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

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishin.

00:00:09.700 And this is a show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects

00:00:14.900 they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts.

00:00:22.300 Our brilliant guest this week is a journalist and an award-winning novelist,

00:00:26.540 Lionel Shriver. Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:00:28.380 Thanks. Nice to be here.

00:00:29.720 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?

00:00:43.320 How long have you got?

00:00:44.500 We've got exactly an hour, Alana.

00:00:46.040 I'm primarily a novelist, though I have done increasing amounts of mostly opinion

00:00:55.280 journalism and features in the last several years. I currently have a column in Standpoint

00:01:03.540 and in Harbors Magazine in the US. You can tell by my accent that I'm American, but

00:01:09.420 I have been in the UK over 30 years, so I've really protected that accent.

00:01:19.880 I'm probably best known for my seventh novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, but I have published

00:01:26.880 several since then.

00:01:28.380 I guess I'm currently at 13 books.

00:01:32.340 My most recent book was a collection of short stories and novellas called Property and the

00:01:38.940 novel before that was The Mandibles, A Family, 2029 to 2047. And that's about economic apocalypse

00:01:48.940 in the United States in the near future. Nice positive subject. I'm a cheerful person.

00:01:58.340 Well, one of the things you've been writing extensively about, and I imagine it might be a

00:02:02.760 frustration for you given how accomplished you are as a novelist that interviews often end up

00:02:07.640 being about the journalistic side of things.

00:02:11.180 But an issue that, as you know, we've encountered on the show

00:02:15.120 and I've personally encountered is free speech and censoriousness

00:02:17.840 on student campuses and so on.

00:02:19.880 And it's a conversation that's ongoing.

00:02:22.800 One of the things I wanted to ask you about,

00:02:24.280 because we're trying to work it out for ourselves,

00:02:25.980 is one of the arguments that often gets made on the progressive side

00:02:30.800 is that we have free speech.

00:02:33.820 You're free to say what you want.

00:02:35.560 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.

00:02:44.620 What do you make of that argument?

00:02:47.020 Well, you caught the problem in a nutshell.

00:02:52.000 If what you say gets you fired, then that's not free speech.

00:02:58.560 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.

00:03:14.260 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?

00:03:25.660 There's no record of what you think but don't allow yourself to say.

00:03:30.000 And I resist the whole climate.

00:03:34.100 I resist the idea that there are a set of opinions which everyone must subscribe to.

00:03:39.180 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.

00:03:51.360 So, you know, it's unhealthy.

00:03:53.760 Now, we talk about, especially in comedy, the comedy industry is one giant ultra-liberal bubble.

00:04:01.120 And they would say, first of all, there's no issue with free speech.

00:04:05.260 How can there be? You can say what you like, how you like, when you like.

00:04:08.820 And they also say that free speech as well is a right-wing issue.

00:04:12.900 It's just for people on the fringes who want to shout racial epithets.

00:04:16.780 Where do you stand on that?

00:04:17.920 I think the fact that free speech has shifted from the left to the right is a catastrophe.

00:04:25.240 In truth, it doesn't belong to either side.

00:04:30.240 It's something that belongs to all of us.

00:04:32.840 And if the right loses the right to say what it wishes, then that's a loss for the left as well.

00:04:40.940 because sooner or later that kind of restriction is going to hit you.

00:04:47.980 And I think that's one of the biggest mistakes that the millennial left tends to make

00:04:53.460 is they think they're always going to be in a position of calling the shots and making the rules.

00:04:57.980 And so because they're so right on, because they're so woke,

00:05:03.120 you know, that climate of fear that I'm talking about that is restrictive,

00:05:10.580 It does keep people from saying things.

00:05:12.420 It does restrict freedom of speech.

00:05:14.540 That's not going to affect them because they have the right opinions 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?

00:05:29.420 Because they're good people, right?

00:05:32.180 But it's a huge mistake.

00:05:36.020 It's like young people always thinking that they're going to be young forever.

00:05:40.580 right? Which all young people do. Is that not true? I'm sorry to break it to you. I know this

00:05:48.140 is going to ruin your day. But eventually, someone else sets the rules. And if you have not

00:05:56.180 allowed a cultural attitude for expressing something that is not, that departs from the

00:06:04.000 orthodoxy of the day, then your restrictive environment is going to bite you in your own

00:06:12.100 bum. And therefore, it isn't a left or right wing issue. And this whole idea that the only

00:06:21.280 reason people keep nattering on about free speech is that they just want to use racist

00:06:27.260 language and promote bigotry. Well, it's a bigotry and it's an ignorance.

00:06:33.660 And where do you think it comes from, this desire to be censorious,

00:06:36.980 this desire to shut down opinions that you feel uncomfortable listening to?

00:06:41.640 Do you think it comes from a position of intolerance,

00:06:44.540 or do you think it's a misguided sense of good

00:06:47.100 and trying to eliminate people who have got unpleasant views, as it were?

00:06:52.880 Well, it feels good to tell people what to do.

00:06:57.580 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.

00:07:17.880 They do. But I think the thrill of it isn't the thrill of doing good. I think the thrill of it

00:07:28.240 is authoritarian, that you're pushing other people around, you're punishing them when they

00:07:35.380 get out of line. It's all about power. Do you think narcissism plays a certain aspect of it?

00:07:41.460 For instance, with the Roger Scruton affair, when George Eaton essentially helped to get

00:07:47.080 Roger Scruton fired. He put a post on Instagram with himself swigging a bottle of champagne saying

00:07:53.060 that, I'm quoting, I missed probably quoting, but essentially he said that feeling you get when you

00:07:57.860 get a racist sacked. Yeah, well, I mean, that's a good example. He bagged a trophy. This is,

00:08:05.800 this is actually a predatory sport. And getting people sacked is now one of the things that you

00:08:16.260 do on social media. And even now, because that was the New Statesman, in mainstream media,

00:08:23.240 I thought that was especially unseemly. It surprised me that that happened at the New

00:08:30.560 Statesman. It's interesting you say what Francis says, because I know that I play computer games

00:08:35.860 sometimes, and that feeling where you have the ability to type something into your own little

00:08:41.660 computer and a human being on the other end of that communication does something different or

00:08:47.420 something happens you know you get even on this platform twitch which is where you watch other

00:08:52.000 people play computer games i'm sorry yes i'm very sad um i said there's a platform that exists how

00:09:02.380 i know about it i guess that means that that for the that audience the paint has already dried

00:09:09.500 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.

00:09:24.280 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.

00:09:36.400 There is that level of, oh, if I do this here, then that thing happens over there.

00:09:40.860 And do you think that is what's happening with these Twitch fork mobs, the Twitter mobs, where essentially it's about power?

00:09:48.460 It's totally about power and the exercise of power.

00:09:52.540 And one thing that's been interesting in the young adult fiction area, which has gone particularly nuts.

00:10:01.180 I don't understand why.

00:10:05.880 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.

00:10:28.120 And they've got a character who is gay and they're not gay or something like that.

00:10:34.920 And then they end up suffering from the same mass attack that they had been organizing against other people.

00:10:46.200 There's a certain rough justice in that.

00:10:48.380 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 eating itself and whatever.

00:10:58.540 And that worries me because I think in a way we're all eating ourselves when that happens.

00:11:02.860 Do you know what I mean?

00:11:03.260 I don't think it's healthy when that happens to anyone.

00:11:08.780 No, it isn't.

00:11:09.700 I mean I say that there is some rough justice in that

00:11:14.100 but it would be better if we were not living in a world

00:11:18.740 that this was happening at all.

00:11:21.480 And I'm concerned that this whole pile-on mentality

00:11:26.660 is infecting major institutions.

00:11:33.260 It's possible I'll write my column about this coming weekend, but the best example

00:11:40.320 I can think of is what happened this week at Harvard, where one of the professors at

00:11:48.280 the law school, very distinguished, I think he's a dean, was part of the team who represented

00:11:59.940 Harvey Weinstein and the students got up in arms and the administration backed down and

00:12:07.860 sacked him. And this is completely contrary to the principles of law. I mean, this should

00:12:15.320 have been a, what do they call it, a teaching moment. It's like, sorry, but no matter how

00:12:24.820 perfidious a character may be, everyone is deserving of legal representation. Just because

00:12:37.600 you represent someone legally, what they did is not supposed to rub off on you. Just because

00:12:48.680 you represent someone, you're not responsible for what they did or didn't do. That's the

00:12:54.200 way the legal system works and yet just a bunch of students saying they were uncomfortable

00:13:01.700 and felt unsafe and just all this nonsense, all this utterly insincere crap. We can get

00:13:08.600 to that in a moment. Harvard caved. Harvard. Harvard. So the worry is not so much social

00:13:20.900 media. If it's contained to Twitter, et cetera, it's painful, it's gross, it's impolite,

00:13:31.860 and it's cutthroat. But the implications are limited. They're no longer limited. We

00:13:39.380 We are now in a mob rule universe, and across the board, mainstream institutions are caving

00:13:50.560 to the pressure of the crowd and throwing principle out the window.

00:13:57.380 The same thing is starting to happen in publishing, and that's where we should really be concerned.

00:14:04.560 once in a while someone, you know, in publishing or academia will draw the line. But that's

00:14:10.660 not the form. That's the exception.

00:14:13.200 And how is it affecting the world of publishing in your own experience?

00:14:19.500 I think it's making publishers very nervous. There was a case very recently of a book about

00:14:29.440 Israel that was canceled because of, again, more mob hysteria, that it got something wrong

00:14:41.560 in a very pro-Palestinian social media universe. And that's starting to happen more and more.

00:14:49.720 I'm interested that the term cancel culture has entered the vocabulary. That's concerning

00:14:57.480 because when you need a name for it, then it's happening more than once.

00:15:03.400 Your point about institutions, I think, is a really important one.

00:15:06.240 We were just at a conference on freedom in academic research,

00:15:10.060 and there was probably 20 or so prominent academics there.

00:15:13.360 We talked to Douglas Murray there.

00:15:14.600 We interviewed him there.

00:15:16.000 And just the people went around the room,

00:15:18.900 and it was 10 or 15 people who detailed their own experience of being fired

00:15:23.820 or no platformed or losing something because of this.

00:15:27.880 And so you say Twitter, and I take your point about if it's just contained to Twitter,

00:15:33.040 then that's one thing.

00:15:34.680 But I think, as you say, the society we're living now is the Twitter mob has power

00:15:40.420 or the student mob has power.

00:15:43.380 Why do you think, because you've written about this

00:15:45.160 and talked about how your generation growing up,

00:15:47.420 you also did some of these things, protesting about stuff and whatever.

00:15:50.700 But how did we get to a point where we don't go, oh, these are just silly students doing their thing.

00:15:56.680 They need to rebel against something.

00:15:58.440 How did we get to a point where we went from that to these students are protesting and we must take action?

00:16:07.480 It's a little mystifying, but it has something to do with commerce.

00:16:16.040 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.

00:16:33.860 I think it's an unfortunate way of thinking about higher education, but it changes behavior.

00:16:46.040 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.

00:17:01.420 There's been a reduction in tenure.

00:17:06.100 But something – there must have been some reorganization as well.

00:17:10.980 It's worse than just not having enough tenured professors.

00:17:14.920 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.

00:17:26.940 And it's the bureaucrats who have been instrumental in turning these often storied, culturally vital institutions into Walmart.

00:17:45.280 And so as far as they're concerned, if there are enough of the customers who are upset, then you remove the product from the shelves.

00:17:56.400 And do you think the fact that we've introduced tuition fees

00:17:58.940 and now it's £9,000 a year in the UK to go to university here,

00:18:02.940 do you think that makes it worse now?

00:18:04.540 Now that the fact that you're paying £27,000 purely in tuition fees

00:18:08.900 and you've got your accommodation books on top,

00:18:10.960 people now feel that they have a right to go,

00:18:13.500 if I don't agree with this, I can now get rid of it.

00:18:18.700 The money here may have something to do with it,

00:18:21.440 though the 9,000 pounds a year is so dwarfed by what you pay for a private college education

00:18:30.580 in the U.S. It's hilarious. It's like spare change. And I suspect that what's going on

00:18:38.420 in U.K. universities is less financial and more having inherited a cultural backwash

00:18:48.440 from academia in the United States.

00:18:53.520 We do get a lot from you guys, don't we?

00:18:56.340 Yeah.

00:18:58.340 You don't look so excited about it.

00:19:00.240 Well, you know, I'm cool about the movies.

00:19:03.740 I even like, you know, when Breaking Bad comes over here,

00:19:07.500 all that's great, but the inheritance from the U.S.

00:19:12.780 is a little too indiscriminate.

00:19:14.180 This is an unfortunate contagion and I have found it mystifying, frankly, why this academic

00:19:26.220 culture has spread throughout the West.

00:19:30.580 I mean it's even weirder in Canada and it's lunatic in Australia.

00:19:41.120 something odd going on in the commonwealth. Even there's a goofball contingent in Ireland.

00:19:48.880 It seems to have spread everywhere and it's as if the world of higher education lives

00:19:58.640 all together in its own bubble and has gone insane together in spite of the fact that

00:20:03.840 physically they're all over the planet. How that works, I don't get it. I mean maybe

00:20:08.560 to go to a lot of conferences.

00:20:10.500 But it seems quite puritanical in nature as well.

00:20:13.240 Recently, I've got a complaint against myself

00:20:15.520 from the comedy club.

00:20:17.920 Or I'm out.

00:20:20.020 But for a joke I made,

00:20:22.140 I'm half Latin American,

00:20:23.520 I make a joke about when I was 18,

00:20:24.940 I tried to get in touch with my Latino roots,

00:20:26.820 and that's just a long way of saying I used to do cocaine.

00:20:29.540 And somebody emailed in and said,

00:20:31.940 as a Latin American woman,

00:20:33.300 I find that offensive,

00:20:35.120 especially from a man in power.

00:20:37.160 Is that true?

00:20:38.380 You're in power?

00:20:39.360 Yeah, I know.

00:20:40.280 She thinks you're a man in power, Jesus Christ.

00:20:42.880 I love that.

00:20:43.420 Longmore has met me for 15 minutes and goes,

00:20:45.320 this is clearly wrong.

00:20:46.660 You should meet my girlfriend.

00:20:48.120 You will find she calls all the shots.

00:20:50.320 You know that audience member was deluded

00:20:51.820 just because they thought you have power.

00:20:55.200 But it's just amazing.

00:20:56.840 And her attitude was, I don't like it,

00:20:59.760 therefore we should get rid of it.

00:21:01.220 That's right.

00:21:02.220 And this is the kind of, you know, you talked,

00:21:04.240 you began the discussion about freedom of speech,

00:21:08.040 And, of course, we all have freedom of speech, so what's the problem?

00:21:10.380 This is a good example.

00:21:12.680 Now, it's true that the police didn't knock down your door

00:21:15.760 and didn't throw you in a cell and put duct tape over your mouth.

00:21:23.020 But, you know, she felt she had the right to tell you you couldn't make that joke.

00:21:29.160 And maybe you will think twice about making it again.

00:21:32.880 I did it the next day.

00:21:33.780 And you just did it again.

00:21:34.980 Good for you.

00:21:36.540 We're all rebels in this room.

00:21:38.040 But I do take your point. Sorry to interrupt. 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?

00:21:54.260 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.

00:22:13.940 and um and there's certain kinds of jokes that you're we are being repeatedly informed you may

00:22:22.720 not make anymore one of the things i find really interesting is that uh as as both of us are

00:22:28.980 working comedians is you often you go on stage and you do a joke that you've you've worked out

00:22:35.360 very carefully and you know that you're not punching down at any oppressed group or anything

00:22:40.820 else for example i have a whole routine about why we need the special olympics for white people

00:22:45.200 right and it's making fun of the fact that white people are not very good at certain things right

00:22:49.040 so i'm punching up at the white people in this whole woke way of thinking but the moment you

00:22:55.140 start talking about that people get super tense yeah they do even though which makes it harder to

00:23:02.480 get them to laugh yeah yeah uh even though the target of that joke isn't an oppressed group but

00:23:09.820 They just hear the words race or something like that, and automatically everyone tenses up.

00:23:16.100 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.

00:23:23.680 I mean, I know you've talked about transgender issues a lot.

00:23:26.280 There are people who have been arrested for misgendering someone on Twitter.

00:23:29.400 Yeah, I know.

00:23:30.360 It's a hate crime.

00:23:31.440 Yeah, it's a hate crime.

00:23:34.120 A pronoun.

00:23:35.440 A pronoun.

00:23:36.000 It's a hate crime.

00:23:36.860 and but you see i'm still trying to work it out for myself because the argument that i put to

00:23:44.880 you right at the beginning is the argument that i hear back when i talk about free speech which is

00:23:49.920 but it's still not illegal you see you can still go and do your jokes you can still go and perform

00:23:54.680 right and if people don't like it well it's your problem and i don't really know necessarily what

00:24:01.640 to say back to that. Do you?

00:24:04.960 Well, it is often on the way to being illegal. I mean, that whole pronoun thing. I don't

00:24:17.320 think the test of censorship is necessarily law, however. If socially and professionally

00:24:26.060 you cannot allow something to escape your lips. That's not free speech. We're not going

00:24:36.160 to get into what the limits of free speech ought to be necessarily, but I think there

00:24:43.140 should be very few.

00:24:44.140 What do you think should be the limits on free speech?

00:24:48.580 incitement to violence. That's where I draw the line. But otherwise, I'm perfectly happy

00:25:00.760 for people to say all the ugly, bigoted, stupid things they want, and then we can say back

00:25:09.800 that they're ugly, bigoted, and stupid

00:25:12.080 rather than tell people

00:25:14.020 that they simply can't say them.

00:25:19.180 So I tend to be on the extreme end.

00:25:23.380 And I'm very hostile

00:25:24.940 to the evolution of hate crime

00:25:27.060 and hate speech.

00:25:30.240 I just talk about slippery slope.

00:25:33.960 What does hate speech mean to you

00:25:35.160 because you put it in inverted commas?

00:25:39.800 In that the definition of hate speech is continually changing, it's anything that can be construed

00:25:52.500 as hostile to some protected group.

00:25:56.420 I think the whole idea of having legally protected groups is off the beam.

00:26:03.600 I grew up with the understanding that equality under the law is one of the principles, the

00:26:13.200 absolute bedrock principles of democracy and that the law applies equally to all of us.

00:26:21.440 And all this specially protected groups means, no, it doesn't.

00:26:26.300 No, it doesn't.

00:26:27.000 And we keep multiplying the specially protected groups, which is why they're fighting over

00:26:32.120 the meaning of Islamophobia.

00:26:34.380 So suddenly we're going to have one religion.

00:26:36.580 Among all religions, only one religion is going to be specially protected.

00:26:41.880 And there's no end to this, you know.

00:26:44.820 It potentially just keeps multiplying.

00:26:48.280 It is, legally speaking, an evil concept to have hate speech be against the law.

00:26:56.420 And especially now that the whole area of hate speech and hate crime, they're defined by the victim.

00:27:04.760 The only thing that makes something a hate crime is that I said it was.

00:27:08.440 You know, you looked at me funny.

00:27:10.720 And I think it was because I was a woman.

00:27:13.980 So that's a hate crime.

00:27:16.420 You know?

00:27:17.140 And you can be arrested.

00:27:18.920 Honestly, that's the way it gets recorded.

00:27:21.020 That's all that's required is that I decide or you decide

00:27:25.680 that you're the victim of a hate crime and then there's a hate crime.

00:27:29.260 That's utterly absurd.

00:27:31.800 And what I find as well is how people take snippets from conversations,

00:27:36.060 which we saw with the Roger Scruton affair,

00:27:39.000 and then it's out of context,

00:27:41.840 and then that is seen as them being racist, sexist, whatever else.

00:27:45.880 You know, like what you just said to me, that could be taken out of context.

00:27:49.040 It's like, here's a classic example of being sexist, get rid of him.

00:27:53.320 Yeah, yeah.

00:27:54.320 I mean, that happened to me about a year ago

00:27:56.740 with a column I did for The Spectator.

00:27:59.780 And it was one line taken out of context,

00:28:03.720 and The Spectator has a paywall.

00:28:06.400 Not that most of these people would bother to look up the larger column anyway.

00:28:12.220 So, and then it spread like wildfire,

00:28:15.460 and suddenly Lionel Shriver is a racist.

00:28:19.860 Although that label has got so tired.

00:28:23.460 Whenever I hear it now, I just laugh.

00:28:26.660 It's interesting to watch how that word has completely lost its punch.

00:28:31.900 I think that's one of the reasons that we now call everyone a white supremacist

00:28:35.620 because racist doesn't mean anything anymore.

00:28:39.400 I don't think white supremacist means anything anymore.

00:28:41.560 No, no. It used to mean something.

00:28:43.280 As soon as we started calling everyone a white supremacist, then there's no such thing as a white supremacist anymore.

00:28:50.260 It used to be a useful term.

00:28:52.160 It identified a very tiny number of people.

00:28:55.440 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.

00:29:02.560 Because real white supremacists feel superior and are very proud of the fact that they're white and better than you.

00:29:12.480 So we've lost that term.

00:29:15.080 That's interesting.

00:29:15.700 It's such a good point.

00:29:16.540 This is the thing that worries me most about this concept creep,

00:29:20.420 is that there are white supremacists.

00:29:22.600 And they're losing their identity.

00:29:25.860 We need to protect them.

00:29:27.800 Thank you for that, Francis.

00:29:28.920 Sorry, carry on.

00:29:30.580 There are white supremacists.

00:29:32.340 There are people who are racist.

00:29:33.700 There are neo-Nazis.

00:29:34.980 And we have to know who they are.

00:29:37.880 And now the neo-Nazis are just Brexiteers.

00:29:41.520 Oh, well, I'm a Nazi.

00:29:43.700 When I turned down that contract from SOAS,

00:29:45.800 the mental comedian went on the radio and called me,

00:29:48.700 oh, right, and said, I'm a Nazi.

00:29:50.940 I mean, I'm Jewish.

00:29:56.120 You're a self-hating.

00:29:57.260 Self-hating.

00:29:58.180 Yeah, you've got to internalize.

00:29:59.620 You're a crypto-Nazi.

00:30:01.060 And the thing is, look, my great-grandfather died fighting the Germans in World War II, right?

00:30:06.760 I wonder how he would feel about my transformation into a Nazi.

00:30:12.660 In context, probably proud.

00:30:15.800 I mean we're living in a world of ever-escalating denunciation.

00:30:23.820 And what that means is that the vocabulary goes to shit because nothing means anything anymore.

00:30:31.160 The language becomes impoverished.

00:30:33.940 and none of these words mean anything anymore.

00:30:37.920 I've seen it before because I lived for 12 years in Belfast

00:30:41.460 and they were, you know, for decades accustomed to the language of denunciation

00:30:48.680 because every time there was an atrocity, every time a bond went off,

00:30:52.460 every time someone was assassinated,

00:30:54.740 then all the politicians competed with one another about who could be more disgusted

00:31:02.020 and who could deplore the depravity of these animals more.

00:31:09.960 And it was hilarious to watch the language just go into contortions.

00:31:15.620 I mean, their thesauruses must have been, you know, leafy and fat

00:31:22.420 because eventually you run out.

00:31:25.520 And eventually, of course, all those denunciations were completely meaningless.

00:31:29.220 It could have been past the salt.

00:31:31.200 And the same thing is happening now.

00:31:34.220 And in some ways, because I don't have need for these terms myself very much,

00:31:41.260 I don't mind it getting all worn out because I'm tired of this culture of denunciation.

00:31:49.160 And I'm tired of the super sensitivity around race.

00:31:52.940 And it's kind of amusing to watch the word racist turn into, I don't like you.

00:32:03.060 That's all it means.

00:32:04.280 That's what it means.

00:32:05.080 The one thing that I find particularly worrying about this is that it gives the far right some legitimate arguments that go, free speech is under threat.

00:32:17.040 Here's an example.

00:32:17.960 Here's another example.

00:32:18.880 Here's another example.

00:32:20.480 You've got the left.

00:32:21.400 They're not going to stand up for you.

00:32:22.940 Who's going to stand up for you?

00:32:24.060 I will.

00:32:25.300 I'm serious.

00:32:26.100 Yeah.

00:32:27.200 Because I'm not on the right.

00:32:30.020 And, you know, one of the reasons I've written more journalism, I'm not a natural altruist.

00:32:36.400 And I'm not a natural activist.

00:32:42.020 But honestly, somebody's got to talk sense from a liberal perspective.

00:32:51.480 And there are any number of people who are doing that, and they garner huge audiences.

00:33:00.200 And you've interviewed some of them already.

00:33:04.760 And they're not all super famous, but people like Brendan O'Neill or Ella Whelan, very encouraging examples, both of them because they're young.

00:33:17.980 You know, and they're thinking for themselves and they're liberally minded.

00:33:30.580 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,

00:33:43.880 for standing up to bullies who are trying to silence people on campus, for trying to

00:33:51.740 keep the larger, the public square of discourse large enough for everyone to speak their mind.

00:34:03.300 And, you know, if you go on YouTube, some of these people garner huge, huge audiences.

00:34:08.960 So there's an appetite out there.

00:34:12.060 And in some ways, I guess I've become the poster girl for fiction writers because they've been notably silent, you know.

00:34:23.320 And I find that peculiar because we depend on free speech occupationally.

00:34:32.100 and, you know, instead I hear any number of fiction writers

00:34:39.000 trying to restrict themselves, you know,

00:34:42.540 to support this idea that, you know,

00:34:45.580 you have to stay in your lane

00:34:48.460 and not write about characters who are different from you

00:34:53.040 or have a different race

00:34:54.540 or have a different sexual inclination or something.

00:34:57.560 Why would you do that to yourself?

00:34:59.120 which like it's it's it's like walking into your study and and and um tying your hands behind your

00:35:06.880 back it's just crazy and where do you know it's it's very true and i was thinking when you would

00:35:14.060 describe yourself as a liberal i found that shocking is the wrong word but i used to describe

00:35:20.240 myself as a liberal and i just don't feel comfortable describing myself as a liberal

00:35:24.020 anymore because people I now associate as being inverted commas liberal to me behave in the most

00:35:29.180 illiberal fashion possible. Have you noticed that the people who would on the left who would used

00:35:34.980 to have used the word liberal don't use it very much anymore? Progressive took over liberal

00:35:43.280 and I think that's apt. I think it's telling and I think it's apt. After all, the word progressive

00:35:51.980 is fundamentally meaningless.

00:35:54.760 It only means going forward.

00:35:57.100 And it's like I wrote in a column at some point,

00:35:59.700 you can go forward into a pit.

00:36:05.800 What I find interesting is the flip that has happened

00:36:08.340 because you keep talking about young people.

00:36:11.400 Even we're old enough to remember

00:36:13.340 when it was the right who were censorious.

00:36:17.020 It was the religious right who were saying

00:36:19.120 you shouldn't talk about sex on TV,

00:36:20.940 you shouldn't do this, you shouldn't do that, you mustn't talk about that, the tip of gauze of the world.

00:36:25.320 And now it's been completely flipped.

00:36:30.080 Yeah, and I think that's one advantage to being older.

00:36:32.760 I mean, I'm always looking for them.

00:36:37.240 Having lived through the 60s and having experienced all the restriction coming from, in the U.S., of course,

00:36:47.160 it would be the Republicans. I was born at the tail end of the McCarthy era. I wouldn't have

00:36:53.540 lived through it, but there was still that residue. I grew up with a lot of anti-communist

00:36:59.760 guff, and there were still all these things you couldn't do, like take drugs and have sex and

00:37:08.220 Have fun.

00:37:12.300 And it was, of course, the left that said we're going to do whatever we want

00:37:17.160 and that, you know, pushed against all the restrictions

00:37:24.160 and, you know, fundamentally changed culture

00:37:30.220 to be more genuinely liberated

00:37:35.160 where you could do more of whatever you wanted.

00:37:39.080 So that was my understanding of what it meant to be on the left.

00:37:43.080 And it's true. It's completely flipped around.

00:37:47.540 And that's concerning primarily because I don't think it's controversial to say

00:37:52.800 that the left controls the mainstream media

00:37:56.720 and whatever may be going on in the White House

00:38:01.700 still controls most mainstream cultural institutions,

00:38:09.280 not to mention the universities.

00:38:11.980 Oh, yes, certainly.

00:38:12.860 Academia is absolutely dominated.

00:38:14.180 So if all of those institutions view free speech

00:38:23.740 as a right-wing issue, then we're in trouble

00:38:28.480 because that means that they are institutionally hostile

00:38:35.200 to the concept of freedom of speech.

00:38:38.980 I think the moment the left, in terms of using TV terminology,

00:38:44.480 jumped the shark, as it were,

00:38:46.080 was when they just became absolutely obsessed of identity politics.

00:38:50.700 And it's just to the point where everybody has to have a label now.

00:38:53.880 We all need to label every single person.

00:38:56.620 You are this, I am this.

00:38:57.640 Therefore, because you have this label, it means this.

00:39:01.660 It's such a reductive way.

00:39:03.800 It's retrograde.

00:39:05.440 And what I don't understand is why it's not pointed out more often that it's sexist and racist.

00:39:12.500 We're fundamentally being told that what is most important about us are these categories into which we were born and didn't have any choice in, right?

00:39:25.240 Nobody asked me if I wanted to be white.

00:39:27.640 And this is more important than anything else about us.

00:39:36.740 It's anti-individual.

00:39:38.620 But it's also, it is, it's racist and sexist.

00:39:43.180 It's saying that whenever I meet anyone,

00:39:47.660 the most important thing that I'm supposed to note about them

00:39:50.080 is the color of their skin, their gender, and their sexual preference,

00:39:55.000 and maybe whether or not they're disabled.

00:39:56.640 But that defines that person for me, and that's going to govern how I deal with them.

00:40:04.620 Well, I thought that's what we were supposed to get away from.

00:40:07.540 I grew up trying to get away from that, that we were supposed to be able to see all these stereotypes we have of each other.

00:40:15.100 And our obsession with these categories into which we fall are impediments to our ability to have equal, fair, and personable relations.

00:40:27.640 And they are keeping us from being able to see each other as individuals.

00:40:31.860 And the goal of these liberation movements was to release us into a world of individuals where we can actually see each other and interact just as people.

00:40:48.760 The identity politics movement is the antithesis of that approach.

00:40:53.940 And to me, it's just so backwards.

00:40:56.860 backwards. And I don't understand how they get away with it. I don't understand why that's not

00:41:03.300 more obvious. Well, one of the reasons is that anyone who says it tends to get destroyed. We had

00:41:08.480 a friend of ours who's a rapper, a black guy, come on the show. And he said that, you know,

00:41:13.600 the idea of why privilege is a racist concept. He said that on the show. Good for him. Yeah.

00:41:19.420 And immediately he started getting people calling him all kinds of names. Anyone who speaks out,

00:41:25.480 particularly if they're from one of those communities, are going to get slammed.

00:41:29.080 And if you're a straight white man and you say something about how it's racist and sexist.

00:41:33.920 Oh, no, if you're a straight white man, you're not supposed to say anything.

00:41:37.460 All right, well, the rest of the interview could just be you talking then.

00:41:42.060 You've got 20 minutes to say whatever you want, Lionel.

00:41:44.380 We won't make a piece.

00:41:45.200 Please don't do this.

00:41:48.620 But I think it's a very important point because some of the most horrendous vitriol that I've seen named

00:41:55.000 are, you know, black conservatives.

00:41:58.320 And ironically enough,

00:42:00.340 they get racist abuse hurled at them

00:42:02.760 from their own community.

00:42:04.460 It is racist, the terminology that they use.

00:42:07.000 Yeah, because they're Uncle Toms,

00:42:09.100 they're turncoats.

00:42:11.280 Yeah, I...

00:42:12.720 Actually, there's the...

00:42:15.000 The guy who was writing in the Times,

00:42:18.160 the New York Times,

00:42:20.280 that was an American sling,

00:42:22.140 about this case at Harvard.

00:42:26.280 His name is Randall Kennedy.

00:42:28.320 This is the second piece of his that I wish I had written.

00:42:32.960 And he's black, and he's on the faculty at Harvard.

00:42:38.540 And he's really smart, and he's very sensible and grounded,

00:42:48.520 perhaps liberally minded in the old sense.

00:42:51.660 I'm a huge admirer, but I bet he gets all kinds of stick.

00:42:57.720 The terminology is interesting because one of the things that happens to us is we are a right-wing podcast in inverted commas.

00:43:04.920 Oh, really?

00:43:05.540 Yeah, apparently.

00:43:06.420 Oh, gosh, I wish you'd told me.

00:43:08.620 Even though Francis is left-wing, I'm a kind of 90s liberal, as I like to call it, before liberals went mental.

00:43:15.420 You know, but just automatically discussing some of these issues, concerns about identity politics, concerns about censoriousness, automatically you're 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.

00:43:40.520 Well, part of the problem is these directional terminologies, what their connotations are.

00:43:52.140 There's a fundamental political unfairness to the fact that when you say left-wing, it's

00:44:01.900 neutral to good, right?

00:44:04.580 And if you say right-wing, it's evil.

00:44:07.220 And essentially what right wing now means, it doesn't mean that you want a small state.

00:44:13.020 Oh, it stopped meaning that a long time ago.

00:44:15.940 And you want to balance the budget.

00:44:21.360 It means racist.

00:44:23.520 Oh, excuse me.

00:44:24.380 It means white supremacist.

00:44:27.080 Or I don't know what the next one is.

00:44:31.740 And that's not fair.

00:44:33.360 That's not fair.

00:44:33.940 It means, I mean, for example, I am an economic conservative, but what word do I get?

00:44:43.280 What direction do I get?

00:44:45.180 Socially, it sounds to me like you're very liberal when you talk about the individual, about sex, drugs, rock and roll, whatever.

00:44:50.940 Yeah, yeah.

00:44:51.800 Well, I am an economic conservative and a social liberal.

00:44:57.480 And the best ideology I can pinpoint, I roughly call myself a libertarian.

00:45:06.000 The problem with that word in the U.S. is that libertarians have a reputation for being kooks.

00:45:13.660 So they all think that you're obsessed with the gold standard.

00:45:18.640 And there's no logical connection.

00:45:23.520 Whereas in the U.K., the problem with that word is no one knows what it means.

00:45:26.800 Yeah, I know, I've often got blank stares when I've used it, but it fundamentally reduces

00:45:33.000 to the core principle that you should be able to do whatever you want as long as you don't

00:45:38.260 hurt other people. And that's sometimes been interpreted as meaning that you can't have

00:45:46.860 environmental regulations, which is absurd, because if you pollute the environment, then

00:45:52.900 hurt other people. So I prefer a state that has a light touch. I probably support a flat

00:46:05.860 tax as ultimately the most just, that kind of thing. In directional terms, I think of

00:46:17.400 of myself is perpendicular to the left-right axis.

00:46:24.660 And where we are now, because I think we're at quite a challenging moment, but I do see

00:46:31.260 it as being a slight tipping point where people on the left are starting to become more aware

00:46:36.700 that their own side, in order to use a, how can I put this, a technical term, have gone

00:46:42.720 batshit.

00:46:44.720 Right. 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?

00:46:52.700 I don't know. I mean, I'm glad to hear you say that. I'm not sure I share that view.

00:46:56.800 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.

00:47:12.180 And, you know, the publisher of Harper's Magazine, for whom I have started writing, a good example, Rick MacArthur.

00:47:24.380 I mean, he's, you know, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, probably roughly my age, maybe a year or two older.

00:47:33.940 but can't stand what's happening on campuses,

00:47:41.200 can't stand all this hysteria and restriction.

00:47:46.760 And there are a lot of people like that.

00:47:47.880 Mark Lila is another one.

00:47:51.480 But again, more my generation.

00:47:54.160 I do not see it happening as much among earlier generations.

00:47:59.920 And that's why I find people like Ella Whelan and Brendan, sorry, I've named blindness, so encouraging just because of not only are they incredibly articulate, but they're younger.

00:48:21.420 And I hope they have a lot of friends.

00:48:24.480 I hope they have a lot of supporters their own age.

00:48:26.580 but I

00:48:29.260 don't

00:48:30.780 meet enough of them

00:48:31.780 and we often

00:48:33.960 and because you're so brilliant with words

00:48:36.640 and summing up what words mean

00:48:38.540 I hear the term

00:48:40.320 woke bandied around a lot

00:48:42.080 and I can never

00:48:43.860 my mum goes to me plenty what is woke

00:48:46.360 and I don't know how to

00:48:47.660 how would you explain woke culture

00:48:49.920 and what the word woke means

00:48:52.080 in where we are now

00:48:53.700 Well, of course, from my perspective, it means self-satisfied, self-righteous,

00:49:07.940 and certain of your own virtue.

00:49:13.220 What's interesting to me about that word, and I've been watching it, is it's been co-opted

00:49:21.580 by the critics of the wokery because it sounds kind of stupid, and therefore it's monosyllabic,

00:49:31.640 right? We're really tired of the vocabulary that has traditionally been used to denounce

00:49:42.240 the hard left, you know, the snowflake metaphor, and the term virtue signaling, I think, has

00:49:51.820 done pretty heavy lifting and is now worn out. Woke is perfect, and we've just taken it.

00:49:59.480 And I've noticed it's all over the spectator, and it's being used to make fun of the people

00:50:07.380 who made up the word.

00:50:08.780 And I hear it less and less

00:50:10.200 from the people

00:50:10.840 to whom it describes.

00:50:14.140 So we've stolen it.

00:50:18.840 That's a really good point,

00:50:20.360 actually, very accurate.

00:50:21.480 And you now have this thing

00:50:22.400 with companies trying to do

00:50:23.960 all these stupid ads

00:50:25.640 where they look at Frosty,

00:50:27.800 oh, Gillette, no!

00:50:30.000 And there's this phrase now,

00:50:31.560 go woke, go broke,

00:50:33.280 which is a really tightly captured thing

00:50:35.180 of what often happens to businesses

00:50:36.600 when they dive too deep into this wormhole of intersectionality.

00:50:43.960 That's a good example of it having been something like reclaiming,

00:50:50.040 but it's in that you never claimed it to begin with.

00:50:53.220 I guess it's just claiming.

00:50:54.720 Just capturing it from the enemy, if you like, if there is such a thing.

00:51:00.740 I've forgotten what I was going to ask, actually.

00:51:03.040 But I think with this whole woke 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.

00:51:21.080 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.

00:51:26.620 and I wouldn't be surprised if something happens,

00:51:37.200 something probably big and bad

00:51:40.660 because that is usually what it means when something happens

00:51:43.660 that makes all this silly obsession with language and identity

00:51:56.220 seem irrelevant and beside the point and jaded. In other words, you know, there's a war,

00:52:09.120 there's a natural cataclysm, there's something terrible happens and then it's just all that

00:52:19.620 stuff is over. Because this is definitely first world problem stuff, right? It's people

00:52:26.660 who are just don't have enough to do, don't have enough real problems.

00:52:33.280 Trevor Burrus Well, I'm offended.

00:52:35.280 Peter Robinson Well, I mean, I guess that applies to me as

00:52:38.320 well. You know, in some ways, one of the things I most despair of about the identity

00:52:46.700 politics movement and in general what is happening on the left is that in refuting it, I spend

00:52:57.160 my time and therefore an increasing amount of my precious finite life battling ideas

00:53:07.000 that I shouldn't have to battle.

00:53:10.880 The fact that I have ended up spending hour upon hour

00:53:17.380 writing or talking about a concept like cultural appropriation

00:53:21.700 means that in some ways the left has won.

00:53:26.920 That is, they have managed to colonize my life

00:53:31.300 with their stupid idea.

00:53:33.980 I mean 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.

00:53:47.160 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.

00:54:04.820 And I'd rather be having a different conversation.

00:54:06.880 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.

00:54:26.660 And I'll be dead soon, and that's what I did.

00:54:31.220 And there's a way in which it's important to fight these battles,

00:54:38.580 but I think it's also important to keep a sense of proportion

00:54:43.560 because our time is valuable.

00:54:48.120 It's a frustration for us as well

00:54:49.760 because we've had world-renowned evolutionary psychologists on the show.

00:54:54.680 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, you know.

00:55:12.780 And we have to have a world-renowned scientist explain to us that men and women evolved to do different things and therefore their brains are slightly different, therefore you might see certain differences.

00:55:22.120 instead of talking about something that's actually interesting.

00:55:24.760 I think, ironically, a comedian summed this up.

00:55:27.340 The best guest we've had on the show, Andrew Doyle, who said,

00:55:30.520 talking about the difference between men and women used to be hack comedy,

00:55:33.720 which only the worst comedians did.

00:55:35.360 Now it's cutting-edge groundbreakers who do it.

00:55:39.520 You know, everyone's like,

00:55:40.580 oh, I can't believe someone's telling these truth bombs.

00:55:43.640 It's just ridiculous.

00:55:45.020 So I totally take your point.

00:55:47.600 And thank you for giving us an hour of your time to do that very thing.

00:55:51.260 Oh, good. We've wasted another hour.

00:55:53.560 We wasted it together. That was the pleasant part of it.

00:55:57.260 Listen, Lionel, thank you so much for coming on.

00:55:59.820 Tell us, our last question always is, what do you think is the one thing that we're not talking about?

00:56:04.240 And this may tie into what we've just talked about.

00:56:07.000 What's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be talking about?

00:56:10.800 Population.

00:56:13.040 That's been my pet subject since I was 16 years old.

00:56:18.100 And it still is.

00:56:19.660 And I was right.

00:56:20.480 world, and it is the most important issue in the world. It was when I was 16. It is

00:56:26.320 even more so now. We're all obsessed with the climate change issue. Nobody talks about

00:56:32.860 where it's coming from. It isn't just the West and its cars. It is also what's going

00:56:39.800 on in India and China, much more than what's happening in Britain, for example. It's caused

00:56:47.580 by people. And the UN originally predicted that we were going to level off at around

00:56:59.340 9 billion. Well, that's out the window. And now it's at least 10.3. It could go considerably

00:57:09.300 higher. What's happening in Africa is not going according to plan. They're supposed

00:57:14.880 to be having much, much smaller families than they are. That's going to pose a real issue

00:57:21.820 for Europe because it's now predicted that Africa will have over 4 billion people at

00:57:33.500 the turn of the century. That's a very inhospitable climate, not just because of climate change.

00:57:43.640 It always has been inhospitable.

00:57:45.840 It's mostly desert.

00:57:47.520 It has problems, huge problems with water, with supporting life.

00:57:56.000 Then you add to that that there's a long history there of poor governance.

00:58:01.580 There's a very good reason why a lot of people want to leave that continent, especially if

00:58:10.540 If four billion people end up being present at the same time, they're not going to stay

00:58:19.760 there.

00:58:20.760 They're not going to stay there.

00:58:24.920 That's going to be the issue of the century, how the West deals with the migratory pressures,

00:58:33.100 especially from Africa and secondarily from the Middle East.

00:58:36.880 I don't have any easy answers, but in terms of what we don't talk about,

00:58:41.000 that's what we don't talk about enough.

00:58:43.120 By the way, Thomas Friedman, columnist in the New York Times,

00:58:47.720 writes lots of books, agrees with me.

00:58:52.420 Well, Lionel Shriver, thank you so much for coming on the show.

00:58:54.640 It's been a pleasure.

00:58:55.720 As always, follow us on all the social media.

00:58:58.600 Buy Lionel's books, of course.

00:59:00.060 I imagine that you're not on any social media yourself.

00:59:02.920 I am not.

00:59:03.480 I kind of had that intuition that you wouldn't be but follow.

00:59:06.880 us on social media that makes this even more special as always and if you're a big fan of

00:59:15.820 the show do support us through patreon you can send us money through paypal as well so that we

00:59:20.180 can keep the show going thank you very much for tuning in and we will see you in a week from now

00:59:24.380 and you've forgotten it again what have you forgotten oh my show yes yes come to see all

00:59:30.780 well that ends well in edinburgh for the whole of august i'll be doing my debut show about freedom

00:59:34.880 of speech, as you will know.

00:59:37.720 Yeah, it's going to be great, isn't it, Francis?

00:59:39.240 It is. It's going to be very, very good. It's at the

00:59:40.760 Gilded Balloon at 7pm. Oh, yeah, I forgot

00:59:42.800 that as well. You are fucking useless.

00:59:45.480 Yeah, so I'm a publicist

00:59:46.980 now. Go and see it. It's going to be great.

00:59:49.200 You should be able to buy it on the Ed Fringe website

00:59:50.840 or the Gilded Balloon website.

00:59:52.820 If you want to come and see me, I'm at

00:59:54.940 the Angel Comedy Club Bill Murray

00:59:56.800 in August.

00:59:58.940 So come and see me. You'll be able to find it on the

01:00:00.860 website. If I haven't been cancelled by

01:00:02.860 them by offending

01:00:04.180 uh latin american people all right thank you very much so it's not happening so it's not happening

01:00:09.320 no i will be erased from memory but probably yeah my mother would agree with it anyway okay guys but

01:00:15.120 you've been uh thank you very much for listening watching please remember to leave a itunes review

01:00:19.420 all the rest of it and we will see you next week

01:00:34.180 Thank you.

TRIGGERnometry - June 09, 2019

Lionel Shriver on Censorship, Cancel Culture and Free Speech

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