Juno News - October 07, 2023Cancelled professor launches course on ‘woke left’ ideology
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Summary
In this episode, I speak to Professor Eric Kaufmann about his new course, Woke: The Origins, Dynamics and Implications of an Elite Ideology at the University of Birmingham, and how it relates to the culture wars, culture wars and speech boundaries.
Transcript
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I've said time and time again, free speech is my hill to die on.
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And that means, you know, legal free speech that is to stand up against censorship and
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regulation of speech by government, but also academic freedom and cultural free speech.
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The idea that we must foster in society an attitude that encourages and welcomes the
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exchange of ideas and information rather than discourages and cancels.
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And I was, of course, very intrigued by this course that was not offered when I was in
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I'll read the proper name of it because I don't want to give it a crude summation, but
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the proper name of the course is, and it's a study of woke ideology here.
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So it is called woke the origins dynamics and implications of an elite ideology.
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Now, this is not being offered at a Canadian school, not yet, but it is being offered at
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the University of Birmingham by a Canadian professor, Eric Kaufman, who joins me now.
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And I should say University of Buckingham is like a very, well, you've said it's the
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I mean, it has a strange origin because it was founded through Margaret Thatcher.
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And it sort of, you know, even though most of the staff and students still lean left,
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it's got more viewpoint diversity than you'll find on a typical British campus.
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So it's somewhat more hospitable and the leadership is very much in favor of moving it in this direction.
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I mean, obviously, you've got 15 weeks of material here.
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I don't expect you to give it all in a few minutes.
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Well, it really is sort of begins with the intellectual history.
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The, you know, the how did we get to this ideology?
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How does it relate to, for example, socialism, liberalism, anarchism, and these other isms that
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And then we kind of look at what happens in the 60s, how the left shifts, you know, from
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class towards identity and, and then how that plays out into our own time.
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I then move on to, to looking at public opinion data, sort of who supports something like
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I mean, it would tend to be younger people would tend to be, is it more female than male?
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And then how this is now affecting electoral politics, the culture wars, the politics of
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the culture wars and speech boundaries, you know, critical race theory, all of that.
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And then finally, looking at the philosophy, the questions that it raises, you know, free
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I mean, it's, it's certainly there on the website.
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If you go to my Twitter, you can sort of see a link, but that we're going to do this sort
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of very empirically, you know, I mean, there's a lot of academics.
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There are thousands of papers on the populist right, lots of courses on it.
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I've taught in that myself, but there's nothing on the woke left because it's just too
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One thing I'm curious about, I years ago sought out to write a book about political correctness,
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and I did years of research on this and just ultimately, for a number of reasons, walked
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But one of the things that I found in doing that is that political correctness as a word
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or as a term, when it was first introduced, was viewed, was described and used by the people
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that wanted political correctness and they wanted to be politically correct.
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And then it morphed and was only used by people that were decrying it and criticizing it.
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And am I correct in saying that woke has kind of gone through a bit of a similar phase where
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it was introduced as a very positive, favorable concept by the woke people?
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And now they've sort of backed off of the word and it's only really being used by people
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I mean, what I would say, I mean, there's no question people abuse the word and stretch
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Well, some people just use it as a stand in for left, which I don't think is entirely accurate.
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No, I don't think it's accurate and is somewhat of a way of devaluing what is actually quite
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a useful, I think, empirically tight social scientific term.
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It's making sacred, sorry, the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender and
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So once you erect these groups as sacred, anything that might offend the most hypothetically
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sensitive member of one of these groups is blasphemy or criticizing anything that's done
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in the name of helping such as these groups, such as anti-racism or trans affirmation or
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If you criticize any such movement, that is also a violation of the sacred and therefore cause
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And I think it is a useful term and it describes something that is very real and has emerged
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Based on that definition, can wokeness be separated from victimhood and this veneration of victims?
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It very much, it springs from the victimhood culture.
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So the wider ideology is based on, you might call it a victimhood culture and sort of emotional
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safety, emotional trauma prevention is sort of the mantra, but of course that is broader
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than just race, gender, sexuality could apply to disability, even potentially class in theory
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But there is a focus very specifically in wokeness on just race, gender and sexuality.
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I think the fat stuff, the class stuff, that doesn't have the same pickup.
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It doesn't seem like there's as much energy in canceling and pushing for DEI along those
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So I think it's much more specific to these three categories.
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Is your view that the woke, whoever they are, and maybe that's something you wanted to
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define, do they see wokeness as a tool, as a vehicle to get to where they want, or is it
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I mean, Jonathan Haidt has his moral foundations theory, and there's really two foundations.
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So all identity groups that could be black, white, male, female, et cetera, should have
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equal outcomes in terms of income, in terms of honors and esteem and so on.
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The other prong is, again, this microscopic, even microaggression, sort of harm protection.
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So anything that might offend or upset in any way, somebody's emotional state must be
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prevented, which is why they're going after free speech, for example, speech which might
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So I think there is something real there and is rooted in these two moral foundations,
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Your description of it as making sacred, I think, is incredibly appropriate, because
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a lot of people have seen that religious-like fervor from people who, again, would identify
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as fundamentally anti-religion in a lot of cases and would talk about the harm of religion
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It's interesting how blind they are to what this does to several groups and people as
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And I guess I wanted to ask a little bit about that, because by making it sacred, you
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have to elevate it above other things that have had a level of sanctity in society.
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I mean, it used to be that even people who are fairly progressive would still operate
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within the parameters of free speech as important, and they'd use free speech to make their point.
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That was, I think, the dominant force you'd saw in progressives for much of the last 50
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And now, freedom of speech no longer has any sacred value.
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In fact, it's viewed as an evil that needs to be dealt with in society by a lot of these
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Yeah, and that's been documented in opinion survey data in the U.S. going back to the 70s,
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that there's been a shift from kind of a more moral relativism toleration to moral absolutism
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But I don't want to, I think it's a mistake to see this as completely new.
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And I think, you know, if you talk about political correctness in the 80s and 90s,
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was it acceptable to offend minority groups in the late 80s and early 90s?
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I actually think you already had a pretty restrictive speech climate.
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The doors were kind of, I think, pretty wide open.
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And that's why you did see episodes of cancel culture.
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You know, the UBC political science department in the mid-1990s was just one episode.
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It just was less frequent because you didn't have social media to organize flash mobs.
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If I could jump in, though, Professor, I feel that what happened there, you're right,
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the acceptability was already established or the unacceptability.
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I feel what happened is the threshold was changed, is that what offense was, was redefined.
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And I wonder if that's the goalpost shift that leads us to where we are now as well.
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I mean, being a racist has been, you know, out of vogue for many decades.
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But the definition of racism has changed a lot in that time.
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You know, the idea of hiking being racist and punctuality being a white thing, you know,
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that there's no question that they've taken it to the next level.
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The only thing I would say, though, is you can find examples, you know, in the mid-70s,
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evolutionary psychologists who argued that genetics mattered.
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This was just genetics mattering for social behavior.
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So I'm, even though you're right that there are some new, there's been some new conceptual
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stretching, I think quite a bit of that had already occurred.
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And certainly in academia, if you look at the published work already in the 70s and 80s and 90s,
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you know, critical race theory dates from the 70s, you know, Chris Rufo in his book talks
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But I would stress the continuities more than the discontinuities.
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Social media is more quantitative scaling up rather than a qualitative change, in my view.
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One of the challenges that I would have, and again, I'm basing this off of how I've used
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woke, not necessarily the parameters that you've set for it, is that there's a prevailing
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theme in it, and there are commonalities in how it's applied.
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But is it coherent enough to be an ideology in the sense that do the woke apply the rules
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If someone's committed to wokeness, do you find that they're consistently applying it?
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Or do you think that there are inconsistencies in that?
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Well, I think if you narrow it to the sort of sacred categories, then it's pretty consistently
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So any time there is a disparity in outcome between white and black, let's say in terms
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of entering Harvard or in terms of wealth, you know, they will be on top of that.
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If there are more black people being incarcerated or excluded from school, they'll be on top of
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Now, what they won't apply that to is, for example, if Jews are doing better than Gypsy
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and Irish travelers here in Britain, or if West Indians or sort of East, West Africans
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are doing better than West Indians within the black group, they don't care about those
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So because those distinctions aren't the sacred ones.
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So I'd say they're being inconsistent in ignoring a lot of different social categories
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But on their sacred categories, I think they're applying those fairly consistently.
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So I'm just like, look, in Canada, as you're well aware, in the last few weeks, we've had
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the boiling point in the parental rights movement where we've had trans activists and Muslim
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And generally speaking, I'd say the woke left has sided with the trans activists, despite
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the Muslims being their sacred cows for much of the last 20 years.
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So I'm just curious, with your approach to this issue, how you would explain that phenomenon?
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Well, there is a sort of hierarchy of oppression points.
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You know, there's the top of the totem pole, and then there's the white male cis hetero type
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So the question there is, right, is who's got more points?
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Is it the Muslims who have more points, or is it trans who have more points?
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And I think it's as simple as trans having more points.
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It's just like trans gets more points than feminist, you know, and female.
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And I think it's as simple as that, is who is seen as punching up and who's seen as punching
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And I don't think it's more complicated, really, than that.
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And of course, of course, what matters are those sacred categories, race, gender, sexuality,
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So I'm just curious, and I don't know the student profile at the University of Buckingham,
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What's the enrollment profile of your class you'd absolutely love here?
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Because I think secretly, or maybe openly, you might like the really like woke, lefty,
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non-binary with the purple hair student in there, having it out with someone who loves
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I think it would be, ideally, it would be 50-50.
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I mean, a lot of the data we have from FIRE in the US would show, you know, when you have
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a roughly 50-50 mix, you've got the least self-censorship going on.
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I'd only want, you know, I would want somebody who was woke, and I want plenty of left-wingers.
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If we're going to get somebody in there who was woke, but who was willing to defend it
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in a Socratic style to say, well, I think, you know, equality trumps liberty, and this
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is important for human flourishing, or the speech boundaries should be much tighter than
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I mean, I think that kind of debate would be really interesting.
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The problem, of course, is when you get people who just stick a label on others and think,
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okay, they're toxic, and I'm going to be polluted by hanging out with them.
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I mean, once you're into that or emotional blackmail, then it's not productive.
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Yeah, or someone who feels unsafe in the climate of ideas, which is not an issue I hope you'll
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have to contend with in your new university home here.
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Professor Eric Coffin, I wish you the best with the class.
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Maybe we'll find some great essays you've done that we can publish over at True North
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Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
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Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.