TRIGGERnometry - Lionel Shriver on Censorship, Cancel Culture and Free Speech

Episode Date: June 9, 2019

Here's a fascinating conversation we recorded with journalist and award-winning novelist Lionel Shriver. Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin. And this is a show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts. We ask the experts. Our brilliant guest this week is a journalist and an award-winning novelist. Lionel Shriver, welcome to Trichonometry. Thanks. Nice to be here. It's so good to have you here. Well, let's, before we dive into things, just tell, Most people will know exactly who you are, but for anyone who doesn't, tell everybody who are you, what's your story, what's your journey through life, and how are you here today? How long have you got?

We've got exactly an hour, I'll know. Then I'll keep it. I'm primarily a novelist, though I have done increasing amounts of mostly opinion, journalism, some features in the last several years. I currently have a column in Standpoint and in Harbors Magazine in the U.S. You can tell by my accent that I'm American, but I have been in the U.K. over 30 years. So I've really protected that accent. I'm probably best known for my seventh novel. We Need to Talk About Kevin, but I have published several since then.

I guess I'm currently at 13 books. My most recent book was a collection of short stories and novellas called Property, and the novel before that was The Mandibles, a family, 2029 to 2047, and that's about economic apocalypse in the United States and in the near future. Nice positive subject. I'm a cheerful person. Well, one of the things you've been writing extensively about, and I imagine it might be a frustration for you,

given how accomplished you are as a novelist, that interviews often end up being about the journalists side of things. But an issue that, as you know, we've encountered on the show and I've personally encountered is free speech and censoriousness on student campuses and so on. And it's a conversation that's ongoing. One of the things I wanted to ask you about is, because we're trying to work it out for ourselves is one of the arguments that often gets made on the progressive side is that free, we have free speech.

You're free to say what you want. And if other people take issue with that and mob you on Twitter or get you fired, well, those are the consequences of your freedom of speech and that's all fine. What do you make of that argument? Well, you caught the problem in a nutshell. If what you say gets you fired, then that's not free speech. I mean, that's why we're encountering so much self-censorship right now because I think that identity politics has brought in a very fearful cultural environment. So we don't know how much people in my profession, for example, are not.

writing things because there's no record of what you don't do, right? There's no record of what you think but don't allow yourself to say. And I resist the whole climate. I resist the idea that there are a set of opinions which everyone must subscribe to and any tiny departure from that. Any use of language that isn't following these very strict rules is going to get you in terrible trouble. So, you know, it's unhealthy. Now, we talk about, especially in comedy, the comedy industry is one giant, ultra-liberal bubble. And they would say, first of all, there's no issue with free speech. How can they be? You can say what you like, how you like, when you like.

And they also say that free speech as well is a right-wing issue. It's just for people on the fringes who want to shout racial epithets. Where do you stand on that? I think the fact that free speech has shifted from the left to the right is a catastrophe. In truth, it doesn't belong to either side. It's something that belongs to all of us. And if the right loses the right to say what it wishes, then that's a loss for the left as well because sooner or later that kind of restriction is going to hit you.

I think that's one of the biggest mistakes that the millennial left tends to make is they think they're always going to be in a position of calling the shots and making the rules. And so because they're so right on, because they're so woke, that's the climate of fear that I'm talking about that is restrictive. It does keep people from saying things. It does restrict freedom of speech. That's not going to affect them because they have the right opinion. So that when they voice the right opinions, then they're never going to get into trouble and they're never going to lose their jobs and they're never going to suffer from a pile on in Twitter that gives them a nervous breakdown.

Right? Because they're good people, right? But it's a huge mistake. It's like young people always thinking that they're going to be young forever, right? Which all young people did. Is that not true? Is that not true? I'm sorry to break it to you. I know this is going to ruin your day. But eventually someone else sets the rules.

And if you have not allowed a cultural latitude for expressing something that departs from the orthodoxy of the day, then your restrictive environment is going to bite you in your own bum. And therefore, it isn't a left or right-wing issue. And this whole idea that the only reason people keep nattering on about free speech is that they just want to use racist language and promote bigotry. Well, it's a bigotry and it's an ignorance. And where do you think it comes from this desire to be censorious, this desire to shut

down opinions that you feel uncomfortable listening to? Do you think it comes from a position of intolerance? Or do you think it's a misguided sense of good in trying to, you know, eliminate people who have got unpleasant views, as it were? Well, it feels good to tell people what to do. Now, I believe that a lot of the people who are the self-appointed enforcers of what we are and are not allowed to say, They think they're motivated by virtue. They do. But I think the thrill of it isn't the thrill of doing good.

I think the thrill of it is authoritarian, that you're pushing other people around, you're punishing them when they get out of line. It's all about power. And do you think a narcissism plays a certain aspect of it, For instance, with the Roger Scruton affair, when George Eaton essentially helped to get Roger Scruton fired, he put a post on Instagram with himself swigging a bottle of champagne saying that, I'm quoted, I'm misquoted, I'm probably quoting, but essentially he said that feeling you get when you get a racist sect.

Yeah, well, I mean, that's a good example. He'd bagged a trophy. This is actually a predatory sport. and getting people sacked is now one of the things that you do on social media and even now, because that was the New Statesman, in mainstream media, I thought that was especially unseemly. It surprised me that that happened at the New Statesman.

It's interesting you say and what Francis says because I know that I play computer games sometimes and that feeling where you have the ability to type something into your own little computer and a human being on the other end of that communication does something different or something happens. You know, you get even on this platform Twitch, which is where you watch other people play computer games. I'm sorry. Yes, I'm very sad. I said there's a platform that exists.

How I know about it is unclosed. I guess that means that. that for that audience, the paint has already dried. Yeah. And so one of the things that happens, and you're not going to believe this, is they find out where that person lives who is streaming this game themselves,

and they get a SWAT team. They complain about them saying there's some kind of terrorist activity happening at that address, and they get a SWAT team to come in and knock the door down and arrest them or take them into custody while it's happening. there is that level of, oh, if I do this here, then that thing happens over there. And do you think that that is what's happening with these Twitchfork mobs, the Twitter mobs, where essentially it's about power.

It's about... It's totally about power. And the exercise of power. And one thing is interesting in the young adult fiction area, which has gone particularly nuts. I don't understand why. But a number of the writers on some of these platforms who have been the most vociferous, the most censorious, the most predatory, have also been converted to prey when they publish their own work. and they've got a character who is gay and they're not gay or something like that. And then they end up suffering from the same mass attack that they had been organizing against other people.

There's a certain rough justice in that. There are some people, particularly people who are against that kind of ideology, who rub their hands in glee at this and go, well, look, the left is easy. eating itself and whatever. And that worries me because I think in a way we're all eating ourselves when that happens. Do you know what I mean? I don't think it's healthy when...

I don't think it's healthy when that happens to anyone. No, it isn't. I mean, I say that there is some rough justice in that, but it would be better if we were not living in a world that this was happening at all. And I'm concerned that this whole pylon mentality is infecting major institutions. It's possible I'll write my column about this coming weekend, but the best example I can think

of is what happened this week at Harvard, where one of the professors at the law school, very distinguished. I think he's a dean. part of the team who represented Harvey Weinstein and the students got up in arms. And the administration backed down and sacked him. And this is completely contrary to the principles of law. I mean, this should have been, what do they call it, a teaching moment. It's like, sorry, but no matter how perfidious a character may be, everyone is deserving of legal representation. And just because you represent someone legally, that doesn't, you know, what they did is

not supposed to rub off on you. You know, just because you represent someone, you're not responsible for what they did or didn't do. That's the way the legal system works. And yet, just a bunch of students saying they were uncomfortable and felt unsafe and just all this nonsense, all this utterly insincere crap. And we could get to that in a moment. Harvard caved. Harvard.

Harvard. So the worry is not so much social media. You know, if it's contained to Twitter, et cetera. It's painful. It's gross. It's impolite. And it's cutthroat. But the implications are limited.

They're no longer limited. We are now in a mob rule universe. And across the board, mainstream institutions are caving to the pressure of the crowd and throwing principal out the window. The same thing is starting to happen in publishing. That's where we should really be concerned. Every once in while someone in publishing or academia will draw the line, but that's not the form, that's the exception.

And how is it affecting the world of publishing in your own experience? I think it's making publishers very nervous. There was a case very recently of a book about Israel that was cancelled because of, again, more mob hysteria that it got something wrong in a very pro-Palestinian social. media universe. And that's starting to happen more and more. I'm interested that the term cancel culture has entered the vocabulary. That's concerning because when you need a name for it, then it's happening more than wise. Your point about institutions, I think, is a really important

one. We were just at a conference on freedom and academic research. And there was probably 20 or so prominent academics there. We talked to Douglas Murray there. We interviewed him there. And just the people went around the room and it was 10 or 15 people who detailed their own experience of being fired or no platformed or losing something because of this. And so you say Twitter and I take a point about if it's just contained to Twitter, then that's one thing. But I think what, as you say, the society we're living now is the Twitter mob has power or the student mob has power. Why do you think, because you've written about this and talked about how your generation growing up, you also did some of these things,

protesting about stuff and whatever. But how do we, how did we get to a point where we don't go, oh, these are just silly students doing their thing, they need to rebel against something. How do we get to a point where we went from that to these students are protesting and we must take action? It's a little mystifying, but it is, it has something to do with commerce. I mean, I mean, academia has gone through a transformation to regard itself more as a business. And therefore, the customers are saying, you know, we don't like your product, so we need to change the product.

I think it's an unfortunate way of thinking about higher education, but it's, it changes behavior. I also get the impression from people I've spoken to who work at universities that the people who exercise the most power now is the administration and not faculty. There's been a reduction in tenure. But there must have been some reorganization as well. It's worse than just not having enough tenured professors. but they don't call the shots anymore. And administrators are bureaucrats, and bureaucrats are famously cowardly.

So it's the bureaucrats who are making these decisions. And it's the bureaucrats who have been instrumental in turning these often storied, culturally vital institutions into Walmart. And so as far as they're concerned, you know, if there are enough of the customers are upset, then you remove the product from the shelves. And do you think the fact that we've introduced tuition fees and now it's £9,000 a year in the UK to go to university here, do you think that makes it worse now? Now that the fact, you know, that you're paying, you know, 27,000 purely in tuition fees

and you've got your accommodation books on top, people now feel that they have a right to go. if I don't agree with this, I can now get rid of it. The money here may have something to do with it, the 9,000 pounds a year is so dwarfed by what you pay for private college education in the U.S. It's hilarious. It's like spare change. And I suspect that what's going on in UK universities

is less financial and more having inherited a cultural backwash from academia in the United States. We do get a lot from you guys, don't we? Yeah. You don't look so excited about that. Well, you know, I'm cool about the movies. I even like, you know, when Breaking Bad comes over here, all that's great. but the inheritance from the U.S. is a little too indiscriminate. This is an unfortunate contagion.

And I have found it mystifying, frankly, why this academic culture has spread throughout the West. I mean, it's even weirder in Canada. and it's lunatic in Australia. There's something odd going on in the Commonwealth. Even there's a goofball contingent in Ireland. It seems to have spread everywhere. And it's as if the world of higher education lives in a all together in its own bubble

and has gone insane together. find out of the fact that physically they're all over the planet. How that works, I don't get it. I mean, maybe they go to a lot of conferences. But it seems quite puritanical in nature as well. Recently, I've got a complaint against myself from the comedy club. Or I'm out. But for a joke I made, I'm half Latin American, I make a joke about it when I was 18.

I tried to get in touch with my Latino roots. That's just a long way of saying, I used to do cocaine. And somebody emailed in and said, as a Latin American woman, I find that offensive, especially from a man in power. And it's just... Is that true? You're in power? Yeah, I know.

She thinks you're a man in power, Jesus Christ. I love that. I've met me for 15 minutes and goes, this is clearly wrong. You should meet my girlfriend. You will find she makes all the shots. You know that audience member was deluded just because they thought you have power. But it's just amazing. And her attitude was, I don't like it, therefore we should get rid of it.

That's right. Yeah. And this is the kind of, you know, you began the discussion about freedom of speech. And, of course, we all have freedom of speech, so what's the problem? This is a good example. Now, it's true that the police didn't knock it down your door and didn't throw you in a cell and put duct tape over your mouth. But, you know, she felt she had the right to tell you you couldn't make that joke. And maybe you will think twice about that.

making it the next day. And you just did it again. Yeah. We're all rebels in this room. But I do take your point, sorry to entourage. I do take your point, though, I mean, I'm just bloody-minded by nature, but somebody who has got, you know, more of a career and they've got a mortgage, they would then feel, is it worth it to go and, you know, keep investigating this particular point or whatever else?

Well, I know that it's a big problem for professional comedians. I mean, it's becoming illegal to be funny. and that's also a problem for me because my novels and even my columns tend to be quite irreverent and there's certain kinds of jokes that we are being repeatedly informed

you may not make anymore one of the things I find really interesting is that as both of us are working comedians is you often, you go on stage and you do a joke that you've worked out very carefully and you know that you're not punching down at any oppressed group or anything else. For example, I have a whole routine about why we need the Special Olympics for white people, right? And it's making fun of the fact that white people are not very good at certain things, right?

So I'm punching up at the white people in this whole woke way of thinking. But the moment you start talking about that, people get super tense. Yeah, they do. Which makes it harder to get them to laugh. Even though the target of that joke isn't an oppressed group, but they just hear the words race or something like that, and automatically everyone tenses up. And this is why I think what you're talking about,

this whole culture that is not necessarily yet reflected in law, although it's getting there. I mean, I know you've talked about transgender issues a lot. There are people who have been arrested for misgendering someone on Twitter. Yeah, I know. It's a hate crime. Yeah, it's a hate crime. So...

A pronoun. A pronoun. A pronoun. Is a hate crime. Yeah. But you see, I'm still trying to work it out for myself because the argument that I put to you right at the beginning is the argument that I hear back when I talk about free speech, which is, but it's still not illegal.

You can still go and do your jokes. You can still go and perform, right? And if people don't like it, well, it's your problem. And I don't really know necessarily what to say back to that. Do you? Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world. So let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality.

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Well, it is often on the way to being illegal. I mean, that whole pronoun thing. I don't think the test of censorship is necessarily law, however. If socially and professionally, you cannot allow something to escape your lips. That's not free speech. I mean, we're not going to get into what the limits of free speech ought to be necessarily, but I think there should be very few. What do you think should be the limits on free speech?

And I think that the, well, incitement to violence. That's where I draw the line. But otherwise, I'm perfectly happy for people to say all the ugly, bigoted, stupid things they want. And then we can say back that they're ugly, bigoted and stupid rather than tell people that they simply can't say them. So I tend to be on the extreme end.

And I'm very hostile to the evolution of hate crime and hate speech. I just talk about slippery slope. What does hate speech mean to you? because you put it in inverted commas? In that the definition of hate speech is continually changing, it's anything that can be construed as hostile to some protected group.

And I think the whole idea of having legally protected groups is off the beam. I grew up with the understanding that equality under the law is one of the principles the absolute bedrock principles of democracy. And the law applies equally to all of us. And all this specially protected groups means, no, it doesn't.

No, it doesn't. And we keep multiplying the specially protected groups, which is why they're fighting over the meaning of Islamophobia. So suddenly we're going to have one religion, among all religions, only one religion is going to be specially protected. And there's no end to this, you know. It potentially just keeps multiplying. It is legally speaking an evil concept to have hate speech be against the law.

And especially now that the whole area of hate speech and hate crime, they're defined by the victim. The only thing that makes something a hate crime is that I said it was. You know, you looked at me funny. And I think it was because I was a woman. So that's a hate crime. You know? And you can be arrested. Honestly, that's the way it gets recorded.

That's all that's required is that I decide or you decide that you're the victim of a hate crime and then there's a hate crime. Now, that's utterly absurd. And what I find as well is that how people, you know, take snippets from conversations, which we saw with the Roger Scruton affair. And then it's out of context. and then that is seen as them being racist, sexes, whatever else. You know, like what you just said to me, that could be taken out of context. And like, here's a classic example of being sexist. Get rid of him.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that happened to me about a year ago with a column I did for The Spectator. And it was one line taken out of context, and Spectator has a paywall. Not that most of these people would bother to look up the larger column any. way. So, and then it spread like wildfire and suddenly Wynel Shriver's a racist. Although that label is got it so tired. Whenever I hear it now, I just laugh. It's interesting to watch how that word has completely lost its punch. I think that's one of the reason that we now call everyone a white supremacist because racist doesn't mean anything anymore. Well, I don't think

White supremacist means anything anymore. No, no. It used to mean something. Sure. As soon as we started calling everyone a white supremacists, then there's no such thing as white supremacist anymore. It used to be a useful term. It identified a very tiny number of people.

And the way that you could tell that they were white supremacists is that if you ask them they were, they'd say, hell yeah. Because real white supremacists feel superior and are very proud of of the fact that they're white and better than you. So we've lost that term. That's interesting. It's such a good point. This is the thing that worries me most about this concept creep

is that there are white supremacists. And they're losing their identity. We need to protect them. Thank you for that, Francis. Sorry, Kerry one. There are white supremacists. There are people who are racist. There are neo-Nazis.

And we have to know who they are. And now the neo-Nazis. Nazis are just Brexiteers. Oh, well, I'm a Nazi. When I turned down that contract from SOAS, the mental comedian went on the radio and called me, oh, right, and said, I'm a Nazi. I mean, I'm Jewish.

You're a self-hating. You're a self-hating. You've got internalized. You're a crypto-Nazi. And the thing is where the, look, my great-grandfather died fighting the Germans in World War II, right? I wonder how he would feel about my transformation into a Nazi.

In context, probably proud. We're living in a world of ever-escalating denunciation. And what that means is that the vocabulary goes to shit because nothing means anything anymore. The language becomes impoverished. And none of these words mean anything anymore. I've seen it before because I lived for 12 years in Belfast and they were, you know, for decades accustomed to the language of denunciation because every time there was an atrocity, every

time a bond went off, every time someone was assassinated, then all the politicians competed with one another about who could be more disgusted and who could deplore the depravity of these animals more. And it was hilarious to watch the language just go into contortions. I mean, their the, their, their thesaurus is must have, you know, leafy and fat, because eventually you run out. And eventually, of course, all those denunciations were completely meaningless. It could have been past the salt. And the same thing is happening now. And in some ways, because I don't have need for these terms myself very much,

I don't mind getting all worn out because I'm tired of this culture of denunciation. And I'm tired of the super sensitivity around race. And it's kind of amusing to watch the word racist turn into, I don't like you. That's all it means. That's what it means. The one thing that I find particularly worrying about this is that it gives the far right some legitimate arguments to go, free speech is under threat. Here's an example.

Here's another example. Here's another example. You've got the left. They're not going to stand up for you. Who's going to stand up for you? I will. I'm serious. Yeah.

Because I'm not on the right. And, you know, one of the reasons I've written more journalism, I'm not a natural altruist, and I'm not a natural activist. But honestly, somebody's got to talk sense from a liberal perspective. And there are, you know, there are any number of people who are doing it, and they garner huge audiences. And you've interviewed some of them already. And they're not all super famous, but people like Brendan O'Neill or Ella Wheelan, you know, very encouraging examples, both of them, because they're young, you know. and they're thinking for themselves and they're liberally minded.

There's a huge hunger, not just from the right, but from the center and the center left, for people talking about the importance of free speech for everyone, for standing up to bullies who are trying to silence people on campus, for trying to keep the larger, the public square of discourse large enough for everyone to speak their mind. And, you know, if you go on YouTube, some of these people garner huge, huge audiences. So there's an appetite out there. And in some ways, I guess I've become the poster girl for fiction writers because they've been notably silent. You know? And I find that peculiar because we depend on free speech, occupational.

And, you know, instead I hear any number of fiction writers trying to restrict themselves, you know, to support this idea that, you know, you have to stay in your lane and not. right about characters who are different from you or have a different race or have a different sexual inclination or something, why would you do that to yourself? It's like, it's like walking into your study and tying your hands behind your back. It's just crazy. It's very true. And I was thinking when you described yourself as a liberal, I found that shocking is a wrong word, but I used to describe myself as a liberal.

I just don't feel comfortable describing myself as a liberal anymore because people I now associate as being inverted commas liberal, to me behave in the most illiberal fashion possible. Have you noticed that the people who would, on the left, who would used to have used the word liberal, don't use it very much anymore? Progressive, yes. Took over liberal. And I think that's apt. I think it's telling and I think it's apt. After all, the word progressive is fundamentally meaningless. It only made it going forward. And it's like I wrote in a column at some point, you can go forward into a pit.

What I find interesting is the flip that has happened because you keep talking about young people. Even we're old enough to remember when it was the right who were censorious. It was the religious right who was saying you shouldn't talk about sex. TV, you shouldn't do this, you shouldn't do that, you mustn't talk about that, the tip of the world, and now it's been completely flipped? Yeah, and I think that's one advantage to being older. I mean, I'm always looking for them. Having lived through the 60s and having experienced all the restriction coming from in

the US, of course, it would be the Republicans, I was born. at the tail end of the McCarthy or I wouldn't have looked through it but there was still that residue I grew up with a lot of anti-communist guff and and it was still

there were still all these things you couldn't do like take drugs and have sex and have fun and it was of course the left that said we're going to do whatever we want and that you know push

pushed against all the restrictions and, you know, fundamentally changed culture to be more genuinely liberated, where you could do more of whatever you wanted. So that was my understanding of what it meant to be on the left. And it's true. It's completely flipped around. And that's concerning primarily because I don't think it's controversial to say that the left controls the mainstream media and whatever may be going on in the White House still controls most mainstream cultural institutions, not to mention the universities. Oh yes, certainly. Academia is absolutely dominated.

So if all of those institutions, view free speech as a right-wing issue, then we're in trouble because that means that it is, you know, they are institutionally hostile to the constant cept of freedom of speech. I think the moment the left, in terms of, you know, using TV terminology,

jump the shark, as it were, was when they just became absolutely obsessive identity, entity politics. And it's just to the point where everybody has to have a label now. Yeah. We all need to label every single person. You were this, I am this, therefore because you have this label, it means this. And it's such a reductive way. It's retrograde. And what I don't understand is why it's not pointed out more often that it's sexist and racist. We're fundamentally being told that what is most important about are these categories into which we were born and didn't have any choice in, right?

Nobody asked me if I wanted to be white. No, I want to be white. Mommy! And this is more important than anything else about us. It's anti-individual. But it's also, it is, it's racist and sexist. It's saying that whenever I meet anyone, the most important thing that I'm supposed to note about them is the color of their skin, their gender, and their sexual preference,

and maybe whether or not they're disabled. But this is, that defines that person for me. That's, and that's going to govern how I deal with them. Well, I thought that's what we were supposed to get away from. I grew up trying to get away from that, that we were supposed to be able to see, you know, all these stereotypes we have of each other is, and our obsession with these categories into which we fall are impediments to our ability to have equal, fair, and personable relations. And we're not, they are keeping us from being able to see each other as individuals. And the goal of the, the goal of these liberation movements was to release us into a world

in which we are, a world of individuals where we can actually see each other and interact just as people. The identity politics movement is the antithesis of that approach. And to me, it's just, it's so backwards. And I don't understand how they get away with it. I don't understand why that's not more obvious. Well, one of the reasons is that anyone who says it tends to get destroyed. We had a friend of ours who's a rapper, a black guy, come on the show, and he said that, you know, the idea of why privilege is a racist concept.

he said that on the show and good for him yeah and immediately he started getting people calling him all kinds of names trying to show anyone who speaks out particularly if they're from one of those communities are going to get slammed and if you're a straight white man and you say

something about how it's racist oh no if you're straight white man you're not supposed to say any of it all right well the rest of the interview could just be you talking then you've got 20 minutes to say whatever you want and we won't make a piece Please don't do this.

But I think it's a very important point because some of the most horrendous vitriol that I've seen named are, you know, black conservatives. And ironically enough, they get racist abuse held at them from their own community. And it's racist, the terminology that they use. Yeah, because they're Uncle Tom's, their turncoats.

Yeah, I... Actually, there's the guy who was writing in the Times, the New York Times, that was an American slant, about this case at Harvard. His name is Randall Kennedy. This is the second piece of his that I wish I had written. And he's black and he's on the faculty at Harvard. He's really smart and he's very sensible and grounded, perhaps liberally minded in the old sense.

I'm a huge admirer, but I bet he gets all kinds of stick. The terminology is interesting because I'm like, one of the things that happens to us is we are a right wing podcast in inverted comedy. Oh really? Yeah. Apparently. Oh gosh, I wish you told me. Even though Francis's left wing, I'm a kind of a kind of.

of 90s liberal, as I like to call it, before liberals went mental, you know. But just automatically discussing some of these issues, concerns about identity politics, concerns about censoriousness, automatically you're a right wing, you know. And that's why it's so difficult to have these conversations, because when you try to do that, you immediately get bracketed into this little group that's evil, and it's very difficult to get out of. Well, part of the, The problem is these directional terminologies, what their connotations are. There's a fundamental political unfairness to the fact that when you say left wing, it's neutral to good, right?

And if you say right wing, it's evil. And essentially what right wing now means, it doesn't mean that you want a small, state. Oh, I stopped meaning that a long time ago. And you want to balance the budget. It means racist. Oh, excuse me. It means white supremacist. Or I don't know what the next one is. And that's not fair. That's not fair.

It means, I mean, for example, I am an economic conservative. But what word do I get? What direction do I get? Socially, it sounds to me like you're very liberal when you talk about the individual, about sex, drugs, rock and roll, whatever. Yeah, yeah. Well, I am an economic conservative

and a social liberal. And the best ideology I can pinpoint, I roughly call myself a libertarian. The problem with that word in the U.S., is that libertarians have a reputation for being cooks. So they all think that you're obsessed with the gold standard. And there's no logical connection. Whereas in the UK, the problem with that word is no one knows what it means.

Yeah, I know. I've often got blank stairs when I've used it. But it fundamentally reduces to the core principle that you should be able to do whatever you want as long as you don't hurt other people. And that's sometimes been interpreted as meaning that you can't have environmental regulations, which is absurd because if you pollute the environment, then you hurt other people. So I prefer a state that has a light touch. I probably support a flat tax as ultimately the most just, that kind of thing. In directional terms, I think of myself as perpendicular to the left-right axis.

And where we are now, because I think we're quite a challenging moment, but I do see it as being a slight tipping point where people on the left are starting to become more aware that their own side in order to use a, how can I put this technical term, have gone bat shit. Do you think this is going to get better or do you think it's going to get far worse before more people start to wake up? I don't know. I mean, I'm glad to hear you say that. I'm not sure I share that view. My sense is that there is a splitting off of older, classically liberal people who are concerned about what has happened on the hard left.

And, you know, the publisher of Harper's Magazine for whom I have started writing. A good example, Rick MacArthur. I mean, he's, you know, died in the world Democrat, probably roughly my age, maybe a year or two older. But can't stand what's happening on campuses, can't stand all this hysteria and restriction. And there are a lot of people like that. Mark Lila is another one. But again, more my generation. I do not see it happening as much among earlier generations.

That's why I find people like Ella Leland and Brendan. Brendan, sorry. I have named blindness. So encouraging just because not only are they incredibly articulate, but they're younger. And I hope they have a lot of friends. I hope they have a lot of supporters their own age. But I don't meet enough of them. And we often, and because you're so brilliant with words

and summing up what words mean, I hear the term work bandied around a lot. And I can never win, my mom goes to plenty of what is work. And I don't know how to, how would you explain work culture and what the word work means in where we are now? Well, of course, from my perspective, it means self-satisfied, self-righteous, and certain of your own virtue. What's interesting to me about that word, and I've been watching it, is it's been co-opted by the the critics of the wokeery because it sounds kind of stupid and therefore it's very, and

it's monosyllabic, right? We're really tired of the vocabulary that has traditionally been used to denounce the hard left. You know, the snowflake metaphor and the term virtue signaling I think is done pretty heavy lifting and is now worn out. Woke is perfect. And we've just taken it. And I've noticed it's all over the spectator.

And it's being used to make fun of the people who made up the word. And I hear it less and less from the people to whom it describes. So we've stolen. That's a really good point, actually.

Very accurate. And you now have this thing with companies trying to do all these stupid ads where they look at the front of saying, oh, Gillette, no. And there's this phrase now, go woke, go broke, which is a really tightly captured thing of what often happens to businesses

when they dive too deep into this wormhole of intersectionality. So, but you... That's a good example of it having been, it's something like reclaiming, but it in that you never claimed it to the beginning

with, it's, I guess it's just claiming. Just capturing it from the enemy, if you like, if there is such a thing. I've forgotten what I was going to ask, actually. But I think with this whole work thing, and the way you talked about generations as well, it sounds to me like you're not particularly optimistic about how things might be going forward in terms of pushing back against the extremes of this ideology. My sense is that something has to run its course and I guess it's, I mean I keep waiting and it's not over. And I wouldn't be surprised if something happens, something probably big and bad because that is usually what it means when something happens.

that makes all this silly obsession with language and identity seem irrelevant and beside the point and dated. In other words, there's a war, there's a natural cataclysm, there's something terrible. happens. And then it's just all that stuff is over. Because this is definitely first world problem stuff, right? It's people who are just don't have enough to do, don't have enough real problems. Well, I'm offended. Well, I mean, I guess that applies to me as well. You know, in some ways, one of the things I most despair of about the identity politics movement and in general what is happening on the left is that in refuting it, I spend my time and therefore an increasing amount of my precious finite life,

battling ideas that I shouldn't have to battle. The fact that I have ended up spending hour upon hour writing or talking about a concept like cultural appropriation means that in some ways the left has won. That is, they have managed to colonize my life with their stupid idea. Even saying cultural appropriation pains me. And it's one of those concepts that should have been knocked out of the park in five minutes, and it's still hanging around.

And when people get you to spend your time and your intellectual energy, even on refuting this stuff, they have succeeded because they have controlled the conversation. And I'd rather be having a different conversation. So in some ways, I'm very self-conscious about how much I've ended up writing about the constellation of issues that has sprouted up around identity politics. Because I feel as if they have contaminated and infested my mind. And I'll be dead soon, and that's what I did. And there's a way in which it's important to fight these battles, but I think it's also important to keep a sense of proportion

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It's a frustration for us as well because, you know, we've had world-renowned evolutionary psychologists on the show. And instead of talking to them about genuinely fascinating things about human evolution, human history, human behavior, we spent 40 minutes talking about the basic differences between men and women because those things are now in question. And we have to have a world-renowned scientist explained to us that men and women evolved to do different things and therefore their brains are slightly different, therefore you might see certain differences. Instead of talking about something that's actually interesting. I think, ironically, a comedian sum this up the best of a guest we've had on the show, Andrew Dahl, who said, talking about the difference between men and women used to be hack comedy, which only the worst comedians did. Now it's cutting-edge groundbreakers who do it.

You know, and everyone's like, oh, I can't believe someone's telling these truth bombs. It's just ridiculous. So I totally take your point. And thank you for giving us an hour of your time to do that very thing. Oh, good. We've wasted another hour. We wasted it together. That was the pleasant part of it.

Listen, Lionel, thank you so much for coming on. Tell us, our last question always is, what do you think is the one thing that we're not talking about? And this may tie into what we've just talked about. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be talking about? Population. That's been my pet subject since I was 16 years old, and it still is. And I was right.

And it is the most important issue in the world. It was when I was 16. It is even more so now. And all this talk about, we're all obsessed with the climate change issue. Nobody talks about where it's coming from. It isn't just, you know, the West and its cars. It is also what's going on in India and China, much more than what's happening in Britain, for example. And it's caused by people.

And the UN originally predicted that we were going to level off at around 9 billion. Well, that's out the window. And now it's at least 10.3. It could go considerably higher. What's happening in Africa is not going according to plan. They're supposed to be having much, much smaller families than they are. And that's going to pose a real issue for Europe because I don't, you know, it's now predicted that Africa will have over 4 billion people at the turn of this century. That's a very inhospitable climate, not just because of climate change.

It always has been inhospitable. It's mostly desert. It has problems, huge problems with water, with supporting life. And then you add to that that there's a long history there of poor governance. There's a very good reason why a lot of people want to leave that continent. And especially if 4 billion people end up being... being present at the same time, they're not going to stay there. They're not going to stay there.

And that's going to be the issue of this century, how the West deals with the migratory pressures, especially from Africa and secondarily from the Middle East. And I don't have any easy answers, but in terms of what we don't talk about, that's what we don't talk about or not. But by the way, Thomas Friedman, columnist in the United Times writes lots of books, agrees with me.

Well, Laino Shriver, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure. As always, follow us on all the social media by Lionel's books. Of course, I imagine that you are not on any social media yourself. I am not. I kind of had that intuition that you wouldn't be. But follow us on social media. That makes this even more special. as always

and if you're a big fan of the show do support us through Patreon you can send us money through PayPal as well so that we can keep the show going thank you very much for tuning in and we will see you in a week from now and you've forgotten it again what have you forgotten oh my show yes yes come to see all well that ends well in Edinburgh for the whole of August I'll be doing my debut show

about freedom of speech as you will know yeah it's going to be great isn't it Francis It is. It's going to be very, very good. It's at the Gilded Balloon at 7pm. Oh yeah, I forgot that as well. You are fucking useless. Yes, so I'm the publicist now. Go and see it. It's going to be great. You should be able to buy it on the Ed Fringe website or the Gilded Balloon website.

If you want to come and see me, I'm at the Angel Comedy Club, Bill Murray, in August. So come and see me, you'll be able to find it on the website. If I haven't been cancelled by them by offending Latin American people. All right. Thank you very much. So it's not happening. So it's not happening, though. I will be erased from memory. But probably, yeah, my mother would agree with it anyway. Okay, guys, but you've been...

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