The Humorless Fundamentalists of Social Justice | Andrew Doyle | EP 373

I mean you mentioned interestingly people like Joe Rogan and Russell Brand have been being considered a gateway to the alt-right they're still traditionally politically, uh, more more akin to the left, but because they've deviated slightly, you have this kind of puritanical sledgehammer coming down and saying, "No, you're straying from what our ideology says you should believe." And that, to me, also feels like a fundamentalist religion.

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Thank you. Hello to everyone watching and listening. Today I'm speaking once again because we've done it before, with playwright, journalist, and political satirist Andrew Doyle, also known as Titanium McGrath. We discuss the intentional irrationality of the far-left doctrines that use religious rhetoric and practices despite the absence of God or perhaps the presence of a different God. Their paramount desire to dismantle societal structures, regardless of need or merit. The argument for transcendence inherent in the pursuit of art and how woke culture stifles genuine expression, forcing dogma to take the place of fundamental truths and say purposely doing so. Looking forward to it.

Well, Mr. Darling, it's good to see you again. I think we're damn near friends, or at least I like you. I don't know what you think about me, but feelings are very much mutual. Jordan, thank you so much. Well, that's good. Well, us reprehensible types, you know, we need to stick together. We do. Yeah, yeah, that's for sure.

So the first, I thought I'd hassle you for a bit. First, I got two things to hassle you about. I think the first is it says on your Wikipedia page for whatever that's worth that you regard yourself as left-wing, and so I think you deserve some harassment for that. But also, I don't know what the hell that means anymore. And then after I've done bugging you about that, I thought I'd bother you about having a PhD in early Renaissance poetry. And okay, humiliation complete.

Okay, let's start with the left-wing thing. Okay, yes, well, firstly, I'd say that Wikipedia is full of errors, I wouldn't trust absolutely everything you see on Wikipedia. However, on that score, I think it's broadly accurate. I mean, I've never voted for a right-wing party. I did vote for Jeremy Corbyn, which to be honest, I now regret.

As you should. I think if you were to—I'm with you, I don't really know what left-wing and right-wing means anymore. I think the culture war has in fact obliterated those two designations. I really do believe that because, you know, if you were to write down my views on most subjects and sort of give them to an impartial observer and say, "Is this person on the left or on the right?" I think broadly speaking, most of my values would fall into what traditionally would be considered left-wing. I think I have some sort of more conservative values when it comes to culture, education, and the arts perhaps. But that's the same as someone like George Orwell who was very much a cultural conservative as well as being a socialist.

I think economically speaking I do believe in fair, fair, proportionate taxation of the wealthy. I do believe in the welfare state. All of those sort of—I believe in redressing economic inequality, looking out for working-class people, social mobility. So all of these kind of things I think would traditionally be deemed to be left-wing. But I think what the culture war has effectively done is, it's substituted identity, group identity for the notion of class and money. And what that now means is that people who describe themselves as left-wing are nothing of the kind.

I mean most of the activists that you see, the sort of most vociferous cheerleaders of the critical social justice movement, tend to be, well, let's put it nicely, quite posh. They tend to have quite plummy voices, double-barreled names. They're called things like Hugo Ponsford and Sage Willoughby and things like this. Particularly the case with environmental activists. You know, those people who glue themselves to Van Gogh paintings and the statue of David or whatever it might be. When they talk, they are almost like a caricature, like the kind of thing that I would have invented as a joke, and have invented in fact.

Exactly! Well, Titanium McGrath has that name because she's very, very well off. Part of the joke with that and part of what I find so funny about so many of these activists is that they are bleating about oppression and persecution and privilege, and they're independently wealthy. They've got everything handed to them on a plate. They're not in a position—Andrew, you know, you look—I noticed this when I was teaching at Harvard, an Ivy League school. Obviously, all of my students were the top one percent, obviously. And if they weren't at that moment, they were going to be by the time they were 40.

So at worst, they were top one percent in what would you call infancy? There we go. And so you might think that'd be good enough on the privileged side, but it seems to me that there's a small coterie of very noisy people for whom being rich and privileged is not enough. They also want all the victimization privileges of being oppressed because then you can have bloody well everything, can't you? And if you're a narcissistic psychopath, then everything is what you want, and you want it now.

And I want to just follow up on that a bit with regards to this left-wing issue. So you know, there's about a dozen studies now. I want to write an article about this or maybe even a book. There's about a dozen studies now looking at the personality predictors of left-wing authoritarianism. And so from 19—from the end of World War II till 2016, social psychologists in particular—and that's a rather dismal discipline—denied the existence of left-wing authoritarianism outright. It was only a right-wing phenomenon, apparently, you know. I mean Stalin and Mao notwithstanding, but it started to switch a bit in 2016.

We did a study in my lab first of all showing that left-wing authoritarianism was a coherent, you could identify a coherent set of beliefs statistically that were associated with so-called progressive causes allied with the willingness to impose them using force, fear, force, and compulsion. So that's not a bad definition of left-wing authoritarianism. But then a number of other studies have come out, and the most interesting ones concentrate on what's known as the dark tetrad. And the dark tetrad is a group of personality traits that were too evil to make it into the standard personality models. They were excluded by fiat to begin with: manipulativeness, that's Machiavellianism, psychopathy, which is predatory, parasitism, narcissism—that was the original dark tetrad—but that wasn't bad enough, so the psychologists had to add sadism to it to fill in the last quadrant.

And the correlation between dark tetrad personality traits and left-wing authoritarianism is so high that it isn't obvious that they're distinguishable. Go ahead. Is it not similarly high among right-wing authoritarians? No, it's not. So it's a different kind of authoritarianism. Yes, it—look, I mean, this isn't clearly laid out yet, you know—but the focus at the moment now, I think, first of all, anybody who's willing to use fear and compulsion and force is likely to be characterized by those dark tetrad traits, but I think the additional pathology that emerges on the left—and this is something we can discuss, obviously—is that you have to be a particular kind of evil snake to mask your psychopathic power-mongering in the guise of compassion.

And I don't think the right-wing authoritarians do that. They more or less come right out and say, "Like, fuck you, I'm going to take everything you have, especially if you're a group I don't like." But the left-wing types, they say, "Well, you know, really I'm your best friend." Historically speaking. Is that necessarily the case? I mean, you know, if you take the example of the Third Reich and Nazism, that was underpinned by a belief, a sincere belief, a sort of quasi-religious belief that what they were doing was for the good of society. However abhorrent we might find it—look, fair enough, man. I know perfectly well that in the 1930s, for example, as the Nazis marched towards the death camps, their primary rationale for the original implementation of euthanasia, so to speak, of mass killing was compassionate euthanasia.

But then I would also say—and this is something we actually don't know, you know—that the Nazis were National socialists, and their political stance was a weird mixture of what we would think of as left and right-wing now, right? I mean, there was the fascist component that involved the aggregation of power at the pinnacle—corporate and governmental and media—all of that, right? So that seems kind of right-wing in a monolithic sense, but it wasn't like they were—there were socialist elements in the platform as well. And so we don't know enough to sort that out, I would say, maybe on the statistical side. But doesn't all of this sort of point to the fact—or not even the fact—but my contention that actually thinking in terms of left and right when it comes to this is kind of redundant?

I think in a way you've sort of hit it. Yeah, exactly. The debate has always been the struggle between liberty and authority, and so, you know, to go back to whether I’m left-wing or right-wing, I think I’m probably just liberal. I think there are liberal-minded people on the left; there are liberal-minded people on the right, among libertarians. It's not something that is tied to a left-right worldview. But when I hear people talking about how trying to frame the culture war in terms of left and right, or to say that the culture war doesn't matter and there are more important things, actually this struggle between liberty and authority—which John Stuart Mill talks about in his book "On Liberty," George Orwell has written about this—that's the thing that matters. And the recognition that there is an authoritarian impulse in humanity, that there is an enduring appeal to authoritarianism, whether you come from the left or from the right, this is something that George Orwell, to go back to, he tackled this as well.

It's precisely the reason why when he wrote "Animal Farm," he couldn't get it published for so long, because people were horrified by the possibility that left-wing people could be authoritarian. And what he was saying is that this is something that doesn't—it’s irrespective of a left-wing view or a right-wing view. And I think although you might be able to pinpoint psychological differences and tendencies among those on the left who have an authoritarian bent and those on the right who have a similar authoritarian bend, perhaps it's more useful just to think, particularly when it comes to the culture war, in terms of who believes in traditional liberal values.

I know that means something very different in America, but liberal values in so far as individual autonomy, shared humanity, freedom, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, etc.—those kind of liberal values—you can do whatever you want with your life so long as it does not impinge upon the rights of others. That's something that left and right can agree on, and the social justice warriors, whilst they might call themselves left-wing, really their movement is characterized by authoritarianism. They oppose them, and quite well—not just what it looks like, quite explicitly. I mean, the early critical race theory texts explicitly say—I mean, if you read Derek Bell or he wrote an essay called "Who's Afraid of Critical Race Theory," he talks about how critical race theorists have always mistrusted liberalism. They see the liberal project as having failed because we still live in a society where racism exists, and they take that as evidence that liberalism doesn't work.

Rather than—right, because the previous societies were so non-racist? Right, exactly. They don't understand that point—the social liberalism is about an ongoing process. It's about recognizing that we live in an imperfectable world and trying to do our best with a bad lot. And the problem is that that authoritarians tend to be as well kind of utopians. Even though, in the case of the social justice activists, I don't think they've got a clear sense of what their final ideal society would look like. At the moment, they just seem to me to be on a sort of rampage of destruction.

Well, that is what it would look like. Just the way I've always thought that Hitler got exactly what he was aiming at. He shot himself while Europe was burning, and it's like, yeah, I mean a big fuck you to God fundamentally. Well, that—but that was because he was the personality type that would rather everyone was torn down rather than he fails. I mean, one of the things—precisely, yeah, well, that is the dark tetrad type, man. That's right. I mean, he was deeply narcissistic. You know, he would bore people with those lectures late at night when no one was interested. It was all he—he—it was all about him.

One thing that comes out very clearly—there's a great biography of Hitler by Ian Kershaw. One thing that very much comes out about that is this guy was a narcissist. And when he knew that the game was up, he wanted everyone to pay. Yeah, that's narcissism right there, man. Right, that's absolutely right. Well, and he said that, you know, I mean, we're near the end of the Second World War. He, when the Russians were advancing on Berlin, he continually expressed his dismay at the uselessness of the German people who had failed him. Yes, he could—exactly—and those who had failed on the Eastern front or, from his perception, had failed, even though he put the military in an impossible situation, couldn't take any responsibility for his own mistakes.

But that kind of nasty—and I don't like comparing social justice activists to Hitler. I think that's—that's their trick; that's what they do. They call everyone Hitler, but I think you can definitely see that combination of narcissism and also a kind of religiosity, intolerance, and yes, exactly what you say, a desire to destroy. You know that if we can't get our way, we'll just destroy everything.

Okay, so let's talk about that. I want to use that as a segue, and I haven't tortured you about having a PhD in Renaissance poetry; we'll get back to that. I want to use that as a segue into the religious issue because you wrote a book here recently. Make sure I get the title exactly right: "The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World." And so we could talk about religious issues.

I've been thinking recently along the religious lines. Let's say that what we're seeing is just the modern manifestation of an eternal battle, and that battle is laid out first very early in the biblical corpus in the story of Cain and Abel because what you have in that story are two modes of adaptation, which I think roughly parallel a kind of demented narcissistic authoritarianism and a kind of responsibility-laden individualism. We can discuss that, but what happens is Cain and Abel make sacrifices, right? And that's what people do when they work because work is the sacrifice of the present for the future, and human beings uniquely work. I mean, maybe beavers work and bees, but look, essentially, human beings uniquely work; we're willing to sacrifice the present for the future.

Now, what happens in the story of Cain and Abel is that Cain appears to make bloodless and relatively low-quality sacrifices, whereas Abel's is all in. And the consequence of that is Abel gets rewarded by God, and everyone loves him, and things go well for him, and Cain, nothing goes his way. And then instead of noticing that maybe he has something to do with that, he calls God out for creating an improper cosmos and really puts him on the stand. And God says, "Look, buddy, if you got your act together, things would go well for you, and the fact that they're not might have more to do with you than me." And Cain thinks, "To hell with you, God. I think I'll go kill your favorite."

And so that's the story, and that's one hell of a brutal story. And then, you know, Cain's descendants, including Tubal-Cain, which is about four generations down the line, they're the builders of the Tower of Babel, and also the first people who make implements of war. So there's an idea there that there's a resentful and bitter, vengeful spirit that preoccupies mankind and that it can spread out from the individual and take out the entire polity.

And I can't help but see a reflection of that on the intellectual landscape now in the political domain. I think now I'm curious about what you think about such things because you have described this new movement, let's say, as religious. So what do you mean by that? What do you think about these more metaphysical speculations?

I suppose I should be very clear about that, and in the book I do make it clear. I've called the book "The New Puritans," and I refer to the religion of social justice because one of the things I'm very keen to do and one of the reasons why I feel that the critical social justice activists are winning is because a lot of people do not understand their aims. They don't understand what they're about and that they are effectively fall for the linguistic tricks. I mean, you all know that the culture war is largely about who gets to define the meaning of words. Activists often use words, but they mean the opposites. They call themselves progressive, for instance, but I believe they are regressive. They call themselves liberal, but they are deeply illiberal. You know, they're in favor of censorship and authoritarianism. They scream about fascism while they themselves are using fascistic tactics, such as violence, to silence political opponents. So the language—unless you understand where they're coming from and unless you understand that theirs is a belief system, which is largely tied to unfalsifiable claims, which depends upon a kind of coterie of high priests, edicts from above, you know, telling the masses what they should believe and punishing those who dissent, it has all the hallmarks of fundamentalist religion.

At least the idea of excommunicating heretics, sort of sniffing out heretics, searching for them, and doing the metaphorical equivalent of burning them at the stake, which is what we call cancel culture—destroying their livelihoods, destroying their reputations—a kind of merciless, brutal, cruel, and vicious quality, which nonetheless dons the guise of compassion and righteousness. You know, I'm sure that bullies and innately cruel sociopaths throughout history have probably been attracted to the priesthood because it gives them the opportunity to be an authority figure to enact cruelty and at the same time to be validated as a principled, important member of society.

So I think it doesn't mean like Pharisees and scribes, those sorts of people. Exactly. And I'm not suggesting for a second, you know, if you take something as brutal as the Inquisition, I mean, I'm sure a lot of those people involved felt that they were doing God's work and genuinely thought they were on the side of the angels, but you can be damn sure that there were some psychopaths who were attracted to those positions of power. So when I'm saying that the—I talk about the religion of critical social justice, I'm doing so to try and make it accessible. I found that if you just—because it is so baffling to everyone, most people are completely baffled because, for a start, they have their own kind of esoteric language. This terminology like heteronormativity and toxic masculinity and cisgender, etc.—words that most people just don't even know what they mean—but if you see them as kind of a Biblical script or a religious text, and they do have their foundational holy texts such as Foucault and Judith Butler and things like that, if you make this analogy to religion, I think it makes the movement comprehensible.

And I think in order to defeat it, it has to be comprehended, and I think most people comprehend it. So let's try to get out something that might approximate a definition of religious. So this is how I've been thinking about it: technically, so imagine that you see the world through a hierarchy of presuppositions, which you have to, because you're fundamentally ignorant. You have to presuppose things in order to move forward because you don't have infinite knowledge. So you have to look at the world through a hierarchy of presuppositions. Then you can imagine that some presuppositions are deeper than others, and what that would mean is some presuppositions very little, very few other presuppositions depend on, and some presuppositions many other presuppositions depend on, right? Sort of like it's like citation depth in the scientific literature.

And so freedom of speech, for example, would be a presupposition in a liberal polity upon which almost all other presuppositions rest. So if you move it, you're moving the depths. So a religion specifies the deepest presuppositions, and they have to be axiomatic because that's sort of where your ignorance bottoms out. You have to say, "I hold these things to be self-evident" before you can proceed. And that is something like the existence of a deity, as a priest. Right, okay, so that's the next issue. So, Kur, I read a lot of Carl Jung years ago and very deeply, and one of the things Jung said about Protestantism, which I found remarkable, he criticized both Catholicism and Protestantism, you know, as a friendly critic, I would say, pointing out that the temptation that Catholicism might fall prey to is one of centralizing authoritarianism, and the temptation that Protestantism falls prey to is fractionating individualism.

He said the logical conclusion of the Protestant Revolution is that every single person becomes their own church. And so it looks to me like that's happened. And what's happened—and psychologists have abetted this— and even the great clinicians, I believe, have abetted this just regardless of my admiration for them—by substituting the self for God. And I think what you have, especially on the psychopathic narcissistic fringes of what used to be the left, and you see this on the right as well, is the momentary self elevated to the status of God.

Well, you see that an awful lot, which I think is why—I mean you've identified the narcissism within these kind of movements—but also the rapidity with which they resort to religious terminology or religious ideas or religious modes of expression. For instance, you remember when—was it outside of Netflix when were the protests against Dave Chappelle's show? And there was that comedian protesting with a sign that said, "We like Dave" or "We like jokes." I think they had signs like that, and one woman cornered him, and it was all caught on film, and she screamed repeatedly in his face, "Repent, fuck!" She said it again and again and again. And I mentioned that in the book because I love that— that sort of combined that combination of rage and religiosity, I think really encapsulates what the movement is all about.

I think, in terms of the presuppositions of that movement, which it takes as axiomatic, it's not supernatural. Okay, it doesn't talk about a deity even though it has its prophets, I think, from the French post-structuralists of the 1960s. But I think it does have certain axiomatic presuppositions, such as there are power structures that dominate society that underpin all human interaction, and that these are based on the notion of group identity, and that that is how society needs to be understood, as Foucault talked about—grids of power through society: power not being a top-down phenomenon, something that sort of is latent within all of our interactions and behavior. And they see that; they believe that these activists believe that they can pick this apart and understand it and remedy the wrongs in society, so long as they can identify where the power structures lie and who is exercising privilege at the expense of the oppressed.

That's why critical race theorists—I mean it was put like this in James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose's book that the key question that you ask if you are a critical race theorist is not "Did racism take place in this situation?" but "How did racism manifest in this situation?" Yes, right, right. So it's almost like a ghostly spiritual thing that is always there. I think that's one of the—that's one of their major presuppositions.

Oh well then, well, here's another way of thinking about that from the religious perspective. I mean, Milton's Satan is an authoritarian narcissist and he rules over hell, and so he's a figure that's very much analogous to Mao or to Stalin, right? He's someone who climbs the most pathological possible power hierarchy and then regards himself as a victor, even though he's actually the biggest loser. And so Satan is the spirit, you might say, in the Judeo-Christian tradition who rules the world by force. Now, the postmodern neomarxist types believe that there's nothing but power. So I can't see that that's any different than a certain Christian heresy that rose up in the Middle Ages making the claim that Satan himself was the ruler of the Earth, right? Because the notion there is that power itself is the only, or at least the ultimate motivator.

Well, motivator is the right way of thinking about it, and so and then it follows—a lot of things follow from that, right? One thing that follows from that is that there's no such thing as free speech because there's just conflicts between different claims to power. And that if you promote free speech, that's just an indication of how conniving you are to use that entire philosophical language to do nothing but buttress your own colonialist power claims. Yes, because their theories always put you in that position where you can't win.

It's similar with critical race theory; they have their notion of interest convergence. You know, when people say, "Well, there are extremely successful black individuals in our history," Barack Obama, say someone like that, they will say the only reason that those people have succeeded is because it was in the interests of white people for them to succeed. In other words, if black people don't succeed—right, so black people don't succeed in society—that's evidence of critical race theorists' claims, but if they do succeed, it's also evidence of their claims because that's interest convergence.

So they keep putting you in this kind of situation that, to me, has to be religious, in without—as in religious belief that has not been proven, merely been asserted. The fact that they take on the very notion of rationality, Enlightenment ideas, the fact that they think that those things are even part—and they also see that through group identity, that that is just the product of some dead white men in periwigs. President Trump recently issued a warning from his Mar-A-Lago home, quote, “Our currency is crashing and will soon no longer be the world standard, which will be our greatest defeat, frankly, in 200 years. There are three reasons why the central banks are dumping the US dollar: inflation, deficit spending, and our insurmountable national debt.”

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So how do you understand—there seems to be—okay, so we figure—we've got a couple of what would you say contenders for deity. One would be Satan himself, right? The spirit of power. The other would be the untrammeled hedonic self. It's something like that, but then there's a weird paradox there. Not that the paradox bothers the postmodern types that group identity is paramount, but full—what would you say? Full licentiousness on the personal front and the granting of every whim on the personal front is also requisite, and I don't—I can't quite square that coherently. Like, how is it that the radicals can push forward the notion that group identity is the only identity but also push forward the notion that everything possible is to be permitted every individual at every moment?

But you put your finger on it when you said that the paradoxes don't trouble the postmodernists. You know, it's sort of built into their whole idea. When Derrida was writing, he was trying to write incoherently, you know? He did manage—it's absolutely unreadable, so let me try and understand what you're saying here. You were talking about—we see this worship of the self when you're talking about—so there's contenders for God, right? We have power and we have the self. And then there's an element of that that spreads out into identity.

Now, the radical types definitely put forward group identity as paramount, and what do you mean by worshipping the self? What do you mean by licentiousness? What do you mean by do they believe that absolutely everything is permissible, that any kind of individual desire is able to be fulfilled? Because in their world, I think they’re quite prescriptive, aren't they, about which modes of behavior are acceptable and which aren't.

Well, that gets extraordinarily complex because it looks to me—one of the things I see on campuses, for example, is the insistence on the left progressive front, let's say, that any form of sexual identity or behavior whatsoever is permissible and not only permissible but to be celebrated. But now it's complicated because, at the same time, every single interaction between a young man and a young woman is so absolutely dangerous that it has to be subjected to contractual validation.

Well, yeah, well, it's a weird psychoanalytic truism, you know, that if you go too far in one direction, you simultaneously go too far in the other, and that really muddies up the water, right? So the really narcissistic types, for example, have an extremely uncertain core, right? But that doesn't make them any less what—what would you say? Forthright in their claims that they should rule? But I don't stretch your—go ahead.

But I don't—I’m not so sure that it's about fulfilling any indulgence, no matter how depraved. I think it's more about what they call queering society. I think it's more about if it is in the service of demolishing the cis white heteropatriarchal structures that are in place, then that is seen as a benefit, as something positive. Right, so you think licentiousness serves the purposes of demolition? What about the reverse hypothesis?

Well, I would say this might be more true of Foucault—all the demolition was put forward to license the licentiousness. Yeah, I'm not sure about that. I mean, a lot of people will say that because Foucault has, as you know, a very shady past, yeah, you might say that. Absolutely, and people have pointed out that there seems to be a strong correlation between some of the founding postmodernists and, shall we say, well, yeah, depraved sexual activity, sometimes pedophilia, these kinds of things. The question I suppose—are you suggesting that they created this kind of theoretical framework in order to justify that sort of behavior? Is that what you mean?

Well, I do—you see, I’m not—I waver, and maybe the causality is interactive because you could see—I see a lot of stunningly immature behavior on the radical front from a developmental psychological perspective. So, for example, a lot of the behavior I see looks to me like unsocialized two-year-old behavior because two-year-olds are highly prone to motivational and emotional whims in the short term and they're incapable of developing a shared frame of reference. That doesn't happen until kids are three, and aggressive two-year-olds who don't develop that by four never develop it in their entire life because they become alienated and they don't make friends, and they can't further their development.

And so you could say if this is sort of a Freudian "id"-like view that part of what we're seeing is the expression of extremely unsocialized, immature motivational and emotional demands, fragmented with what would you say? Temper tantrum-like insistence that those whims be granted immediately. And then you could say, "Well, the entire power critique has been erected by on the intellectual front just to justify that." Although you could also reverse it and say "No, the licentiousness—which was the case you were making, the licentiousness is promoted because it's revolutionary in a sense and it can be used to demolish these so-called traditional power structures."

Well, it has to be because it's just—they just have so many impositions on other people's freedoms. They have so many ideas of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable, particularly in the arts, in film, in plays, in books, that, you know, they’re for censorship. They believe that things—they are—the horrible word they use, problematic. And they like to problematize things. So it can't be the case that they just believe in a kind of global free-for-all. It can't be that because I think they come across more like Pharisees to me than anything else.

But maybe what you're describing in terms of the temper tantrums and the things that we see from these people is that that is just simply the natural consequence of when you have decades of academics and figures of authority saying that we ought to prioritize our emotional responses and our own subjective view of the world over objective epistemological frameworks and actual practical responsibility. I mean, I saw it right at the University of Toronto; it was one of the things that constantly made me morally ill was that my idiot compatriots thought that the best thing to do with young people was to teach them to protest rather than to help them figure out how to make their way responsibly and productively, which is—they've created a generation that are infantile.

I mean, it is an infantilized world, and we see it in absolutely every strand of our culture and politics as well, and it's because, as you say, academics, by and large, are activists first and academics second. You know, Helen Pluckrose traces out to what she calls the applied turn of postmodernism—late '80s. You know, postmodernists for many years were quite enjoyed sort of theorizing and frolicking about, coming up with these airy-fairy ideas, not applying them to society, not seriously saying we should, you know, reconstruct society and apply these methods. And then they applied the applied postmodern—they said, "Oh, actually, we can actually change society, revolutionize society through the application of our untested theories and highly contested theories." And they did it.

And what's so tragic is not—I mean, is that it eventually works. You know, we're now in a situation where our government over here, the government certainly in Canada and in the US, they are implementing these ideas, these highly contested theories in public policy, in education, yes! They're making it mandatory. Yeah, well, that was right, you know, that was what propelled me into the public domain to begin with, was the first move of that sort on the true liberal government front.

But that's amazing—speech, but that's why surely it does merit the analogy with religion because you are imposing on society ideas that are based on belief simply based on belief. You know, there is no evidence, uh, or that reorganizing society in the way that the critical race theorists would like to do so that we have a hyper-racialized society that focuses first and foremost on your group of identity and secondarily on who you are as an individual—there's no evidence that this is making society less racist or that—

So we seem to—we seem to have agreed that the desire for demolition and destruction rules paramount even over the desire for untrammeled personal self-expression. I think that that is inevitable when you come from the supposition that society is inherently broken, that it is undergirded by power structures that only support the already privileged. That's—okay, so let's dive into that because this is a good place to further interrogate the left issue.

So you know a lot of the people that I talk with—Russell Brand and Joe Rogan, Brett Weinstein, those are good—Eric Weinstein, those are good initial exemplars—are more classical leftist types, and yet they're identified by the screaming radicals as gateways to the alt-right. Which is extraordinarily interesting because it means as soon as you're no longer a useful idiot from the radical perspective, you're instantly a Nazi, which is very convenient for them.

But here's the thing: the postmodern critique that society is to be understood as nothing but the manifestation of power is attractive partly because when social arrangements or even psychological arrangements pathologize, they do pathologize in the direction of power, right? So if you can tyrannize yourself like an overlord, you can tyrannize your partner; you can tyrannize your family in your community. You can act like a tyrant on the local political stage and then nationally, right? You can do that in business as well, and that happens relatively often. So there's a core of sense in the claim that power is a powerful motivating force.

Now, I think the radicals go too far when they say everything is about power because, well, everything is—a lot of things, and you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But the problem the left therefore has, if the left is willing to be reasonable and say—"Well, some social structures are corrupted by power," then the left has to figure out—and can't, because I've asked like 50 senators and Republican and congressmen on the Democrat side to do this—if your leftist stance is that power corrupts society, then how in the world can you tell when those who make that claim take that claim too far?

And I've asked like—the reason I brought up the Democrat senators and the congressmen is because I asked every lefty I could get my hands on, and that's been quite a few over the last five years: when the left goes too far. And I even asked Robert Kennedy that recently, and he said, "Well, I'm trying to run a campaign based on unity, so I don't want to go down that rabbit hole." It's like, well, the barbarians are at your gate, buddy! They've been canceling you for 18 years!

So how do we separate out this? Well, there are so many things that you've raised there. I mean, firstly, you're right to identify that there is a kernel in truth of power in the postmodernist claims; power is important, it is significant in human behavior and society and history, all of that. That is absolutely accurate. And you're also right that where they go wrong is to assume that everything is about power. Like you say, power is really important, but it's not everything.

I wonder whether reducing everything to just power structures makes things understandable, easier in a way? Yeah, because we found that the best predictor in our first study—the best predictor of left-wing authoritarianism, yeah, it was low verbal intelligence, right? Because people wonder—absolutely! You and power, power is a good easy answer, right? To terrify any ideology because it means that you're outsourcing your thinking to a set of rules. And that is what is happening.

But that's why all those people that you've tried to ask this question—what happens when the left goes too far in terms of their own megalomania? They won't answer the question because to do so would be to acknowledge that there is a flaw in their ideology, there's a potential flaw in their system, that they're dealing ultimately with human beings. You know, it's a thing to—going back to Orwell, it's the same reason why the Stalinists have never forgiven Orwell. All these people on the left have always hated him for pointing out that the left is just as susceptible to corruption as the writers, and they've never forgiven him for that.

And it comes down to that idea of moral purity. I mean one of the reasons I call them the new Puritans, again, it's an analogy; it's trying to make them accessible. It's because in their world to deviate even slightly from this very simplistic formula that they've applied to society to make—to give them power, ironically enough—to put them in a position where they can control other people but also can control their own understandings and comprehensions of the world because they've got this framework through which they can look at it—and to say, "Well, actually, your framework is flawed in all sorts of ways." That's harder because then you have to start thinking, and they don't want to start thinking. Thinking is the death of ideology.

I think—that's why you're getting that moral purity; but it’s also why—I mean, you mentioned interestingly people like Joe Rogan and Russell Brand being considered a gateway to the alt-right. They're still traditionally politically more akin to the left, I would say, than the right, but because they've deviated slightly, you have this kind of puritanical sledgehammer coming down and saying, "No, you're straying from what our ideology says you should believe." And that, to me, also feels like a fundamentalist religion. It feels like, you know, within a—and I'm making the distinction clearly between a religion and a fundamentalist religion because I think even within Catholicism, the Vatican has always encouraged debate, theological debate and discussion. It's not as though they just give you the catechism and say, "That's it."

There's all these kinds of discussions and debates and nuances being teased out in theological thoughts. Theologians for centuries have done that, but with fundamentalist religion, that doesn't happen, does it? It doesn't happen with ISIS, for instance. You don't get the sort of—the leaders of ISIS sitting around cross-legged in their caves saying, "You know, let's decide whether we're right about this fine theological point." That doesn't happen.

So what scares me, I think, about the critical social justice movement is that they are like a fundamentalist religion for some reason. I mean, this is why—and you know this—whenever you meet one of these people, whenever you encounter them online, get into some kind of discussion, you know what their opinions are and absolutely everything. Yes, yes, and like turning in a crank on someone's head. I've never been surprised by them.

I'd like to be surprised once in a while. I've had a few occasions recently where I've gotten to conversation. You know, I fall for it. You should just block them, really, because they're not people who can be reasoned with. But every now and then, I take debate and I say, "Okay, what is it you think I've said? What has upset you? What is the perspective that I have that you disagree with and why?" And they can't do it. They just come back screaming Nazi or whatever, and then you think, "Okay, well, I shouldn't have bothered trying." But they never surprise me. I just wish they would because if you're not thinking for yourself and challenging your own ideas—if you're not coming from the basis from humility—if you're not coming to the world on the understanding that you're probably wrong about an awful lot of things, I don't think you're fully human in a way. I think you're like an automaton; you know, you're just following a code possessed by a principality, right?

I find that myself. I find that disturbed. Okay, so let me hassle you about something else. I tweeted out about Richard Dawkins here recently, and I talked to Richard Dawkins, and I actually admire Richard Dawkins. I liked his book, his books; they taught me a lot in some of his essays too. And I think Dawkins is a real scientist in that he believes there is truth and that the pursuit of the truth will set you free, which, by the way, is a religious claim. But he still believes that in any case. I also think that Dawkins and Harris and the rest of the new atheists help pave the landscape for this new woke catastrophe because it's a humanistic movement fundamentally and it's radically anti-science. And I think that Dawkins—I know Dawkins sees that because I've been watching his tweets, and I did talk to him, and it's certainly the case that the woke mob I think can take out science even more easily than they can take out the vestiges of Judeo-Christian thought. And they're definitely going to do that.

So now Dawkins and his coterie looked at the history of the West and they said, "Well, we should dispense with that medieval superstition, and we should progress down the Enlightenment trail." And I've talked to Douglas Murray about this. Now the problem with that seems to me—so Jung said something very interesting as well that I'll bring up—he implied that Catholicism, with all its strange mysticism and dreamlike propositional structure, was as sane as people got. Like that—in order for people to function psychologically and to exist together socially, the belief system that united them had to have a dreamlike quality. Okay, so—and that now the new atheist types would say, "Well, no, no, we can replace all that mumbo jumbo and darkness and occult mysticism with a clear-headed rationality." But what I see happening instead—and this is on the religious front—is that in the aftermath of the death of God, what we've seen re-emerge is either a form of worship of power or degeneration into a kind of polytheistic paganism, not a move forward to Enlightenment-type Dawkins rationality. Quite the contrary.

And so one of the things I'm curious about—is there a—I'm trying to wrap my head around it. I know Murray is uncomfortable about this. Douglas Murray is uncomfortable about this. If the woke movement is a religion and if it's a dangerous religion, is the alternative to that no religion? Or is the alternative to that whatever might constitute genuine religion? And what do you think about that?

Well, I think there is clearly something within humanity that we require a certain satisfaction from some kind of belief system which is out outside of ourselves or a sense that there is something beyond ourselves. I suppose you might call it transcendence. I think there is a need for that. I think that—I get that through the arts—I think that's why we create things; that's why we are creative beings—which is also why I think the woke movement is threatened by the arts and seeks to curtail it and actually to transform it into just another propagandizing tool. Because it fundamentally doesn't understand what art is.

So it is interesting to me though to have noted that the new atheist movement—the one that you describe—they seem now to have evolved into the most woke of all. The humanist—right? Yeah, there's something about them that they bought into gender identity ideology very quickly, probably before other bodies did, and the Humanist Society in the UK now is fully paid up in that really quasi-religious belief system, the idea of a sexed or gendered soul that doesn't match your biological form. How is that anything other than religious? Then actually, how is it anything other than supernatural, really? You know, so I think of course—so, but it has been interesting to me that those were the very people—the people who were talking about rationality—and to sort of claw back the primacy of Enlightenment values that they are the ones who have been most susceptible of all.

Of course, this is what has got Dawkins in trouble, right? That's a stunningly devastating observation, right? Because if it turns out that those who wanted to walk down the mass Enlightenment pathway produce children who were most susceptible to woke ideology, that's a pretty damning bit of evidence for the validity of that approach, as far as I mean, yeah, I'm trying to look at it, well, because it's also—it's always concerned me that some of my most intelligent friends and acquaintances have fallen for the woke movement. In other words, you talk about the fact that they have a lot of the activists are very infantile in their behavior, and yet some of the smartest people in society seem to buy into it.

It has the capacity to infect everyone. It perhaps, because it isn't responsive to intellectual rigor, it exists regardless of that. And right—and that begs the question of why it attracts the intelligent types that you're describing. I mean, look, it originated in the bloody Academy; it didn't originate—hypothetically, it originated not only in the academy but in the core of the academy that was occupied with the humanities, right? So it obviously appeals to the intellect, let's say, or is it just that we're all—we all have the capacity to become—to fall for hysteria? Is it possible that we're just all—I mean, look, my book opens with a discussion of Salem—the witch hunts in Salem. And one of the key things about that, the more I read about it—and the more I was fascinated by the fact that it was these figures in authority, it was the ministers, the judges, it was the highly intelligent in the community who were the ones who were pushing this. I mean, the girls were screaming and crying, "Witch!" and pointing and saying that the devil was everywhere and they'd seen people sign the devil's book and all of that kind of thing.

I see those girls as analogous with the screaming anime activists online who just shout Nazi everywhere. The girls saw witches everywhere. I see that as very, very similar, but it would have gone away if the ministers and the judges said, "No, this isn't rational." You're wrong. You know there's no evidence for your claims; we have to move on. But they didn't. They went along with it. That's why people ended up being executed. It's when figures in authority capitulate to the screaming of the children—you’ve described the children, the activist as children, the activists themselves I posit are not the problem; if they were all out there with their beliefs, it's the enablers!

It's the politicians! Okay, all right! People in charge. So one of the things you see as the biblical corpus unfolds itself symbolically is an emerging relationship between the figure of Cain and that bitter figure, who's out for revenge, and the figure of the, what would you call it, untrammeled intellect. So, for example, very rapidly after the Cain and Abel story, you have the story of the Tower of Babel, and what you see there are emperors who are competing to replace God, right? They're building towers that are ever and ever higher predicated on the proposition that they could build the Tower all the way to heaven. So that's like Jacob's ladder.

And thereby replace God. Then you have, you know, Milton's meditations on Lucifer. Lucifer is the highest angel of God's heavenly kingdom who has gone most wrong, and he's a stellar example of the untrammeled intellect, you know? And I kind of see this in the new atheist movement too. It's like, we're so smart that our theories can replace the transcendent. Now your way out of that, I think you just told me your way out of that is your involvement on the aesthetic front with the arts, right?

Well, I think so. Well, there were two ways, yeah. There's also humility. I think I'll come back to that point. What you're describing is hubris, and then, yeah, that's something which is common, particularly common among intelligent people, I think. Right? Right, absolutely! It's this—you know, the cardinal sin of the intellect is hubris, exactly. But yes, the arts, I think, are, I suppose, our way out if they are sustained, because they satisfy that human need to understand ourselves and to explore ourselves and to interrogate our existence. It's so important, therefore, that the arts aren't curtailed in the way that they currently are being.

Okay, so let me ask you a question about that. I agree with that. I mean, I see that the signal power of beauty, especially manifested in music for me, speaks of something that's truly transcendent. So here's a question for you. So is there a superordinate unity at which the arts aim? And is that unity not equivalent to the monotheistic spirit? I know this is a major question, right? I'm throwing out major questions. Something makes the arts the arts, right? It's their movement towards beauty. What beauty and unity? Transcendence. But are the arts unified? Are they—they are the manifestation of a unitary spirit?

And now you see that unitary spirit is what I think is the antithesis of power. I couldn't profess to know, and I think a lot of people have attempted to define even what art is, and I think they've failed. I've always liked Zola's definition of art: "It's life seen through a temperament." The idea that what the artist does is attempts to present to you his view of the way that he sees the world on the understanding that we all see the world differently. And there is something quite beautiful about that—about expressions.

But it's not just variety. You know, it's not just variety because there are qualitative distinctions between presentations of world view. So, I mean, Dostoevsky trumps "Fifty Shades of Gray," right? Because—yeah! So there's a hierarchy of rank, right? And the greatest artists occupy the highest rank, and that is what tilts the more towards that transcendent unity. I think it's something like that.

Well, yeah, that's absolutely right—it's genius, isn't it—genius! That's right. That's how the canon is formed. I mean, the canon is—you know, I think academics like to think that they're the ones who select what is in the canon. The canon is formed through influence, through—to what extent other great artists borrow and imitate and innovate.

That's the same depth of presupposition that I was describing earlier, right? Yes! The more the fundamental the text is, the more other texts depend on it. But the reason they do—that the reason that artists do that is because obviously people like Michelangelo, Brahms, Dickens, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky—all of these are clearly the pinnacles of human achievement. They're achieving something that most of us simply cannot do. All we can do is look in awe at what they have achieved, and other artists looking in awe at that and try to come close to it.

Or at least—or in some cases of extreme genius, build upon it. And that is right—so maybe—so this is buying something fundamental. Well, there's a cardinal—well, there's a cardinal observation because the hypothesis that you just put forward is something like the purpose of art is to, what would you say, to provoke the emulation of greatness and that that's based on the hypothesis that there is something transcendent that's great, you know? And that's that unity that I think that the arts are striving toward.

And, yeah, well, I don't know—I don't think it's conscious like that. I don't think that we—I don't—I don't think so either. And all I can say is that artists, I think great art provokes something of the numinous in us, right? And whether that's religious or spiritual or godly or whatever, I don't know, but it's something— I think it is sort of by definition, right? I mean, you know what I mean? It's like—yeah, well, if that's not religious, then what is dogma? It's certainly sure, they're just on the experiential front, yes.

I suppose what I mean is it doesn't point to the existence of God necessarily, it just points to the existence of something beyond ourselves that we require in order to have a satisfactory life. It sounds a lot like God. Okay, well, that would be—well, I'm not trying to pick your—you know, well, that's the thing, man, because it is a matter of definition. You know, like, I don't think God—this transcendent unity that I've been tapping towards here is something like the central animating spirit of mankind at its best. It's something like that.

Now, you might say, "Well, is that real?" and that's not a good question because you have—you can't ask that question without bringing an a priority set of presuppositions about what constitutes real to bear on the question. Like, is it the same reality as the materialist atheists claim most real? Probably not. No, but that doesn't mean it's not real. It just means we can't agree on what constitutes real. Well, we can't agree on what constitutes a woman, so that's not surprising.

Well then, let's suggest then that—let's agree that the critical social justice movement is essentially godless. I think it is. It is godless. It doesn't have—it has no yearning after that sense of the numinous, and it has no capacity to produce it. That's why no great art has ever been produced from—can you name a single woke activist who has produced a great work of art in any medium or any genre? Because I can't. I don't think—okay, so that's an interesting—that's a very interesting observation.

You know what is it—the gospel statement, "By the fruits you will know them." So if they bear nothing but bitter fruit, then you might think they're worshipping the wrong God, or in your case, they're no God. But right, that was your criticism of the woke types! I think they worship power as a God, but whatever; we're close enough on that, so we don't have to discuss it.

So let's talk about the artistic front here because I see the scientists being mowed down like grass under a lawnmower by the woke activists, and that's going to continue because the real scientists don't have a political bone in their body and they have no idea what's coming for them. But I'm particularly sickened by the bloody artists because the only thing they have to offer is this connection to the truly numinous. That's true across art forms, right? They point to the numinous, and they're willing increasingly to subordinate that ideology or to remain silent in the face of this onslaught to bolster their moral self-righteousness.

Yeah, cutting their own throats. It's horrible to watch; it's horrible to witness because genius, artistic genius can only come about by those who can think outside the box, who can—not conformists, ultimately. This is a movement that demands conformity, and artists of all people are the ones who are going along with it.

Now, to an extent, I suppose that's always happened, though. I mean, it must have always happened because people—artists have to get on with the business of living. Back in my era, in the Renaissance period, the area that I studied for my doctorate, you had patrons. You had patrons of the arts in society, and you would effectively say to William Shakespeare, for instance, when King James patronized William Shakespeare's company, The King's Man, it went from being the Lord Chamberlain's Men to the King's Men; and he said, yeah, they were patronized, but they could write whatever he wanted, right?

The great patrons are the ones who don't try to steer the artist in a certain way. I mean, sure, you would get—for instance, at the start of Shakespeare's narrative poem "Venus and Adonis," you have this sycophantic passage about the person to whom it is dedicated—Henry Rudley, the earl—and that's because Shakespeare also needed to live at that point; he wasn't yet a rich man at that point. He became very, very rich ultimately, but at that point he wasn't.

So artists do require an income, and in order—in our day and age, in order for an artist to be employed, they have to satisfy a set of demands by the gatekeepers of various industries. That's theater, the publishing industry, comedy industry, television executives, commissioners—all of those kind of things. The problem is that at the moment all of those people are entirely captured by the woke ideology. They are all its foot soldiers or at least—even in some cases, I suppose you could call them its clergy. And so they make these demands to artists, and I suppose unless you are independently wealthy, what choice have you?

In other words, what this thing does is—you know, we can't all be a Van Gogh living in complete poverty doing whatever the hell he wanted. Well, that's a very sympathetic account, and I have some sympathy for that account because I've seen people—many, many people who've been who faced the threat of cancellation, yes, and are terrified by it, not least often because they have a family to support, let's say. But yes, but so let—but let me push back on that a little bit, and you tell me if you think there's any flaws in this, okay?

So look, as far as I can tell, your best bet in life is to play the most transcendent iterable strategy. And because you're going to pay a price for what you do, no matter what you do, you're going to pay. In fact, you're going to pay the ultimate price no matter what you do. So you're already screwed in the fundamental analysis now, and that means that you're—the fact that you're going to pay means that you're always confronted with a choice, and the choice is to say what you believe to be true and take the consequences, or to fail to say what you believe to be true and take the consequences.

Now, people will say, "Well, I don't want to speak right now because look at the consequences." And I would say, "Well, that's always why people have lied throughout history, is to avoid the consequences or to get something they don't deserve." And so I could say from the judgment perspective rather than the mercy perspective, especially to artists, it's like—I don't give a damn about your financial need. The only thing you have to offer the world is the purity of your vision, and if you sacrifice that, while you're killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

And you might be protected in the short term, but they're going to come for you in the future. There may be a lot of these creative people thinking to themselves, "I will play the game as far as I need to, so that I can establish myself, and then I can make my own artistic choices." That's—yeah, right, it doesn't work! That's what the faculty did; they said over and over as they rose up the ladder from graduate student to professor, "Well, once I have tenure, I'll be brave." It's like, "That isn't how it works!" You don't get a favor because you're more puritanical.

Yeah, okay, so you didn't do that, so why didn't you do it? So look, I completely share your sense of dismay, particularly from artists. You know, I think yes, the world—the world of academia is rather more careerist, I think, and so although I think it's just as unforgivable, it's more understandable. I think to be an artist, you have to be the kind of person whose soul fealty is to your muse. It has to be that. Otherwise, you're not really an artist in any serious sense at all. You have to be creating what it is you are personally impelled to create, whatever drives you. And you know, there are some people who have done that in history.

William Blake is a good example because William Blake was poor throughout his life, died in poverty, and he could see all these mediocre people playing the game and becoming rich, but he couldn't do it. He was too much of an authentic artist; he wasn't able to do that. And I wish all artists could have that, but the other thing about that is actually very few people are great artists. Most people are sort of peddlers of popular culture or, you know, kind of functional hacks that can produce the entertainment that actually we do really need and require. Like I'm not trying to denigrate popular culture; I think it's really, really important.

But it's not the same as great art, right? The pop music—I really enjoy pop music, but I don't pretend to myself that it's Brahms, you know? That we have those hierarchies—hierarchies, by the way, which the woke would like to tear down and say that's all about the implementation of power again. And they will say there's no difference between a—there's no such thing as quality. No, no, exactly, exactly. Because it's all about subjective feeling. And they would say that there's no difference between an Elton John song and a Beethoven symphony. They'll say there's no difference there; it's just about, you know, and to pretend that there is is a problem in and of itself.

And that's why I think there are two things the way the artists could really be supported in this, partly comes from academic—from academia, partly comes from literary theorists and people who, by the way, I think have completely lost the plot, but they need to retain the primacy of the canon, of the Western canon. They need to say, "Actually, there are certain works of art that are greater than others." They need to be able to be bold enough to say that rather than stripping away Chaucer or Shakespeare or Marlow or whatever from the canon to make way for mediocre writers who happen to represent a marginalized group identity.

Well, I see in that again this re-emergence of the spirit of Cain because, Cain, imagine you're a mediocre artist wannabe, and part of the reason for that, maybe, isn't so much that you're talentless, although that might have something to do with it—but that you're unwilling to say a true word or to paint a true brush stroke. You're too cowardly, so you're not going anywhere. Okay, so you're getting irritated and resentful because your sacrifices aren't being appreciated by God, and so what do you do? Well, if you're Cain, you destroy your own ideal, right? Because that's what Cain says to God, "My punishment is more than I can bear." Now that's a very ambiguous phrase because you can't tell exactly what it refers to, but as far as I can tell, what he means is, "Well, I've really spent my whole life miserable and jealous because I'm not able to, and I want to be more than anything else, and now I've gone and killed my own ideal."

And so how can I live? I've killed my own ideal. Well, that's what these bloody woke artist wannabe types are doing. It's not just even the woke; this predates the woke. Harold Bloom used to—the great literary theorist used to write about the critical theorists, the identitarian theorists of the ’90s as being the theorists of resentment. That's what he called them. I think that's exactly right; it started way back in the ’60s with feminist writers trying to problematize writers such as D.H. Lawrence or Norman Mailer or whoever it might be—Ernest Hemingway, whatever.

When I was studying as an undergraduate for English literature, you basically got the highest marks if you problematized texts. If you went through a play and teased out the homophobic elements or the racist elements, you'd get rewarded almost like you were kind of a kind of moral detective. And I think it all started there. It goes way back, so then I would say that's part of the prideful hubris of the intellect. So you have these second-rate creative wannabes in English departments, let's say, and instead of worshiping the spirit of Shakespeare—which is what they should properly be doing and transmitting that to students—they elevate their critical capacity over and above the creative capacity of the artist and lay moral claim to the integrity of their arguments and then propagandize to the students who pay fifty thousand dollars a year for the privilege.

Which is why I go back to humility, because I think the only sensible or intelligent approach to Shakespeare is humility. Similarly, you know, when we saw recently the publishing house—which publishing house was it that decided to rewrite P.G. Wodehouse's novels? P.G. Wodehouse is the greatest comic prose stylist in the English language. The idea that a group of 20-something activists in a publishing house think that they can write better than Wodehouse, think that they can improve his work by this sort of horrendous boulderized version, especially morally, of course. Morally—it's all based on morals.

So it's so infuriating. I mean, it makes me very, very angry because it's the arrogance of that that I find absolutely stunning. But similarly with productions of Shakespeare. So there’s—that I just saw a review the other day for a production of Julius Caesar by the Royal Shakespeare Company. By all accounts, it's just an identitarian mess. It's just—it's taking the play and just reshaping it to promote voguish ideas that are in fashion at the moment about group identity and the primacy of group identity and power structures, et cetera. And therefore they're missing the entire play, and as an audience member, this is why I think it's better to read Shakespeare at this point because as an audience member, you are subject to whatever interpretation the director wants to impose on it. And if that director is really a preacher in disguise, then you're just going to get a sermon, not a play. That seems to me what's happening over and over again.

I saw today, actually, there was an article about Macbeth, yeah, which university? Trigger warning! It’s a trigger warning on Macbeth at the University—in Belfast—Queens University in Belfast, right? Now those people are studying a module on Shakespeare, and it's actually even a secondary module. They already have a decent knowledge of the subject. This is like an advanced module where they are to really get into the weeds with this great writer, and to put a trigger warning in that is to say that the way that we need to perceive these great texts is through our particularly obsessive, moralistic identitarian lens and that we have to see them as morally dangerous texts, potentially.

Maybe they’re exactly right on that front because if you are a woke propagandist, there is nothing more dangerous to you than the spirit of Shakespeare. Sure! And there is something dangerous, actually, particularly about Macbeth, I think, because—I think Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's greatest plays, and I think one of the reasons why I always found it disturbing, even as a child, even though I didn't really know why I found it disturbing as a child—because it's one of those that gets on school texts because it's such a short one. But actually when you watch it, it isn't like your—you know, Shakespeare created so many sort of great embodiments of evil, people like Iago in Othello or Edmund in King Lear or Aaron in Titus Andronicus—these figures.

But Macbeth is different because with Macbeth, you go along—you go along with Macbeth knowing that it could be you. I think it's the closest to what—you know, when you write about Solzhenitsyn talking about the line of good and evil cutting through the heart of every man, that to me is Macbeth because Macbeth is like this incredible study into a representation of what if we lived in a world where we didn't have free will? Macbeth knows everything he is doing is wrong and cannot stop it from happening. And that's a—it's like you're—when you're watching it, if you're watching a good production of Macbeth, you are Macbeth, right? And you're falling into this vortex.

Your—that's why I think—well, that’s actually like a definition of great literature, you know, I think. Great literature almost always portrays, well, something like a romantic adventure and then something like the battle of good against evil, depending on how that's laid out, right? It's a romantic battle of good against evil, okay? But the great literary authors placed that battle in the soul of a single individual, right? So that each character contains the entire landscape of the cosmic battle instead of there being some characters parsed out as good and other characters parsed out as villainous.

And so then when you sit in the audience and you experience that, you're experiencing the divine drama in your own soul. Yeah, and that is—that means let me throw you something at you. So I went to Jerusalem with Jonathan Pajo, and Pajo is about the deepest religious thinker I ever encountered, and he was a postmodernist for a good while and so is expert in that domain as well, which makes him a particularly vicious critic now of the postmodernist types.

Anyways, we walked the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, and what that is as far—so if you imagine a tragic story, then you embody that, and the ultimate tragic story is the worst possible thing happening to the best possible person, right? That's like—that's the pinnacle towards which all tragedy strives, you might say. And walking the Via Dolorosa is an exercise in literary experience because the point of that pilgrimage, so to speak, is to place yourself not only in the role of the recipient of all that brutality but also in the role of the deliverer of the brutality, right?

To imagine yourself as the mob, as yourself as the best friend who betrays, as the intellectually hubristic Pharisee and scribe, as the hapless ruler of Rome. That's all you. And that's what literature does. Like, it walks you through that, and I think Macbeth and plays of that magnitude are threatening to the woke types most particularly because they do require that pilgrimage of moral inquiry, and that does upset the ideological apple cart. So they hate art! They hate art because it pushes past propaganda always, exactly!

And that's why "The Passion of the Christ" is the most powerful story and the most enduring story—not story but account of the brutality that—that we—I mean, when you read about the experience of Jesus on the way to Calvary, could any of us be sure that we wouldn't be among the jeering mobs throwing the stone? No, we can be sure we would be; we can be certain we would be.

Yeah, the woke don’t agree with that, do they? Because the woke like to judge the past, and they will say that if I had lived in the Antebellum South, if I'd lived in the Civil War, I would have been the ones trying to free the slaves. I wouldn't have been a slave owner; I wouldn't have been one of those people who supported racial segregation. But of course, they would! And in fact, they would have been the first ones—sure! because they can't—

Alright, so I've been thinking about this mythological motif of the harrowing of hell. So what happens in this ultimate tragedy is that—well, first of all, the best possible person is put to death by the worst possible people in the worst possible way. And you might think, well, that's as bad as it gets, right? Because, of course, sort of by definition, that's as bad as it gets. But you know, that isn't as bad as it gets, and that's pretty awful because, you know, you just pointed to something—is that if you're looking at history and you have any bloody sense, you think, "I wouldn't have been a victim or a hero; I would have been a perpetrator," because most people were perpetrators.

Although, you know, there were plenty of victims. I would have been a perpetrator! And so then when you realize that you likely would have been a perpetrator, and that you probably are at the moment, unbeknownst to yourself, well then you're facing something, I think, that is in some ways worse than death. I think it's hell! I actually think that is—that you have to understand that there is a part of you that would willingly dwell in hell before you can rescue yourself from it at all. You know? And I think that's what we're called to do in the aftermath of the 20th century and the horrors of Auschwitz to wake up and think, "Oh my God, there's something inside us that's so malevolent that to gaze upon it for a second is to suffer nightmares from nightmares for the rest of your life."

But that—that's also your moral obligation, and that seems to me what the harrowing of hell is, right? It's the descent through death into the realm of malevolence itself and to take that onto yourself. So when the woke try to police art, apply trigger warnings to art, censor it, remove scenes, et cetera, are they, in your view, attempting to prevent that experience—that necessary human experience of confronting the worst possible version of yourself? Is that what they're doing?

That's what it looks like to me! I mean, I think they're protecting themselves from chaotic complexity, but that also denies them possibility, so that's terrible. And hope! But more importantly, they're trying to shuffle off the responsibility of confronting Satan in the desert. So that there's something—well, I mean there's something quite understandable about all of that, isn't it? Because, yeah, it is uncomfortable. I mean, people have done this with the arts forever! When I mean, one of the most interesting things I think about King Lear, for instance, is that that was not—the after 1680, roughly 1680, his version wasn't on the stage anymore. It was rewritten by a guy called Tate, and that was the version of King Lear that was on the stage for 150 years.

And in that version, you have a happy ending. You don't have Lear come in cradling his daughter, who's been hanged, because they couldn't cope with that! They couldn't cope! And it's not just—it's not just because I think King Lear of all his plays really represents his complete barrenness. I mean, it is barren! It's pre-Christian! It is godless! It's—it's this society where, exactly what you describe, the best type of person has the worst possible