Juno News - October 07, 2023


Cancelled professor launches course on ‘woke left’ ideology


Episode Stats

Length

15 minutes

Words per Minute

179.1271

Word Count

2,717

Sentence Count

148

Hate Speech Sentences

9


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 I've said time and time again, free speech is my hill to die on.
00:00:12.260 And that means, you know, legal free speech that is to stand up against censorship and
00:00:16.840 regulation of speech by government, but also academic freedom and cultural free speech.
00:00:21.560 The idea that we must foster in society an attitude that encourages and welcomes the
00:00:28.280 exchange of ideas and information rather than discourages and cancels.
00:00:32.900 And I was, of course, very intrigued by this course that was not offered when I was in
00:00:38.540 university.
00:00:39.480 I'll read the proper name of it because I don't want to give it a crude summation, but
00:00:44.280 the proper name of the course is, and it's a study of woke ideology here.
00:00:49.980 And I lost the thing here.
00:00:52.600 There we go.
00:00:53.260 So it is called woke the origins dynamics and implications of an elite ideology.
00:00:59.460 Now, this is not being offered at a Canadian school, not yet, but it is being offered at
00:01:03.840 the University of Birmingham by a Canadian professor, Eric Kaufman, who joins me now.
00:01:09.220 Professor, good to talk to you.
00:01:10.360 Thanks for coming on.
00:01:12.160 Good to be here, Andrew.
00:01:13.160 I should just one slight correction.
00:01:15.180 It's University of Buckingham, not Birmingham.
00:01:17.280 I'm so sorry.
00:01:18.620 I get my hams.
00:01:19.700 It was all the Thanksgiving talk.
00:01:20.980 I'm getting my hams mixed up here.
00:01:22.380 Buckingham, yes.
00:01:23.440 And I should say University of Buckingham is like a very, well, you've said it's the
00:01:27.780 only free speech university really in the UK.
00:01:31.240 It is, yeah.
00:01:32.280 I mean, it has a strange origin because it was founded through Margaret Thatcher.
00:01:37.440 And it sort of, you know, even though most of the staff and students still lean left,
00:01:41.520 it's got more viewpoint diversity than you'll find on a typical British campus.
00:01:45.900 So it's somewhat more hospitable and the leadership is very much in favor of moving it in this direction.
00:01:50.760 So what is your class about?
00:01:52.740 I mean, obviously, you've got 15 weeks of material here.
00:01:54.860 I don't expect you to give it all in a few minutes.
00:01:56.700 But what is this course about?
00:01:58.760 Well, it really is sort of begins with the intellectual history.
00:02:02.320 The, you know, the how did we get to this ideology?
00:02:04.700 How does it relate to, for example, socialism, liberalism, anarchism, and these other isms that
00:02:11.200 go back earlier into the 19th century?
00:02:13.460 And then we kind of look at what happens in the 60s, how the left shifts, you know, from
00:02:19.160 class towards identity and, and then how that plays out into our own time.
00:02:23.760 I then move on to, to looking at public opinion data, sort of who supports something like
00:02:29.860 canceling JK Rowling, for example.
00:02:31.780 I mean, it would tend to be younger people would tend to be, is it more female than male?
00:02:35.480 Is it more left than right?
00:02:36.980 And so on.
00:02:37.580 And then how this is now affecting electoral politics, the culture wars, the politics of
00:02:42.980 the culture wars and speech boundaries, you know, critical race theory, all of that.
00:02:48.920 And then finally, looking at the philosophy, the questions that it raises, you know, free
00:02:53.760 speech versus so-called equal speech.
00:02:56.240 So that's kind of a very quick and dirty.
00:02:58.180 I mean, it's, it's certainly there on the website.
00:03:00.360 If you go to my Twitter, you can sort of see a link, but that we're going to do this sort
00:03:04.280 of very empirically, you know, I mean, there's a lot of academics.
00:03:08.600 There are thousands of papers on the populist right, lots of courses on it.
00:03:12.480 I've taught in that myself, but there's nothing on the woke left because it's just too
00:03:16.100 uncomfortable to do.
00:03:17.400 One thing I'm curious about, I years ago sought out to write a book about political correctness,
00:03:24.480 and I did years of research on this and just ultimately, for a number of reasons, walked
00:03:28.640 away from it.
00:03:29.240 But one of the things that I found in doing that is that political correctness as a word
00:03:33.920 or as a term, when it was first introduced, was viewed, was described and used by the people
00:03:40.540 that wanted political correctness and they wanted to be politically correct.
00:03:43.320 And then it morphed and was only used by people that were decrying it and criticizing it.
00:03:48.120 And am I correct in saying that woke has kind of gone through a bit of a similar phase where
00:03:53.360 it was introduced as a very positive, favorable concept by the woke people?
00:03:57.520 And now they've sort of backed off of the word and it's only really being used by people
00:04:01.400 that are calling out wokeness.
00:04:02.740 Yeah, you're absolutely right about that.
00:04:06.060 I mean, what I would say, I mean, there's no question people abuse the word and stretch
00:04:10.480 the word to mean anything they don't like.
00:04:13.380 Well, some people just use it as a stand in for left, which I don't think is entirely accurate.
00:04:17.600 No, I don't think it's accurate and is somewhat of a way of devaluing what is actually quite
00:04:23.480 a useful, I think, empirically tight social scientific term.
00:04:28.280 So I have a one sentence definition.
00:04:30.700 It's making sacred, sorry, the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender and
00:04:36.960 sexual identity groups.
00:04:38.140 So once you erect these groups as sacred, anything that might offend the most hypothetically
00:04:45.520 sensitive member of one of these groups is blasphemy or criticizing anything that's done
00:04:51.980 in the name of helping such as these groups, such as anti-racism or trans affirmation or
00:04:58.100 whatever.
00:04:58.480 If you criticize any such movement, that is also a violation of the sacred and therefore cause
00:05:03.960 for excommunication or cancellation.
00:05:06.020 So there's this very religious quality to it.
00:05:08.480 And I think it is a useful term and it describes something that is very real and has emerged
00:05:14.080 strongly in our time.
00:05:16.040 Based on that definition, can wokeness be separated from victimhood and this veneration of victims?
00:05:23.300 It very much, it springs from the victimhood culture.
00:05:27.240 So the wider ideology is based on, you might call it a victimhood culture and sort of emotional
00:05:35.740 safety, emotional trauma prevention is sort of the mantra, but of course that is broader
00:05:41.680 than just race, gender, sexuality could apply to disability, even potentially class in theory
00:05:48.200 would fit into the victimhood model.
00:05:51.140 But there is a focus very specifically in wokeness on just race, gender and sexuality.
00:05:56.620 I think the fat stuff, the class stuff, that doesn't have the same pickup.
00:06:01.220 It doesn't seem like there's as much energy in canceling and pushing for DEI along those
00:06:05.940 axes.
00:06:06.960 So I think it's much more specific to these three categories.
00:06:12.060 Is your view that the woke, whoever they are, and maybe that's something you wanted to
00:06:16.560 define, do they see wokeness as a tool, as a vehicle to get to where they want, or is it
00:06:21.020 the destination?
00:06:21.740 I think it is the destination.
00:06:25.040 I mean, Jonathan Haidt has his moral foundations theory, and there's really two foundations.
00:06:31.760 One is equal outcomes.
00:06:33.140 So all identity groups that could be black, white, male, female, et cetera, should have
00:06:39.120 equal outcomes in terms of income, in terms of honors and esteem and so on.
00:06:44.040 That would be one prong of it.
00:06:45.420 The other prong is, again, this microscopic, even microaggression, sort of harm protection.
00:06:51.960 So anything that might offend or upset in any way, somebody's emotional state must be
00:06:57.620 prevented, which is why they're going after free speech, for example, speech which might
00:07:02.340 offend.
00:07:02.720 So I think there is something real there and is rooted in these two moral foundations,
00:07:09.020 but just taken to the extreme.
00:07:11.880 Your description of it as making sacred, I think, is incredibly appropriate, because
00:07:16.100 a lot of people have seen that religious-like fervor from people who, again, would identify
00:07:21.000 as fundamentally anti-religion in a lot of cases and would talk about the harm of religion
00:07:26.280 against certain groups.
00:07:27.340 It's interesting how blind they are to what this does to several groups and people as
00:07:34.400 well.
00:07:35.080 And I guess I wanted to ask a little bit about that, because by making it sacred, you
00:07:40.040 have to elevate it above other things that have had a level of sanctity in society.
00:07:44.880 Freedom of speech is a notable one.
00:07:46.420 I mean, it used to be that even people who are fairly progressive would still operate
00:07:51.460 within the parameters of free speech as important, and they'd use free speech to make their point.
00:07:56.060 That was, I think, the dominant force you'd saw in progressives for much of the last 50
00:08:01.540 years.
00:08:02.040 And now, freedom of speech no longer has any sacred value.
00:08:06.100 In fact, it's viewed as an evil that needs to be dealt with in society by a lot of these
00:08:10.500 people.
00:08:12.180 Yeah, and that's been documented in opinion survey data in the U.S. going back to the 70s,
00:08:18.140 that there's been a shift from kind of a more moral relativism toleration to moral absolutism
00:08:23.280 in young people.
00:08:26.060 But I don't want to, I think it's a mistake to see this as completely new.
00:08:31.380 And I think, you know, if you talk about political correctness in the 80s and 90s,
00:08:36.380 was it acceptable to offend minority groups in the late 80s and early 90s?
00:08:43.120 No, is the answer.
00:08:44.540 They had speech codes at U.S.
00:08:46.040 universities.
00:08:46.460 I actually think you already had a pretty restrictive speech climate.
00:08:51.520 The doors were kind of, I think, pretty wide open.
00:08:53.740 And that's why you did see episodes of cancel culture.
00:08:57.040 You know, the UBC political science department in the mid-1990s was just one episode.
00:09:01.520 It just was less frequent because you didn't have social media to organize flash mobs.
00:09:05.620 If I could jump in, though, Professor, I feel that what happened there, you're right,
00:09:11.880 the acceptability was already established or the unacceptability.
00:09:15.260 I feel what happened is the threshold was changed, is that what offense was, was redefined.
00:09:20.980 And I wonder if that's the goalpost shift that leads us to where we are now as well.
00:09:25.140 The same idea.
00:09:25.900 I mean, being a racist has been, you know, out of vogue for many decades.
00:09:30.560 But the definition of racism has changed a lot in that time.
00:09:35.100 True, true.
00:09:35.620 I mean, I think you're right.
00:09:36.940 You know, the idea of hiking being racist and punctuality being a white thing, you know,
00:09:41.700 that there's no question that they've taken it to the next level.
00:09:44.980 The only thing I would say, though, is you can find examples, you know, in the mid-70s,
00:09:50.640 evolutionary psychologists who argued that genetics mattered.
00:09:55.740 And this wasn't race IQ.
00:09:57.040 This was just genetics mattering for social behavior.
00:09:59.560 They were ostracized.
00:10:00.720 They had open letters.
00:10:02.140 So I'm, even though you're right that there are some new, there's been some new conceptual
00:10:07.860 stretching, I think quite a bit of that had already occurred.
00:10:11.580 And certainly in academia, if you look at the published work already in the 70s and 80s and 90s,
00:10:17.720 you know, critical race theory dates from the 70s, you know, Chris Rufo in his book talks
00:10:22.680 about this.
00:10:23.280 So these ideas were already there.
00:10:26.260 It's just that they hadn't spread as widely.
00:10:29.000 And yes, there were some innovations.
00:10:31.260 The trans thing is new.
00:10:32.440 But I would stress the continuities more than the discontinuities.
00:10:37.740 Social media is more quantitative scaling up rather than a qualitative change, in my view.
00:10:43.040 One of the challenges that I would have, and again, I'm basing this off of how I've used
00:10:49.660 woke, not necessarily the parameters that you've set for it, is that there's a prevailing
00:10:55.100 theme in it, and there are commonalities in how it's applied.
00:10:58.900 But is it coherent enough to be an ideology in the sense that do the woke apply the rules
00:11:07.180 they set equally, in your view?
00:11:09.500 If someone's committed to wokeness, do you find that they're consistently applying it?
00:11:14.160 Or do you think that there are inconsistencies in that?
00:11:17.920 Well, I think if you narrow it to the sort of sacred categories, then it's pretty consistently
00:11:22.820 applied.
00:11:23.440 So any time there is a disparity in outcome between white and black, let's say in terms
00:11:28.360 of entering Harvard or in terms of wealth, you know, they will be on top of that.
00:11:33.960 If there are more black people being incarcerated or excluded from school, they'll be on top of
00:11:40.120 that.
00:11:40.300 Now, what they won't apply that to is, for example, if Jews are doing better than Gypsy
00:11:47.260 and Irish travelers here in Britain, or if West Indians or sort of East, West Africans
00:11:52.880 are doing better than West Indians within the black group, they don't care about those
00:11:58.200 distinctions.
00:11:59.180 So because those distinctions aren't the sacred ones.
00:12:01.560 So I'd say they're being inconsistent in ignoring a lot of different social categories
00:12:05.960 where there are inequalities of outcome.
00:12:08.820 But on their sacred categories, I think they're applying those fairly consistently.
00:12:15.440 So the rules are simply, yeah.
00:12:18.360 So I'm just like, look, in Canada, as you're well aware, in the last few weeks, we've had
00:12:22.480 the boiling point in the parental rights movement where we've had trans activists and Muslim
00:12:27.680 activists that are in conflict.
00:12:29.240 And generally speaking, I'd say the woke left has sided with the trans activists, despite
00:12:33.300 the Muslims being their sacred cows for much of the last 20 years.
00:12:37.100 So I'm just curious, with your approach to this issue, how you would explain that phenomenon?
00:12:42.300 Well, there is a sort of hierarchy of oppression points.
00:12:46.380 You know, there's the top of the totem pole, and then there's the white male cis hetero type
00:12:51.280 at the very bottom of the podium.
00:12:52.880 Yeah, I don't stand a chance.
00:12:54.340 No.
00:12:54.780 So the question there is, right, is who's got more points?
00:12:57.900 Is it the Muslims who have more points, or is it trans who have more points?
00:13:02.140 And I think it's as simple as trans having more points.
00:13:04.860 It's just like trans gets more points than feminist, you know, and female.
00:13:11.120 And I think it's as simple as that, is who is seen as punching up and who's seen as punching
00:13:16.020 down.
00:13:16.380 And I don't think it's more complicated, really, than that.
00:13:19.360 And of course, of course, what matters are those sacred categories, race, gender, sexuality,
00:13:23.580 and it's just who has more points.
00:13:25.840 So I'm just curious, and I don't know the student profile at the University of Buckingham,
00:13:29.560 but what would you love to see in your class?
00:13:31.880 What's the enrollment profile of your class you'd absolutely love here?
00:13:35.260 Because I think secretly, or maybe openly, you might like the really like woke, lefty,
00:13:40.200 non-binary with the purple hair student in there, having it out with someone who loves
00:13:44.740 free speech and all of that.
00:13:47.200 Yeah, exactly.
00:13:47.880 I think it would be, ideally, it would be 50-50.
00:13:50.340 I mean, a lot of the data we have from FIRE in the US would show, you know, when you have
00:13:55.600 a roughly 50-50 mix, you've got the least self-censorship going on.
00:14:00.240 I'd only want, you know, I would want somebody who was woke, and I want plenty of left-wingers.
00:14:04.860 I don't want it to be an echo chamber.
00:14:06.140 If we're going to get somebody in there who was woke, but who was willing to defend it
00:14:12.080 in a Socratic style to say, well, I think, you know, equality trumps liberty, and this
00:14:16.460 is important for human flourishing, or the speech boundaries should be much tighter than
00:14:20.480 they are.
00:14:20.760 I mean, I think that kind of debate would be really interesting.
00:14:24.360 The problem, of course, is when you get people who just stick a label on others and think,
00:14:29.360 okay, they're toxic, and I'm going to be polluted by hanging out with them.
00:14:32.500 And so, no, we have to know platform.
00:14:34.320 I mean, once you're into that or emotional blackmail, then it's not productive.
00:14:39.760 Yeah, or someone who feels unsafe in the climate of ideas, which is not an issue I hope you'll
00:14:45.820 have to contend with in your new university home here.
00:14:48.860 Professor Eric Coffin, I wish you the best with the class.
00:14:53.400 Maybe we'll find some great essays you've done that we can publish over at True North
00:14:57.500 for some of your students.
00:14:59.180 But thank you so much for coming on.
00:15:01.360 Thanks, Andrew.
00:15:02.180 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:15:04.680 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.