they came from.

These people, are they lone wolves? We call them lone wolves. We talk about them in terms of their mental health, in terms of their economic status, in terms of how badly they were. or abused as children. And so we humanize them so much to the extent that actually we almost excuse their actions because they are of us.

They are the natives. And the natives can do no wrong. And even when they do wrong, it's because they have been wronged somewhere along the line. And so we draw no further conclusions. A lone wolf means there is nobody else. There is nothing we need to worry about in terms of our culture, in terms of our racial hierarchies in terms of our economy. When a black or brown person does the same thing,

it becomes about Islam, all black people, all brown people, the threat, the kind of mass, the mob at the gate, that we need to shut down or that we need to weed out for some reason. And the danger in this isn't just that, you know, people get talked about differently, is that you actually create a fertile ground for a very large and growing white terrorist movement. And there's figures in the book about the sort of casualties in United States

over the past 20 years, and the casualties from far-right or white supremacist terrorism in the U.S. far outstrip any casualties that were inflicted as a part of either race-related movements or Islamic terrorism. But then if you look at the media coverage, and more crucially, when you look at the funds earmarked by the government to fight or get intelligence about terrorist movements, they are overwhelmingly geared towards Muslims, immigrants, and people of color.

So when we default white behavior as sort of neutral, unrelated to race, untoxic, uncorrupted by racist motivations, then we miss this huge threat and that costs lives. Just to reflect on this quote a bit more because there's another, I think, interesting idea here that I want to make sure I have this, I'm interpreting you in the right way, that there is a, there's a category distinction that you're making between whiteness as a kind of modality of thinking, a way of, a way of, of approaching the world versus being of the white race. Am I right that you're trying to get at something that's different? It's different simply than one's racial identity. It's an ontology. It's a view of how the world should work and unfold.

Yeah, it's a paradigm. And that's why the way we talk about, and hopefully we'll get to this later, But the way we talk about racism is so insufficient, really, to try and grasp the challenges. Because when you have one identity, and I'm not particularly interested in kind of the race aspect of it, it's just how it has decided to organize itself. But when you have one identity that has been awarded and has hoarded so much of the political power, the economic capital, and the two, the two,

of narrating the experience of itself and everyone around it, you end up in a world or in a paradigm that is delusional, that is completely removed from reality. And so when you try and have these conversations, when you try and highlight these things, you're not really engaging with people's logical or critical faculties. You are literally talking to people from another planet because they live on another planet,

you know, in which their race and their history their history and their identity and their entire cultural orientation is built on things that I, even though I spend a lot of time researching this, can only sort of see very faintly from afar, but I can never really grasp them because my existence, the modality of my existence, as you very well put it, has been formed in a completely different planet. And so this defaulting of also sexual identity, gender identity, the creation of this large, neutral, valid, legitimate, wise center. Whiteness is just one of the qualities of that center.

But once you start to unpick it, it's incredibly difficult because all of these things are. related, you know, white supremacy is also linked to machismo, to patriarchy, and to misogyny. And so people kind of get caught up in talking about identity politics purely in terms of race and racism, but that's a poor way, and I think a counterproductive way of looking at how we are really talking about different paradigms and different ways of viewing the world that have been in the making for centuries. Yeah, I think that's a really important insight, one that is not discussed enough.

Let's go to my next quote from you, from your book, We Need New Stories. It goes as follows, unable to conceive of coalitions of inequality as the way forward. People reach for universal values that are not relevant when people are disenfranchised. So I thought this was a really interesting quote for two reasons. To unpack that idea of coalitions of inequality, because that's a kind of an interesting thesis of a path away forward, and I want to hear from you your critique of universal values as the means to achieve progress, because the assumption is that universal values around freedom, human rights,

the respect for the individual, these are the kind of core tenets of liberal Western democracy, and are the building blocks, the tools that we have to try to pursue greater equality amongst and between groups? Universal values are great. It's like that famous quote about democracy. It would be a fine idea. Universal values would be a fine idea, but we don't have them.

We don't live in a world in which universal values, human rights, the freedom of the individual, meritocracy, all these universal values to which we aspire do not exist for a large wave of people. And so in terms of kind of going back to thinking about aggressive and defense of identity politics, what defensive identity politics is trying to do is trying to secure some of these values that have been withheld from it. And what we're doing is we're kind of racing to the finish line, right, when we invoke universal values. And so when people say, say, for example, all lives matter in response to Black Lives Matter.

What they're saying is, we all, you know, we all deserve to live. We all have the right to be free from police persecution. Black Lives Matter are not saying that other people do not matter or their lives do not matter. What they're saying is that Black lives matter less. And until they get to the point where they have the same rights as the other lives, they then all lives will matter. The goal, the ideal, the sort of Valhalla, the holy grail of defensive identity politics,

is that everyone has universal values. And I find this quite, I get very exercised by this logic that somehow when people demand equality for themselves on the base of their identity, that they are somehow fracturing or destabilizing, or setting back a larger human rights cause

when actually they barely made it into the kind they barely made the threshold in the first place. But one of the things, and this is where the bit about coalitions of inequality is important, one of the things that makes it hard for people to understand that identity politics is defensive is because some of the ways in which marginalized identities have practiced their demands or practice our identity politics

has been herochial and limited to their own specific needs. That's a dead end. And that's why I think, and if you think also, if you look back to the origin of identity politics, I talk about in the book, the origin of the term, it was always only ever meant to be the beginning of a movement in which people interlocked, right? When women, people of color,

gay and bisexual people, queer, transsexual people, all kind of tried to figure out the intersections, you know, the places where their discriminations were similar, the places where their experiences were similar, so that they could create a large coalition that could push everyone's cause forward. But what has happened, unfortunately,

is a Balkanization of identity politics. So you've got Latinos, African Americans, immigrants, Muslims, people who identify as color but don't identify as black. And they have been broadcasting or making the case for their issues in ways that are quite fractured. And so that is a situation in which identity politics is a dead end and it is corrosive. But it's like the people don't aspire to universal values.

It's because these people have not found the right connections with the right groups of people. So just that's a really interesting jumping off point to try to think about the future because this idea of coalitions of inequality. How do you see that potentially moving towards the coalition part? Like where does the impetus come for, as you say, groups that are now quite at times inward looking because they're dealing with very urgent real challenges that affect their specific community? How do they find a way to create those broader alliances that are going to bring about, as you've articulated, this universalization of these universal values that aren't really universal values that aren't really. but could become more so if that broader coalition formed. How does that come about? So we're already seeing this.

It has already come about, or the start of it has already come about, in that, for example, the Black Lives Matter in a movement in the US and the UK from the beginning declared that it was an intersectional movement. The kind of coalition behind Black Lives Matter has become, to use a slight, cheesy term, a rainbow coalition. It has become about, you know, a whole group of people that see themselves as at odds with a racist state or a whiteness-dominated state. And so if you look at the kind of the protest movement, the organizational figureheads of the chapters, the Black Lives Matter movement, they are Muslims, Asians, immigrants, natives, and black people. It's

It is fascinating to me how un-black, really, if you look at it, the Black Lives Matter movement has become, because the word black has become a political word, meaning non-white. And one of the most beautiful things that I saw after the events of last summer is that the funds that were dispersed after this kind of fit of donations for the Black Lives Matter movement, The funds that were dispersed, this is not something you'll see in the mainstream media, the funds were dispersed to so many different small organizations that worked across the board from domestic violence to giving shelters to vulnerable women, to legal aid for asylum seekers and refugees,

to interpreters and translators for immigrants who couldn't speak English, to voter registration charities and to bail funds. And so that is what I mean when I say coalition is the only way forward, in that little by little, what you do is you unmarginalize the marginalized. And when you unmarginalized people with whom you have common cause, you will suddenly accrue power, because those people will not be oppressed by their male partners and violent and therefore cannot come and meet you and create a coalition with you.

They will not be limited because they can't speak English. They will not be limited because they're incarcerated because they couldn't afford legal defense. So there is like an entire army of people across this coalition that is not even limited to race. It's also about gender and sexuality and legal settled status. It's also about immigrants versus citizens, that once they are empowered, will make it much easier to kind of march towards these universal values, which are equality, human rights for all,

due process, all these things that we all want and aspire to. But you can't achieve it on your own. You have to create a coalition, and it's already happening. I've got it. Just to pause for one quick moment to remind viewers that if you're enjoying these monk dialogues, please consider becoming a monk member by making a donation to our charity.

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becoming a donor to the monk debates. Nazarene, this conversation is really unfolding nicely, and we're kind of, again, following each other here in terms of ideas. And I want to put this next quote up on the board. It's short, concise to the point, but it has some really interesting ideas embedded within it. And the quote is, most civilizations are, in relative terms, more advanced than the last in technology and law,

but not more advanced in absolute terms. So explain to us what you mean by that, because many people would be challenged by that statement. They would say, no, there is a story of progress that we can discern for the last 200 years of history, a story of increasing levels of personal and human. freedom, of people being able to be safer, live longer, all these things that are, in a sense, part of a Western conception of the direction, the progress of our society. So you're acknowledging

that there is progress, but that it's specific to an aspect of our society and not the totality of it. So it's two things, actually. And I can understand why that might seem like a slightly flat estimation of the very complex and rich ways in which we have come along as a society. So two things I mean to say about progress. Number one, because we have made progress doesn't mean that there is no more progress to be made. And that is what I mean when I say progress is not absolute. This is specifically in terms,

I think this quote specifically in terms in the book to what I call the tool of progress, which is an argument of tool that people throw at you when you complain about, for example, gender inequality in Western societies, or when you complain about sort of the inefficiency of the legal system. The first question I get, particularly as an immigrant, is, well, if you don't like it, you could go back to the countries that you came from or that you grew up in that are far less advanced on the progress scheme than we are, particularly in terms of gender equality. And it's a sort of chilling argument, because what it does is it stops you from asking for more rights that you deserve, because you've already been given some.

And so this idea of progress as something that we should sort of slap, pat ourselves on the back for and be incredibly grateful for our kind of longer life expectancies, for the fall in the infant mortality rate, for the integration of women in the workplace, reproductive rights, civil rights. All these things are amazing and huge and without them. I could not be sitting here today, but they are not everything. there are still ways in which women are massively enfranchised. We just have to look at the way the pandemic has played out over the past year in Western societies,

where women were hit the most. There is a staggering figure where 90% of people who lost their jobs in the pandemic in 2020 were women. Because they have, a because they are structural discrimination against them, but also because they tend to work in jobs that don't give them the same rights and the same flexibilities that men do. They tend to be more precarious work. And so there are, there's a kind of tense stability because of the progress that we have. But we don't really look behind the scenes and say,

what kind of progress have we made? What does it look like for these people whose lives are longer, but what jobs are they doing? So it takes me to my second argument, which is that actually in some areas we have not made progress. and that some of the progress that we have made has come at the expense of progress in other areas. So if you look at, for example, the types of jobs that we do these days, again, something that the pandemic highlighted, the types of jobs that we do these days that have managed to accrue massive wealth and prosperity

and increase living standards for many people in the kind of managerial and entrepreneurial class are zero hours precarious jobs that have no pension, have no health care, have no holiday pay, have no recourse to swing your employer for discrimination. And so we have built some of our progress on the backs of an entire class of precarious workers. And what happened when the pandemic hit these precarious workers? They lost their jobs first, or they had to keep doing their jobs because they couldn't afford to shield because they didn't have sick pay, they could do their jobs from home,

then they got ill and they succumbed to the illness. Who does these jobs? Who is the kind of modern-day slave, who gets to create this outsized wealth for higher classes, people of color, immigrants, people without papers, people without official status? And so I would doubt if you spoke to that class, that they would feel that the progress that we have made over the past 200 years or since the Enlightenment

is something they should feel particularly pleased about. Yeah, fair point. In our remaining time together, I want to push us towards solutions or in a sense where this conversation about race and identity goes from here. This is a long quote of yours, but bear with me because it contains a number of important ideas. It goes as follows. The new stories we need to tell each other are not just the corrections of old stories. For societies to involve an old order must change.

We cannot pick and choose the elements of progress that suit our own demographic preferences. Ways of life that do not modify themselves will invariably disintegrate. The only way to preserve the good that exists in our societies today is to allow it to wreck the bat. So maybe we could deal with this kind of thesis in a sense about the future Nazarene in two parts. The first being what are you getting at when you're talking about, you know, not just correcting old stories, but a new order. How different is that new order? What does it comprise? What are its kind of its hallmarks? And in a sense, what does it, what does, what does it look like once we've replaced what we have today with this this different this different possible

future so the correction of old stories which is I think not the way to go about change is essentially trying to bring about change within the system that already exists so an example of that is diversity initiatives, particularly since the summer of last year, but generally, I would say over the past 20, 30 years, the left or the sort of progressive left in Western countries has decided that the way to tackle racial inequality is to focus on diversity or diversity initiatives. Diversity initiatives mean that people try and get a black face on a board. They try and increase the number of people of color in a certain workplace. they try and make their products, their goods and services, less exclusive and more colorful, shall we say, no pun intended,

because they are not kind of intimidating or don't resonate with people of color. These kinds of diversity initiatives are broadly a dead end because what they do is they simply populate these broken spaces in which the people I spoke about right at the beginning, the powerful people at the top, continue to maintain and hold and pull believers of power. And all that the diverse people do when they are in these spaces is either co-sign them, give them legitimacy, or they have to leave because they realize that they're not really changing anything.

So one of the ways in which rewriting the old stories has become thwarted is by thinking that if we just increase the diversity of elite spaces, if we just increase the number of faces that look slightly unfamiliar, then that is progress, and that eventually that diversity will lead to a world in which people think differently, have more radical ideas about racial equality, gender equality, etc. That does not work because fundamentally nothing changes. So the second part of that is, what is the alternative to diverse?

The alternative diversity is to create power structures that are parallel and competitive to the old power structures. And that is something that I have personally found really invigorating in that you don't really have to wait, for example, elite media institutions such as New York Times to cover or narrate the experience of people of color in the United States or all over the world. You can set up your own small venture. You can write it on social media. You can kind of try and narrate yourself in ways that are not just about waiting for the gatekeepers to be interested in your experience.

One of the first ways this has happened, which has been very exciting, is the way in which social media and smaller online media organizations have really begun to challenge and oppose. the extremely embedded unipolar world of the Western media that concentrated very much in the elite white spaces on the East and the West. You have the funds, you don't have the political power, you don't have the private, the expensive education, but you do have your people and your experiences and your stories. And that creates a very strong counterbalance to these forces that hitherto seemed completely unassailable.

Mm-hmm. And I mean, this is personal for you and that you've been a member of The Guardian as a columnist or writer. You've in a sense been subject to, as you relate in the book, discrimination as a woman who is writing in ways that, your readers react to, that frankly is racist. And are you seeing, are you hopeful that there's

something different that's happening in these mainstream organizations like The Guardian or the New York Times? Is there a reason to expect that, you know, you're still there? So I guess you have some hope that the change of these larger institutions from within is in fact possible. So this is a difficult question because I don't think my presence on its own says an awful lot because there are not many other people who look like me or have my background. And so I feel quite limited in what I can achieve because I don't have that sort of contextual backup. that I was referencing earlier when I talked about these alternative spaces that can challenge the traditional structures of power. And so I look at younger women of color in the UK in particular who have set up news and opinion websites

that are very unabashedly about the kind of political needs of people of color and particularly women of color. And I envy them because I see that they have. something that my generation did not have in that they have strength in numbers, they have the confidence and the conviction of the sort of solidarity of their tribe to when they set up these small media organizations really challenge the mainstream narratives and the mainstream establishments that have one of me if we're lucky. And so I guess I'm optimistic in general because I think that the media space has become much more exciting and much more reflective, more importantly, of the real world. And the kind of the channels for these new stories are really growing.

But I guess I'm only optimistic vis-à-vis the mainstream media establishments in the sense that I hope that they will somehow either diminish in status or diminish a little. the power that they have because there are these new players and influencers, or they will have to change in a way that is so fundamental that they no longer exist in the way that we know them and are familiar with them, which is allow the good to wreck the bad. And I think one of the things that we have been very bad at with the culture wars, particularly since 2016,

since Trump's election and since Brexit in the UK, is that we have tried to kind of, in the face of these extremely damning, in-your-face movements of social exclusion, white supremacy and fascism, really, tried to respond, or liberals and progressives, try to respond along the lines of, okay, but maybe if we just trim this bit

off what's happening, this, like, bad bit that's, rotten, we will be fine because the centre is still holding and it's still virtuous and benign when actually this bit that is corrupt and rotting and needs to be cut off did come from the centre. And so one thing that is very liberating is that once you are faced with these very damning facts where people are marching on the capital and members of Congress are cowering in in their safe rooms in the seat of power,

United States, when you were faced with these things, you need to understand that something has gone terribly wrong and that this is a bad system and it needs to be wrecked and replaced by something completely new and not modified or reformed. Well, just before we go to your book recommendations to wrap up our dialogue, let's spend just a little bit more on the second half

of this final quote of yours. And you've just talked about it. The ways of life that do not modify themselves will inevitably disintegrate. I just want to kind of push you a little bit because you and I think a lot of people in society feel that the existing power structures are so powerful that they contain, you know, in their hands the levers of capital, the systems of social control. So where does the optimism that you seem to have come from in terms of the inevitability of change? Am I right that maybe you see a kind of an inherent weakness in this systems, a fragility? That maybe they're unaware of. This is an excellent question because there are kind of two types of change that I'm talking about.

I don't have a polliana view about the inevitability of change. I don't think, and actually there is a quote in the book, I remember correctly, change is always possible. It's not inevitable, but it is always possible. I think that there is the potential for change always, but the inevitability of change is not a given. When I talk about disintegration of societies, I'm not talking about the collapse of the nodes of power. I'm talking about, you know, increasing poverty. I'm talking about opiate addiction. I'm talking about the inflation and our size power of lobbies in the health firm insurance companies, for example.

The societies that we live in, I think, at the moment, are in the process of wrecking themselves. If you look outside the sort of comfortable mainstream, there are crises upon crises. that we are firefighting all the time. Again, look at the pandemic. The pandemic has exposed the sort of fragility of our healthcare system. It's exposed the weakness of our infrastructure and our inability to respond to crises

in ways that are fast and efficient. It has exposed the dearth of our intellectual capital when faced with these challenges. Our societies are not thriving. Certain people are thriving. Certain powerful institutions are thriving. but our societies are fraying and in the process of getting wrecked. And so when I talk about sort of inevitability of the collapse of the system

when these sort of sources of power don't modify themselves and don't allow change to happen, I am not talking about their collapse. I'm talking about kind of fires being lit all around them and then also having to kind of redirect, to try and put out those fires. That's not a stable system. That's not a stable society. Something we should aspire to.

And it's something that we should feel very urgently concerned about. And what I'm trying to do with the book, and this is where I'm hopeful, is I think that there is an awareness that all these crises are kind of coming to a head. In that sense, I think Trump was very good for this conversation. I think Brexit was very good for this conversation. good for this conversation. And I think also not to sound kind of cynical about it, but I think the rise of white supremacy has also woken people up to realizing that our society is incredibly volatile and weak and vulnerable. And I think the pandemic has moved that conversation on

even further. So my optimism comes from not the sense that change is going to happen immediately or even inevitably, but that there is an understanding, finally, I think, a growing understanding that these societies that we created on the back of hundreds of years of enlightenment thinking and scientific progress and liberalism are maybe not all they are cracked up to be. Well said. Well, Nazir, we end all these programs with recommendations for books for our members to read that kind of build on the ideas that we've talked about. So you are kind enough to present us with two books. Let's briefly talk about them both.

The first mistaken identity, the second, the age of anger. Why did you choose these books for us? So these books are sorted by Bibles when it comes to thinking about, number one, the way in which identity politics has gone wrong. And number two, the way in which what we are going through today is related to a pattern that has happened several times before. So mistaken identity by Asad Haider, I think, is the only book one should read about identity politics, because it's not reflexively negative about identity politics. It understands the power of politics, but it also is very clear-eyed about all the ways in which the left and progressives have practiced identity politics and fractured the cause and balkanized political demands. So that is the kind of quintessential coalitions are the way forward piece of work.

Pankaj Mishra's age of anger was very helpful to me, and Pankaj Mishra's writings in general, very helpful to me in things. about what we're going through now, not as this kind of singular moment of crisis, but a continuation and an echo and a relation to crises that have happened in the past when societies empower certain identities and scare them into thinking that they are under threat. So I found there was something quite comforting in that to know that what we are going through at the moment and that these myths in general have a long history and that they are challenges that human beings have had to grapple with for a very long time. And so it made me feel that we're not sort of uniquely cursed

and at the same time that because those societies found a way to redeem themselves, there is redemption for us as well. Positive note, necessary for us to end on. I just want to thank you for this book. We Need New Stories. I've really enjoyed it. You've taken some different permutations and slices on this important conversation that we're having

about our democracy, our society at this moment. And I just urge our viewers to add, We Need New Stories to their summer reading list, thoughtful, meaty, important. read for all of us in 2021. So Nazarene, thank you for coming on the Monk Dialogues. Hopefully we can find an opportunity to host you here in Toronto in person. This was not second best, but it would be absolutely fabulous to have a conversation like

this with you with our Monk members in person on a stage in Toronto. I'm very grateful. And can I just say it's such a refreshing, stimulating, in spirit. experience to be able to do a long-form conversation about these ideas. Because there is just no way that we can excavate or explore or even doubt ourselves if we have to do it in these short, pugilistic slots. So I'm very grateful for this. Wow, we're grateful for your time today. Thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, that was Nazarene Malik in our latest monk dialogue. Just a reminder, we do these every two weeks leading up to the end of July.

Our next monk dialogue is coming up with big thinker Timothy Snyder on June 17th at 8 p.m. Timothy is one of the world's leading kind of historians on the rise of authoritarianism. It has some really provocative and interesting views on the challenges that democracies will face in the 21st century in terms of confronting the threat of authoritarian states. So catch that dialogue on June 17th at 8 p.m. I'd also just like to remind you if you've enjoying these monk dialogues, please consider Monk membership. Again, all kinds of great benefits that we have for you,

for those who'd like to make a donation to our charity. Please consider becoming a member 20% off right now with the promo code, monk 20 at our website, monkdebates.com. Thank you also to all the groups who have made these dialogues possible, the Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundation. Thank you for your leadership on this. Gluskin Chef and Onix, our presenting sponsors, our supporting sponsors,

Bond brand loyalty and Tories, Facebook, our social media partner, thank you, and our production partners, Amber Mac and Creative Harbor. Thank you, guys. Well, that wraps up our show. We'll do this all again in two weeks with Timothy Snyder.

Please tune in then. In the meantime, be well, be safe, and stay in dialogue. We'll catch you then. Bye, bye.