Within Reason - #56 Susan Neiman - Left is Not Woke

Episode Date: February 18, 2024

Susan Neiman is an American moral philosopher, cultural commentator, and essayist. She is the author of "Left is Not Woke", available here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Free access ends August 24th. Visit Ancestry.ca for more details. Terms apply. Susan Neiman, welcome to Within Reason. Glad to be here. So you wrote a book called Left is Not Woke, and you've said somewhere that some of your friends practically begged you to not write a book with the word Woke in the title. Why is that? Because Woke has become a slur by the right, and it's used to attack anybody who is engaged in working against racism,

or sexism or homophobia. I don't really know anybody who would define themselves as woke. It's really turned into a term of abuse. And people were afraid that I would, you know, I would be instrumentalized by the right if I, that my book would be seen as contributing to that.

And it's even the case that my French publisher decided not to do the book, although she had just very successfully published two of my older books. books because she was afraid of giving aid and comfort to the right. Now, actually, a larger French press is going to publish it in the fall. I did two things to avoid being instrumentalized because I am very much not a creature of the right, okay?

Number one, I wrote on the very first page of the book that I consider myself a socialist, which makes it sort of hard for right-wing people to, you know, instrumental. you. And the other is that I've refused to do interviews with blatantly right-wing media. And, you know, I've certainly had invitations, but I have not done that. You know, and I don't actually think, it seems clear that people who actually read the book or listen to me talk, that it is not another right-wing rant about, you know, anybody who objects to discrimination and domination. It's a very different argument. Yeah, you see a lot of people making this complaint about wokeness and how it's sort of ruined the left. And of course, it makes sense for people on the left. If this concept

of wokeness, whatever that may be, has ruined the left. It makes sense for people on the left to make that criticism, but it does feel as though most people who are claiming this are actually coming from the right. I feel like there's a big confusion that goes on. You get a lot of people saying things like, well, you know, I'm a person of the left, but even I think all of this, you know, cancel culture stuff's gone too far and everything. And I'm not even quite sure what it means to be on the left anymore with regards to this kind of debate. I don't know if you feel the same way. No, I don't because actually my book was an attempt to define what it means to be left, not. an attempt to define woke.

Believe me, many more people say these things when in private than they do in public. And I have had so many people come to me or write to me or say, I'm so glad you said this, this is exactly what I've been thinking, but I didn't want to say it out loud either in some cases, frankly, because they were afraid, it depends on their position, but also because they felt, they didn't want to betray people who they felt were, you know, on their side in some sense. Look, my, it's, the reason why it's so hard to define woke is that it's an incoherent concept. It depends on a clash between emotion and thinking. So woker lies on emotions that are traditionally left in every sense of the word. One wants to, when push comes

to shove, be on the side of the underdog, of people who are marginalized, of people who are oppressed. One wants to correct the crimes of history. And if you can't make up for them, at the very least, you should remember them. Okay, so those are all emotions that I share and that I think are common to virtually every person on the left liberal spectrum of politics. The problem is, which many people don't realize, is that those feelings are undermined by what are actually very reactionary thoughts. And there are thoughts about what matters in one's own identity, their thoughts about whether you can distinguish power from justice, and their thoughts about progress. And what the book argues is that it's a fundamentally reactionary view that

the only people you can have genuine connections to are members of your own tribe. Be the tribe, your ethnic background, or possibly your sex or your sexual orientation. Those are the only people you can really trust and who will really understand you. And therefore, the only people to whom you have real obligations, that's a very right-wing thought. And for the left, it's fundamental to think, no, I can have deep connections. and real obligations to all kinds of people. They're not limited to my own tribe. That's actually the point of being on the liberal left

is a kind of universalism, which leads to a view of universal human rights. So that's the first point of a difference between left and right. The second one is people on the left believe it's possible to distinguish justice and power. And sometimes it's very hard to do that in a particular case. and most people who start wars claim that they're starting them for reasons of justice or to spread democracy to Iraq or whatever it is that they claim to be doing.

And fact, those are rhetorical ways of hiding the fact that they're after some kind of regional power. But what people on the right tend to do is to say, eh, it all comes down to power. any claim to be working towards human rights, any claim to be, you know, guided by certain ideals is really just a disguised claim to power. One of the reasons why I talk in the book about evolutionary psychology is that that has come along and seem to give a kind of scientific foundation for the idea that, you know, you may think that you're writing a love song or, you know, volunteering for some important community cause, but really what your genes are doing are trying to multiply

themselves. And, you know, that's something that's come to be accepted as scientific by virtually everybody on the political spectrum. But it's only the right that has long put that in front and center of an ideology. And the third thing that leftists and liberals have in common is a belief that it's possible to make progress, whereas reactionaries tend to think that we went downhill at the Garden of Eden and possibly will be saved if we believe in the right religious form.

So they're constantly bringing up ideas of a golden age that we've fallen from and probably can't get back. The interesting thing that the left has done, thanks to people like Michelle Foucault, the most single-quoted author in all the humanities and social sciences for quite some time, certainly right now, is they take out the golden age. There never was a golden age. There were just raw expressions of power, turning into more subtle expressions of power. And this is a line that you hear from very many people who think of themselves as being on the left. Now, of course, if you asked an activist, are you striving for progress? Are you trying to make progress? They would say, particularly if they're activists on the ground and not academics, they would say, of course I am. But then one might say, so give me an example of some progress that was made in the past. And that's where you see that they don't actually believe in it as something, you know, that's a real fact.

Because, I mean, you have people like the Afro-pessimists saying things like racism is baked into the DNA of the United States. Well, first of all, even using metaphors like that suggest you can't possibly get rid of it to say that the U.S. has a long racist tradition is certainly true, but to ignore the fact that people fought and died for progress, you know, towards a less racist society is also to, you know, deny their memory and deny their struggle, but it's to deny common sense in ways that we can actually reliably measure. So those are three ideas that I think really do make sense to say, okay, anybody that I would call on the liberal left has, you know, believes in universalism, justice, and progress, those are all ideas that come out of the much maligned enlightenment.

Now, I add a fourth principle that distinguishes the left from the liberal. For people who are on the left, social rights are genuine human rights, and they're every bit as important as political rights. So, you know, healthcare and education and housing and work and access to culture are as important as the right to travel or the right to speak for people who are on the real left, whereas liberals tend to look at those things as nice if you have it, but they're not human rights. Actually, both of those. were written into the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights and given equal weight. So not a lot of people like to remember that today, but it's true.

So that would be my distinction between left and liberal, but I would be happy these days, given that fascism is growing on every single continent, I would be happy to, make common cause with people who only agreed with the first three of those principles. That's people who are liberals and don't share my view that you actually do need social rights in order to have a real exercise of political rights. Sure. It's a comprehensive and interesting analysis of what it means to be on the left. The book is left is not woke.

I suppose people will hear that. And firstly, there is this culture of woke bashing that goes on on the internet. It's very tired. It's very boring. I think that even putting out an episode like this that mentions so-called wokeism, people without watching it will go into the comments and say, oh, for goodness sake, you're talking about wokeism again. Because, yeah, I've spoken to people on my podcast who are sort of anti-woke figures, people

like Constantine Kissin or Andrew Doyle. And a lot of the time people say, you know, it's getting a bit tired. it's getting a bit boring and it's all a bit silly. But it's funny because you're obviously not doing that and you say that you've been proactively avoiding that kind of thing, but at the same time you must be doing some kind of so-called woke bashing that is saying that something's wrong with wokeness and that it's not as tied up to the left that you've just described as it is.

So what is it that you're saying about wokeness and how is it distinguished from the left? And if it's not on the left, I think people will immediately see the title of your book and say, well, if wokeness is not about being on the left, then what is it about? If it being on the right, that surely can't be right either. Well, that's exactly why I started at the beginning by saying it's an incoherent concept because it's based both on very left-wing emotions, which sweep us along. They're, you know, on the side of people who are victims of racism or sexism or homophobia. like left, and that's absolutely right. The emotions are really very left, but they're undermined by a whole host of philosophical assumptions that are actually very reactionary. And one example that I start with in the book comes from the New York Times. I mean, I could give other

examples. The point of the book was not to do a bunch of woke bashing by listing a bunch of examples. Some people in Germany particularly attacked me for not giving enough example. I said, You can find them in any newspaper any day. This is boring to list them. And it's the kind of thing that people do, you know, after work over a drink, you know, whatever political orientation they have, it's quite easy to make fun of the examples. But here's an example that as far as I know,

nobody made fun of and few people even noticed. This was shortly after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were sworn in to the president's, and vice presidency. And the New York Times noted, well, despite Vice President Harris's Indian roots, Biden may not be as forgiving towards the Modi government as one would think or something. And this is one of these sentences that you just run by and you don't really think about and try to analyze. Okay. Now, I happen to wish the sentence had come true because, in fact, Biden gave Modi the most lavish White House state dinner that anybody has been given. He's using him, you know, to try and shore up his anti-China policy, okay? But the philosophical assumption that gets buried in a sentence like that is people's voting choices are determined by their ethnic background.

Okay. Right. And, you know, of course because Kamala Harris' mother is Indian, she's going to support the Hindutva fascism, as my Indian friends call it, of Narendra Modi. But in fact, the people who I know are the fiercest opponents of Modi are Indian because they actually know what's going on and they follow the news rather carefully. So, you know, it's, but we, there are thousands of assumptions like that that we go through every day without really seriously thinking about them. One thing that I hope the book will do for some people is to sensitize us for the host of philosophical assumptions that get smuggled into your daily newspaper. Sure, yeah. Yeah, I wonder. Exactly, I mean, we're sort of, you say that wokeness is an incoherent concept, but the term has to have a referent to be able to talk about it. It has to have some kind of referent. And so something about, you know, this idea of identifying people with their, with their ethnicity, essentially, or assuming ideological positions based on their ethnicity, maybe has something to do with wokeness, but obviously that alone can't quite function as a definition.

So what are we driving at here? Well, you know, if a concept is incoherent, it cannot be defined by, you know, so I mean, I could give you a list of examples, but you don't want that. We've all been through that. I'm trying to say the concept is incoherent because it depends on a total confusion between emotion and reasoning. One huge part of it is indeed believing that all the identities we possess, each of us possess, can be reduced to ethnic background and sex. Now, I don't use the word identity politics, and I don't use it for a reason, because it begs the question of whether or not those things do make up our identity. There's sort of the parts of our identity, but I challenge anybody, take out a piece of paper and write down 10 things that are really important to you, that you would not be who you are if you lost, whatever it is, you know, an idea of whom you love, an idea of your profession, if your profession is important to your identity, not everybody's is, your political leanings. some people are such passionate musicians, and even if they aren't professional musicians,

certain pieces of music, certain kinds of music are absolutely essential to their identity and so on and so on. I sometimes said people identify with their football teams, which I find rather bizarre, and then I'm sometimes told this is, you know, I'm trivializing the idea of identity, then someone else will say, not if you're from Glasgow or not if you're from wherever it is, you know. So I don't get it, but I do know that some people are absolutely passionate about a particular team. What's so interesting about all of those different things is that those are by and large things that we choose, things that make us agents in the world and in the world of forming ourself, forming our own identities. The two things that get called identity politics

are the two things over which we have absolutely no control. And there are also two things in which we're therefore actually quite vulnerable. So it's an identity based on possible victim would, that is passivity rather than what we actually do in the world and what we decide. And I think it's a very sad way to look at basic questions of identity. But that is very much a part of woke. The second is, yeah. The second is, you know, again, as I said before, the belief that there aren't any real conceptions of justice, it's all kind of hype to disguise power relations. It's a very strong tenet that you get running through an awful lot of woke discourse, and it comes, you know, one can trace where it comes from in terms of philosophical theory.

And the third is a deep distrust or even a rejection of the idea of progress, no matter how it's played. One thing that all of the people who I would call woke have in common, even if they wouldn't sit down at the table together, is the fact that they believe that the Enlightenment is a source of Eurocentric patriarchal white ideas that were forced on other parts of the world and that are not in fact in any. sense universal, okay? And that is one line that basically post-colonial theory has pushed and actually made lots of people extremely nervous and uneasy about, not just about saying anything good about the Enlightenment, but saying anything good about the West or the north, whatever direction we're feeling like calling, you know, Yeah, sure. I want to, I mean, I want to go back to the first point that you made about reducing identity to two things, race and sex. And you pointed out that if you're asked to write down a number of your most important identities, you might write musician, mother, you know, you might identify with your sports team. I think there are a few things to say about this, especially the point that the two that we've landed on here are the ones that you don't choose. And that's that if you asked me to write down which identities were important to me, me, I probably, yeah, I mean, I don't think I'm going to write down my, my sex and my race.

I think two critiques that people would make of that is firstly, that's because if you were to ask somebody which of their important identities, do they cause them to suffer the most political inconvenience, then suddenly I don't think they would be writing things like their football team or the fact that they're a musician. And so in the conversation about politics and the conversation about justice, those identities just sort of don't become relevant. And so in the political arena, it kind of makes sense that those aren't the ones that are coming up, right? And the fact that you don't choose them maybe is the point. You said it's a sad way to look at things or something like that, but maybe it's just, as people see it, a sad reality

of the world that there are these factors which are outside of people's control, which are significant sources of their political unluckiness in a way. You see what I'm saying? Yeah, I see exactly what you're saying. You're giving a good definition of the concept of intersectionality, which when I first heard of, I thought, oh, goody, somebody is actually acknowledging that our identities can be complex, but it's not. It's intersectionality is about the fact that we can have multiple identities that determine how we suffer or how we're discriminated against.

And I just think, first of all, as a way of looking at anything, but certainly even the political world, I don't think that that's the way we want to define ourselves. Look, something that will come, you know, has become increasingly relevant in the last few months in defining. I'm Jewish, but I belong to the universalist tradition of Jewish thought. And it goes all the way back to the Bible, and most of the famous Jewish thinkers you've ever heard of are people. who were in that tradition, rather than a nationalist tradition. At the moment in Germany, as you may have read, in fact, there was a guardian piece last week

in which I was quoted, Germany has decided that, as part of their way of understanding and doing penance for their own history, what they've learned about Jews is they were our very, victims, and therefore Jews are always victims. We think of Jews in the category of victims and anti-Semitism. And we can't think of them in any other category. So someone like me who says, wait a sec, I don't just see myself as a victim at all. I see myself as an agent.

And I actually see some Jews, particularly the present government of the state of Israel, as perpetrators, okay? And, you know, that's a decision that I've made based on lots of knowledge and five years living in Tel Aviv and all kinds of things. What that means for me is, if you wanted, as certain people do, to reduce me to my ethnic heritage, I wouldn't be able to have a political opinion that goes against the racist nationalism of the present Israeli government. And I'm saying, no, absolutely not.

Sorry, what's most important to my identity is not the couple of genes that I may share with Benjamin Netanyahu, but the fact that unlike him, I stand in the universalist tradition of Jewish thinking. and I think, you know, lives are equally valuable, and I care about Palestinian lives as well as I care about Jewish ones, okay? So, you know, you're taking away that possibility if you insist that I see myself primarily as a possible victim of anti-Semitism because Jews have been, you know, have indeed been victimized over the years. And by the way, I know quite a number of friends of color who also absolutely reject the idea that dealing with racism means they should consider themselves permanent victims of racism or people who had no privilege, okay, permanently underprivileged. I have quite a number of friends who reject that complete fact, I suppose any person of color who I would consider a friend does reject that way of looking at. at themselves and looking at these questions. It's just not the, those aren't the voices that get the loudest, get the most hearings,

but there certainly are such voices. Sure. I mean, I'm sort of imagining that the way that you were talking about primarily identifying yourself through the lens of your ethnicity or your race, yeah, I don't think that's a good idea either. And I know that that critique is often made, people do, and oftentimes it does come from the woke bashing crowd, people who say, look, the problem with this is that people are reducing each other to their immutable characteristics, and that's a sad way to look at the world.

But do you think that there's sort of a version of wokeness that can be put forward that says, well, obviously, I'm not going to reduce you to your ethnicity. But what I'm saying is that this is something that's politically relevant in a way that those who say, you know, race shouldn't be relevant at all and we should all be colorblind, just sort of aren't getting. And so they wouldn't use the language of producing you to that. They would just say that it is a lens that you need to look through sometimes on, let's say, certain issues. Of course it is. I mean, it's ridiculous to call oneself colorblind. We're not colorblind, most of us. You know, we see red. If the sky is red or green, if the leaves are green.

So it's silly to say we don't see color. We don't see race. Of course we do. And I'm very much in favor of celebrating cultural differences as well. I think we're all in rich. by the fact that we have cultural differences and those, you know, participating in other people's culture and, you know, stepping into it as far as one can is absolutely the best way to, you know, overcome this sense that, you know, there's an other and those are the only kinds of people you can have real connections with. So, of course, I'm not arguing for colorblindness. I think that's ridiculous. I'm just saying that I have been in too many situations, and boy, are they not just in universities, you know, entire cultural institutions where, you know, the differences, what's focused on is really a reduction.

I'll even say this. Let's see, I can say this, this is spiritual. I found out that this happened to me last night when I was in someone's mind paired with a Jewish writer in Germany, with whom I have nothing in common, but nothing, okay? I mean, either politically or intellectually or in any possible way, but behind my back, it was said, these two. go together, you know, and it just read practically any page that I've written and a page this person has written and you would see the difference immediately, not to mention looking at our CVs or this or whatever, you know, but because this thinking has become so, reductive thinking has become so automatic. It was just, oh, they belong together. They're both Jews. You know, pretty

pretty strange. And these are not people who would ever consider themselves anti-Semites. On the contrary, these are people who are committed to fighting anti-Semitism, and yet they're still identifying people based only, the only thing that I would have in common with this person is ethnic identity. And I just see that happen all the time. I see it happen, you know, if I'm asked, I know exactly. when I'm being asked to give an interview or a talk because somebody's read something I've written and thinks it's interesting and when I'm being invited because we need a woman, which is insulting, first of all. And secondly, you know, are we interchangeable? I mean, but there are many people

who act as if that were the case. Yeah. I mean, the problem isn't perhaps the principal contradiction between wokeness and leftness that I think we're driving at here is something to do with tribalism which is what you were talking about at the start of our conversation,

right? And that wokeness is about identifying people with a form of tribe, be it at their ethnicity or their sex. Left wing, traditionally, at least in my country, has really been to do

with class, has really been to do with money. And it's not so much the case anymore, but if you go back a couple of decades and you ask somebody, you know, you ask somebody whether they're on the left or the right, what you're really asking them is at least going to be probably correlated with their economic background. And the left is seen as fighting for the for the rights of the working class and the right is seen as, you know, fighting for the rights of the elite. And that's how it was characterized. Now, at the time, I don't think people would have described this as a form of identity. politics, if that word, you know, it sort of existed back then. But it seems to me that arguably what's happened here is where the left has traditionally taken one aspect of a person's

identity, which is their economic situation, which people did identify with. And I guess it's more complicated as to whether that's immutable or not, of course. But, you know, people were proud of being, and are proud of being working class, but also identified as the most significant political factor determining who they vote for and the biggest factor in how they're politically oppressed. Now, people do the same thing today, but they're talking about sex and they're talking about race. It doesn't seem to me obvious that there's some kind of category difference between doing these kinds of things. Maybe the difference is just a sort of factual one. Maybe we think that in the way that being working class was truly politically relevant, it turns out

that what sex you are actually kind of isn't. Maybe that's one view. But it doesn't seem to me that the sort of attitude towards taking an aspect of someone's identity, considering it politically relevant and saying this is the lens that we look at politics through, has necessarily changed. But all the criticisms that you would make of people doing it with race and sex, I don't think you'd be, maybe you are, I'm not sure, probably not, though, as enthusiastic to levy that criticism against people who identify with the working class, for example. I'm glad you asked that question. That's new because I actually am not a class reductionist either, okay? And I call myself a socialist, but not a Marxist. Now, you can say that Marx himself wasn't really a class reductionist and couldn't have been, because of course, neither he nor, and certainly not angles, came from the working class, okay? So there's a long discussion in Marxist theory about how much it's a matter of simply economic positioning and how much it's a matter of justice. But I would certainly say that, for Friedrich Engels and for Karl Marx,

it was a matter of justice plus a belief that because of the way conditions were in the mid to later 19th century, there was this idea that it would be the working classes that could be, as they put it, the universal class. Partly, this is also the result of coming from Hegel and so on. I don't think those arguments make sense anymore. And I also think, as in the case of sex and ethnic background, I don't think they do justice to us.

I mean, not only a class difference is so very different than they were in, even the beginning of the 20th century, it just changed radically. But I think even then it was an impoverished way of looking at these questions. So I agree with you entirely. I know, in fact, there's an entire political party that was just formed in Germany that began with a sentence that I would agree with. That is for a, this gendering that the Germans think you have to do with language, changing speech is exactly the opposite of the way that English speakers do it, and it's quite provincial. but, you know, that for a retired woman who cannot pay her rent from her pension, you know, general neutral language is not going to help her, okay? So there's this new political party that just got started,

but it's all we need only to focus on class, we need only to focus on economic questions. And I agree that I think we need to focus more on economic questions. and more in particular on the incredible power of capital to undermine democratic institutions, by what it does with the media and, you know, various other ways in which people are prevented from thinking themselves about important political questions.

So I think we need to think more about economics than we have. But I don't see that this classic, everything would be fine if we only focused on class differences and got more economic equality. I don't think that's the answer either. Yeah, I mean, we shouldn't think that it's the only pertinent political issue. But I wonder if you would have the same skepticism about a form of identity politics that focuses on class rather than something like that. sex and race. For example, I'm not going to vote for this party. Yeah, sure. But would, I mean, would you, would you say that somebody who was identifying with the working class in that kind of way and the way that people do with, with sex and race could be described as woke? Because to me,

it seems like if somebody does that, if somebody says, yes, I'm working class and that's what I vote in accordance with, we can sit here and say, well, maybe that's a, you know, an impoverished worldview or something, but I think it would be probably wrong to say that that's not left wing, to say that, well, that's this wokeness thing that's not really in accordance with the values of the left. I would say, okay, I see what you're saying, and I guess what I would say is, you know, you're hanging on to a view of what's left. It wasn't even entirely true when Marx and Engels were writing about the working class, and it's certainly no longer true today. But yeah, one does sometimes get, it's funny. This is a conversation with

a friend of mine recently who I normally, you know, really respect. Well, actually, himself doesn't come from really a working class family either, but was objecting to certain people who said, oh, they all have trust funds. And I just had to say, no, actually, they don't. I know who they are. And even if they did, it wouldn't be an argument against them. But that is the kind of thing that one does sometimes here. Yeah, and I mean, you were talking before about how Marx and certainly angles couldn't have been class reductionists because they didn't come from the working class. But in the modern sort of woke movement, you get the typical sort of woke white male, you know, the person who makes a lot of noise about how people of color or women are oppressed. they themselves don't belong to one of those categories, and it's a common character, right?

And I suppose they could still be described as maybe not reductionists exactly, but as doing the kind of thing that you're accusing woke people of doing here, despite not being members of that community themselves, right? Yeah, sure. I run into it all the time. In fact, often the people who are most vociferous about doing what they think as defending, you know, the rights of women or people of color are actually white men who are anxious to prove themselves, you know, on the right side of history. And I think it's sad, frankly.

When you were talking about this list of identities that you would put forward and you wouldn't, you know, enthusiastically write down your race and your sex, I think some people listening would want to say, certainly of me, well, of course you're not going to do that because you're a white male, right? They're going to say if you're writing down the things that are politically relevant, in the same way that if you ask somebody to write these down, they might write working class. That's really important to me as a political identity. Whereas if they've got a ton of money and you ask them the same question, they're probably not going to say, I've got lots of money. That's one of my political identities. In other words, it only becomes relevant when you're suffering because of it. And so, of course, I'm not going to identify with these factors. politically speaking, but that's because of who I am. Believe it or not, the wealthiest person I know, someone who's extremely wealthy, suffers, it was actually good to become friends with someone who is wealthy beyond anything I could imagine in my own life because I stopped, you know, wishing for large amounts of money. So, you know, I can imagine somebody who really has. lots of money, they might be embarrassed, this is bad taste to say it, but I can certainly, I'm,

you know, I'm thinking of somebody, certainly imagine someone saying that was a gigantic part of his identity and something that, that, uh, influence his life in honorable ways. I mean, um, I'm not sure what kind of a reaction you want. want me to give. So I get to, I feel like I've been on both sides of this, these lines, because I've had a peculiar or complicated life in a number of countries. Okay. Now, um, in the U.S., possibly in England, but certainly in the U.S., well, I'm a woman, so that gives me victim points, if that's what I want. I don't, by the way. But I code as white, so I'm kind of, you know, a little funny that way. By the way, growing up as a child

in the American South, Jews did not count as white. So, you know, I grew up with that experience. But in Germany, of course, being a woman is a victim point, and being a Jew is a victim point, even if I don't want it. So I feel like I've been on both sides of this line because I've lived and worked for such a long time in actually three different countries. but primarily two. And I don't know why anyone would want to continue to insist on it. Is it the case that I would not want a friend of color to say go jogging in certain parts of the United States? Yes, that's the case. I also, as a woman, wouldn't go walking in certain parts of the United States.

But, you know, am I denying that there's discrimination to the point of there being danger? That is, you know, that black men, say, running through certain neighborhoods in the United States, run real risk of getting shot, yes, okay? That women run real risks of getting raped? Sure. But I don't, and most of the people, really all of the people that I admire and respect, don't want our lives to be reduced to that fact, those facts. We don't think about those facts, but we don't feel that we're, you know,

they have to be absolutely central to our lives. So I understand what you're saying here. When it comes to those particular issues, which will be political insofar as, you know, we need to have discussions about how to police them, for example, are those examples of times when it does make sense to at least sometimes look through the lens of something like race or sex in that? Because, you know, if anything, it's a useful tactic to help people understand the problem that they haven't experienced themselves, right, to try and look through this lens?

I will go one further. I will say it's crucial for white people to look through the lens of race, to read some books, okay, written by black authors that, you know, give us a window into what that's like, to get to know some people of color and actually discuss what that's like. It would also, by the way, it's amazing how many men don't read books written by women. It's extraordinary. They've actually done some studies of this, okay? And that includes some of the greatest books that were ever, ever written. Men just don't pick them up because, you know, hey, it's a girl's book.

It's a woman's book. Yeah, well, famously, J.K. Rowling was J.K. because the publishers were worried that if it said Joanne on the front, people wouldn't buy the book. And George Elliott, long before her, was also George Elliott for exactly the same reason. Yeah, sure. And she is, you know, she was considered the greatest, the greatest, the greatest, the greatest, the greatest century. I would give her the 20th and so far the 21st as well. I just think she's one of the greatest writers that ever lived. Okay. So, of course, it's important for us to, actually, the most, one of the things that shows Elliot's greatness is that she was incredibly able to portray men and the different kinds of things that move men in a society as rigidly constructed as the one she was living with. You know, she paints incredibly insightful, intimate portraits of men as well as women. So, you know, of course we should sometimes look at the world through those lenses.

We just shouldn't stop there. One thing that I wanted to ask you about was something I heard you say in a talk. One of your colleagues, I think, said the phrase, the left police language as the right police values. Do you think that's true and what does it mean? I didn't say that. That's an interesting. somebody might have said that to me in a discussion. I think you were you were quoting something someone had said to you,

but it might have been from a while ago. Okay, because I don't remember it. I mean, my reaction to that would be, yeah, that looks like it's the case. The problem is that the right has such a hard time, of actually maintaining the values it claims to police that they're not very believable. I mean, you know, look at your government, look at, you know, Trump and his people. I mean, these are people who, I mean, the thing that, of course, makes Britain better than the United States is the way that it was able to actually send for us packing because it was just, so clear that he'd violated a basic value of decency and honesty that was still in some

sense being maintained even by his own party, a conservative party. But, you know, the problem with the right claiming to police values is it would be fine if they actually lived up to them themselves, but they so very often don't. And another question I think people are really going to want to ask is, and maybe the answer has already been given implicitly through what we've been talking about, but to make it plain, I mean, whatever problems the left is currently suffering, either reputationally with its association with wokeness, or actually in principle as people who are on the left, become more woke, for one of a better term, what practical steps can we take to bring the left back into focus as it should be defined and to disassociate

with this woke stuff? Well, I mean, I wrote this book to encourage people to think about these things for a beginning because I actually think that as soon as you start realizing how many reactionary assumptions you're taking for granted, you switch, okay? and that's what I'd like to leave people with. I get the intentions. I get the good intentions in the work, okay? And the woke, I'm not viewing, contrary to people on the right,

I'm not viewing the woke as the enemy. On the contrary, I'm arguing that some of the battles that the woke have been having, over language, over purity, over who's allowed to speak, have done damage to the left. I know lots of people who won't say it out loud, but who feel politically homeless because they've gone to meetings where it's, you know, they've been considered not ideologically pure enough. And we are facing incredible dangers right now. people worry about the inflation of the term fascism but as a friend of mine

who's an Indian historian says if we wait till they build concentration camps to call things by their proper name it would be too late to do anything about it so you really see rising in most of the world and as people know we have

you know something like 65% of the world is voting in this year. And very far right parties are doing extremely well. They meet. They come together. They share strategies. Steve Bannon invites them all to a castle in Italy. I mean, those are the European ones, but the non-European ones meet as well. And it's tragic and dangerous that people on the left who basically share similar goals tear each other up over questions of ideological purity. So I think once we see the dangers, you know, we can realize that a certain kind of symbolic politics is absolutely nothing compared to the kind of.

of real dangers that we're facing, not to mention the climate crisis. That is, the climate crisis is only going to be resolved on an international basis if people stop thinking in tribalist terms and begin thinking in universalist terms. And these two dangers, the danger of proto-fascism and the danger of the climate crisis, are things that can only be faced if we pull back and, you know, unite as a popular front irrespective of smaller differences. Well, Susan Neiman, thank you for taking the time. Thanks for your insights. And I will make sure that the book is linked in the show notes for everybody who wants to go and read it.

Yeah, thanks for coming on the show. It's been fun. Thanks very much, Alex. You know,