Political correctness: a force for good? A Munk Debate

[Music] [Music] Brilliant minds, even mediocre minds, operate better under stimulus. Canadian history is the Canadian, and you can't take away someone's. Barack Obama has systematically rebuilt the trust of the world in our willingness to work through the Security Council and other. Three, you must not talk to anybody in the world, any of our allies. Whatever you want to call this system, a mafia state, a feudal empire, it's a disaster for ordinary Russians. [Music] Brilliant minds, even with the ochre minds, operate better under stimulus. Canadian is a Canadian. Barack Obama has systematically rebuilt the trust of the world in our willingness to work through the Security Council and other. Three, you must not talk to anybody in the world, any of our allies. Whatever you want to call this system, a mafia state, a feudal empire, it's a disaster for ordinary Russians.

I think that's the kind of hypocritical argument that, if I were Chinese, that annoying. But historically, Chinese foreign policy can be described; it's by Berrien management. Science and religion are not incompatible. Religion forces nice people to do unkind things. Our men are obsolete. My conclusion to this question is no; I won't let you be. You show me the oil pretext. I quoted them saying, "Show me a free program how you can keep screaming out." And it doesn't change the point. We do not want sympathy; we do not want pity; we want opportunities. It's an appalling slander to me, to the Muslim religion. I never said the word Muslim in my fulminating. It was a Muslim free form; a nation, it is that. That kind of restraint, it is that kind of sober-minded sensible intelligent foreign policy that Obama represents. So I guess what I'm telling you is he's sort of a closeted Canadian. Vote for him, for God's sake.

[Applause] Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. My name is Roger Griffith. It's my privilege to have the opportunity to moderate tonight's debates and to act as your organizer. I want to start by welcoming the North American-wide television audience tuning in right now across Canada on CPAC, Canada's Public Affairs Channel, C-SPAN across the continental United States, and on CBC Radio Ideas. A warm hello also to our online audience watching this debate, over 6,000 streams active at this moment on Facebook Live, Bloomberg.com, and MunkDebates.com. It's great to have you as virtual participants in tonight's proceedings, and hello to you, the over 3,000 people who filled Roy Thompson Hall for yet another Monk debate. Thank you for your support for more and better debate on the big issues of the day.

This debate marks the start of our tenth season, and we begin this season missing someone who was vital to this debate series in every aspect. It was his passion for ideas, his love for debate that inspired our creation in 2008, and it was his energy, his generosity, and his drive that was so important in allowing us to really win international acclaim as one of the world's great debating series. His philanthropy, its legacy, wow, it's incredible. Last fall, we all remember that hundred million dollar donation to cardiac health here in Toronto, transforming the lives of tens of thousands of millions of Canadians to come. We are all big fans and supporters of a terrific school for global affairs on the UFT campus, represented here tonight by many students who are in its master's program. Congratulations to you, and also a generous endowment last spring to this series that will allow us to organize many evenings like this for many more years to come.

Now knowing our benefactor as we do, the last thing he'd want is for us to mark his absence with a moment of silence. That wasn't his style, so let's instead celebrate a great Canadian, a great life, and a great legacy of the late Peter Munk. Bravo Peter! Where to go, Peter? I know he would have enjoyed that, and I want to just thank Melanie, Anthony, Cheney for being here tonight to be part of Peter’s continuing positive impact on public debate in Canada. Thank you guys for being here tonight.

Now knowing Peter as I did, the first thing on his mind at this point in the debate would be right here: stop talking, get this debate underway, get our debaters out here, come on, got to show on the road. So we're gonna do that right now because we have a terrific debate lined up for you this evening. So let's introduce first our pro team arguing for tonight's motion: "Be it resolved what you call political correctness, I call progress." Please welcome to the stage, he's an award-winning writer, scholar, broadcaster on NPR and sports networks across America, Michael Eric Dyson. Michael, come on out! Michael's debating partner is also award-winning author; she's a columnist at the New York Times and someone who is going to bring a very distinct and powerful perspective tonight, Michelle Goldberg. Michelle, come on out!

[Music] So one great team of debaters deserves another, and arguing against our resolution, "Be it resolved what you call political correctness, I call progress," is the Emmy award-winning actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, and tonight's debater, Stephen Fry. Thank you, city. Stephen's teammate is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, a YouTube sensation, and the author of the big new international bestseller, "12 Rules for Life." Ladies and gentlemen, Toronto's Jordan Peterson!

Okay, we're gonna get our debate underway momentarily, but first, a quick checklist to go through. We've got a hashtag tonight, hashtag MonkDebate. Those of you in the hall and those of you watching online, please weigh in. Let's get your opinions going. Also, for those of you watching online right now, we have a running poll at www.munkdebates.com/ford/votes. Reflect, input, react to this debate as it unfolds over the next hour and a half. My favorite part aspect of this show that was Peter’s brilliance and creation, we have our countdown clock. What this does is it keeps our debaters on their toes and our debate on time. So when you see these clocks on the screen go down to zero, I want you to join me in a warm round of applause, and we'll have a debate that ends when it's supposed to end.

Now, let’s see. We had our resolution tonight on the way in. We had this audience of roughly 3,000 people here in downtown Toronto vote on "Be it resolved what you call political correctness, I call progress." Let's see the agree/disagree on that number. 36% agree, 64% disagree. So a room in play. Now, we asked you how many of you were open to changing your vote over the course of the debate? Are you fixed agree/disagree, or could you potentially be convinced by one or other of these two teams to move your vote over the next hour and a half? Let's see those numbers now.

Wow! Okay, a pretty open-minded crowd; this debate is very much in play. And as per the agreed-upon order of speakers, I’m going to call on Michelle Goldberg first. Michelle, would you like, I said, but water? You can have a sip of water before you start calling Michelle Goldberg first for her six minutes of opening remarks. Michelle, okay, thank you for having me.

As record knows, I initially balked a little bit at the resolution that we're debating because there are a lot of things that fall under the rubric of political correctness that I don't call progress. I don't like nope forming or Twitter or trigger warnings. You know, like a lot of middle-aged liberals, there are many aspects of student social justice culture that I find off-putting, although I'm not sure that that particular generation gap is new. On the record about the toxicity of social media call-out culture, and I think it's good to debate people whose ideas I don't like, which is why I'm here. So if there are social justice warriors in the audience, I feel like I should apologize to you because I'm probably not - you're probably gonna feel like I'm not adequately defending your ideas. But the reason I'm on this side of the stage is that political correctness isn't just a term for left-wing excesses on college campuses or people being terrible on Twitter; especially is deployed by Mr. Peterson.

I think it can be a way to delay, jitter, and minimize any attempt for women and racial and sexual minorities to overcome discrimination, or even to argue that such discrimination is real. In the New York Times today, Mr. Peterson says, "The people who hold that all that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don't want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence." That sounds particularly insane to me because I'm an American, and our president is Donald Trump. But it's an assumption that I think underlies a worldview in which any challenges to the current hierarchy are written off as political correctness.

I also think we should be clear that this isn't really a debate about free speech. Mr. Peterson once referred to what he called "the evil Trinity of equity, diversity, and inclusivity," and said those three words, if you hear people mouth those three words, equity, diversity, and inclusivity, you know who you're dealing with, and you should step away from that because it is not acceptable. He argues that the movie Frozen is politically correct propaganda, and at one point, he floated the idea of creating a database of university course content so students could avoid postmodern critical theory.

So in the criticism of political correctness, I sometimes hear an urge or an attempt to purge our thought of certain analytical categories that mirror, I think, the worst caricatures of the social justice left that want to get rid of anything that smacks of colonialism, or patriarchy, or white supremacy. I also don't really think we're debating the value of the Enlightenment, at least not in the way that somebody like Mr. Fry, who I think is a champion of enlightenment values, brings it. The efforts to expand rights and privileges once granted just to landowning white heterosexual men is the Enlightenment, or is very much in keeping with the Enlightenment. To quote a dead white man, John Stuart Mill, “The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.” I think that some of our opponents, by contrast, frame challenges to the despotism of customs as politically correct attacks on a transcendent natural order. To quote Mr. Peterson again, "Each gender, each sex has its own unfairness to deal with. But to think of it as a consequence of the social structure, it's like, come on, really? What about nature itself?" But there's an exception to this because he does believe in social interventions to remedy some kinds of unfairness, which is why in the New York Times it calls for "enforced monogamy" to remedy the woes of men who don't get their equal distribution of sex.

When it comes to the political correctness debate, we've been exactly here before. The Alan Bloom, the author of The Closing of the American Mind, compared the tyranny of feminism in academia to the Khmer Rouge, and he was writing at a time when women accounted for 10% of all college tenured faculty. It's worth looking back at what was considered annoyingly outrageously politically correct in the 1980s, last time we had this debate. You know, having to call or not being able to call indigenous people “quote Indians” or having to use hyphenated terms, at least in the United States, have terms like "African Americans." You know, adding women or people of color to the Western Civ curriculum, not making gay jokes, or using [ __ ] as an epithet.

And I kind of get it, right? New concepts, new words sort of stick in your throat. The way we're used to talking and thinking seem natural and normal, you know, by definition. And then the new terms and new concepts that have social utility stick, and those that don't fall away. So if you go back to the 1970s myth, you know, "Ms." as an alternative to “Miss” or “Mrs.” stuck around, and “Women with a Y” didn't. And I think that someday, or I hope that someday, we'll look back and marvel at the idea that gender-neutral pronouns ever seemed like an existential threat to anyone.

But I also don't think it's clear that, you know, that might not happen because if you look around the world right now, there are plenty of places that have indeed dialed back cosmopolitanism and reinstated patriarchy in the name of staving off chaos, and they have seemed like terrible places to live. You know, I come to you from the United States, which is currently undergoing a monumental attempt to rollback social progress in the name of overcoming political correctness, and as someone who lives there, I assure you it feels nothing like progress.

Thank you. Great start to the debate, Michelle. Thank you. I'm now going to ask Jordan Peterson to speak for the con team. Hello. So we should first decide what we're talking about. We're not talking about my views of political correctness, despite what you might have inferred from the last speaker's comments. This is how it looks to me. We essentially need something approximating a low-resolution grand narrative to unite us, and we need a narrative to unite us because otherwise we don't have peace. What's playing out in the universities and in broader society right now is a debate between two fundamental low-resolution narratives, neither of which can be completely accurate because they can't encompass all the details. Obviously, human beings have an individual element and a collective element – a group element, let's say.

The question is, what story should be paramount? And this is how it looks to me. In the West, we have reasonably functional, reasonably free, remarkably productive, stable hierarchies that are open to consideration of the dispossessed. Those hierarchies generally create our societies. Our societies are freer and functioning more effectively than any societies anywhere else in the world and any societies ever have. And as far as I'm concerned, and I think there's good reason to assume this, it's because the fundamental low-resolution grand narrative that we've oriented ourselves around in the West is one of the sovereignty of the individual, and it's predicated on the idea that all things considered, the best way for me to interact with someone else is individual to individual and to react to that person as if they're both part of the process because that's the right way of thinking about it – the psychological process by which things we don't understand can yet be explored and by things that aren't properly organized in our society can be yet set right.

The reason we're valuable as individuals, both with regards to our rights and responsibilities, is because that's our essential purpose, and that's our nobility, and that's our function. What's happening, as far as I'm concerned, in the universities in particular and spreading very rapidly out into the broader world, including the corporate world, much to its chagrin, is a collectivist narrative. And of course, there's some utility in a collectivist narrative because we're all part of groups in different ways, but the collectivist narrative that I regard as politically correct is a pastiche - a strange pastiche of postmodernism and neo-Marxism, and its fundamental claim is that no, you're not essentially an individual; you're essentially a member of a group. And that group might be your ethnicity, and it might be your sex, and it might be a race, and it might be any of the endless numbers of other potential groups that you belong to because you belong to many of them, and that you should be essentially categorized along with those who are like you on that dimension, in that group.

That's proposition number one. Proposition number two is that the proper way to view the world is as a battleground between groups of different power. So you define the groups first, and then you assume that you view the individual from the group context, you view the battle between groups from the group context, and you view history itself as a consequence of nothing but the power maneuvers between different groups. That eliminates any consideration of the individual and at a very fundamental level, and also any idea, for example, of free speech because if you're collectivist at heart in this manner, there is no such thing as free speech. It isn't that it's debated by those on the radical left and let's say the rest of us, so to speak. It's that in that formulation, there's no such thing as free speech because for an individualist, free speech is how you make sense of the world and reorganize society in a proper manner.

But for the radical left type collectivist that's associated with this viewpoint of political correctness, when you speak, all you're doing is playing a power game on behalf of your group, and there's nothing else that you can do because that's all there is. And not only is that all there is in terms of who you are as an individual now, and how society should be viewed, it's also the fundamental narrative of history. For example, it's widely assumed in our universities now that the best way to conceptualize Western civilization is as an oppressive male-dominated patriarchy and that the best way to construe relationships between men and women across the centuries is one of oppression of women by men. That's like, well, look, no hierarchy is without its tyranny. That's an axiomatic truth. People have recognized that literally for thousands of years, and hierarchies do tend towards tyranny, and they tend towards the usurpation by people with power. But that only happens when they become corrupt.

We have mechanisms in our society to stop hierarchies from becoming intolerably corrupt, and they actually work pretty well. And so, and so I would also, I would also point this out. You know, don't be thinking that this is a debate about whether empathy is useful or not, or that the people on the con side of the argument are not empathetic. I know perfectly well, as I'm sure Mr. Fry does, that hierarchies tend to produce situations where people stack up at the bottom and that the dispossessed in hierarchies need a political voice, which is the proper voice of the left, by the way. The necessary voice of the left. But that is not the same as proclaiming that the right level of analysis for our grand unifying narrative is that all of us are fundamentally to be identified by the groups that we belong to and to construe the entire world as the battleground between different forms of tyranny in consequence of that group affiliation. And to the degree that we play out that narrative, that won't be progress; believe me. And we certainly haven't seen that progress in the universities. We've seen situations like what happened at Wilfrid Laurier University. Instead, we won't see progress; what we'll return to is exactly the same kind of tribalism that characterized the [ __ ].

Thank you, Jordan. Michael Eric Dyson, your six minutes starts now. Thank you very kindly. Wonderful opportunity to be here in Canada. Thank you so much. I'm gonna stand here at the podium; I'm a preacher, and I will ask for an offering at the end of my presentation. This is the swimsuit competition of the intellectual beauty pageant, so let me show you the curves of my thought. Oh my God, was that a politically incorrect statement I just made? How did we get to the point where the hijacking of the discourse on political correctness has become a kind of Manichean distinction between us and them? The abortive fantasy just presented is remarkable for both its clarity and yet the muddiness of the context from which it has emerged.

What's interesting to me is that when we look at the radical left, I'm saying what he had. I want to join them, named running up, and I'm from a country where a man stands up every day to tweet the moral mendacity of his viciousness into a nation he has turned into his psychic commode. Y'all get Justin; we got Donald. So what's interesting then is that political correctness has transmogrified into a caricature of the left. The left came up with the term political correctness! Shall I remind you? We were tired of our excuses and our excesses, in our exaggerations. We were willing to be so critical in a way that I fear my confreres, my compatriots, are not. Don't take yourself too seriously; smile, take yourself not seriously at all, but what you do with deadly seriousness.

Now it is transmogrified into an attempt to characterize the radical left, the radical left, as a metaphor, as a symbol, as an articulation. They don't exist; their numbers are too small. I'm on college campuses; I don't see much of them coming. When I hear about identity politics, it amazes me: the collectivist identity politics, last time I checked, I forgive, in a trace, that was an invention from a dominant culture that wanted groups to, at their behest, the invention of race was driven by the demand of a dominant culture to subordinate others.

Patriarchy? Hey, patriarchy was the demand of men to have their exclusive vision presented. The beauty of feminism is it's not gonna resolve differences between men and women. It just says, "Me!" I don't automatically get the last word; of course, of my career he never did. And so identity politics has been generated as a bit noir of the right, and yet the right doesn't understand the degree to which identity has been foisted upon black people and brown people and people of color from the very beginning, on women and trans people. You think that I want to be part of a group that is constantly imported by people at Starbucks?

I imagine my own black business, walking down the street. I have group identity thrust upon me. They don't say, "Aha! There goes a Negro, highly intelligent, articulate, verbose, capable of rhetorical fury at the drop of a hat." We should not interrogate him as to the bona fides of his legal status. No! They treat me as part of a group, and the problem is that our friends don't want to acknowledge is that the hegemony, that dominance of that group, has been so vicious that it has denied us the opportunity to exist as individuals. Individualism is the characteristic moment in modernity. Mr. Peterson is right—the development of the individual, however, is predicated upon notions of intelligence.

Immanuel Kant, David Hume, and others philosophically. Carté Descartes comes along, introducing knowledge into the fray, saying that knowledge is based upon a kind of reference to the golden intelligence, the reflective glass that one possesses, and yet it got rooted in the very ground of our existence. So now it has a fleshly basis, and what I'm saying to you, the knowledge that I bring as a person of color makes a difference in my body because I know what people think of me, and I know how they respond to me. And that ain't no theory! Am I - you might mad at trigger warnings? The only trigger warning I want is from a cop: “Are you about to shoot me?”

Not funny! In America, where young black people die repeatedly unarmed, without provocation. And so for me, identity politics is something very serious. And what's interesting about safe spaces—I hear about the University—I teach there! Look, if you're in a safe space in your body, you don't need a safe space! Some of that is overblown; some of it is ridiculous. I understand; I believe that the classroom is a robust place for serious learning. I believe in the interrogation of knowledge based upon our understanding, usually of the edifying proposition of enlightenment. At the same time, some people ain't as equal as others, so we have to understand the conditions under which they have emerged and in which they have been knighted and attacked by their own culture.

And I ain't seen nobody be a bigger snowflake than white men who can play, "Mommy, mommy, they won't let us play and have everything we used to have under the old regime, where we were right racist and supremacist and dominant and patriarchs and hated gays and lesbians and transsexuals." Yeah, you gotta share! This ain't your world! This is about his world! And let me have my saying this: Yoram, that story from David Foster Wallace fishing, going down to fishing, going—and the older fish comes in the opposite direction; he said, "Hello boys, how's the water?" They swim on; they turn each other: "What the hell is water?"

Because when you're in it, you don't know it! When you're dominant, you don't know it. Nothing—Keyser Söze, he said—is more interesting but the devil did, and to make people believe he didn't exist. [Music]

Thank you, Michael. Stephen, you're up. We're going to put six minutes on the clock and please start because if I miss that plane to London, I won't be able to see the end of it from the bridegroom's mother.

Now in agreeing to participate in this debate and stand on this side of the argument, I'm fully aware that many people who choose incorrectly, in my view, to see this issue in terms of left and right, devalued and exploded terms, as I think they are, will believe that I am betraying myself in such causes and values that I've espoused over the years. I've been given a huge grief already, simply because I'm standing here next to Professor Peterson, which is the very reason that I am standing here in the first place. I'm standing next to someone with whom I have no differences, shall we say, in terms of politics and all kinds of other things, precisely because I think all this has got to stop.

This rage, resentment, hostility, hostility, intolerance; above all, this "some with us or against us" certainty. A grand canyon has opened up in our world! The fissure, the crack, grows wider every day! Neither on each side can hear a word that the other shrieks, nor do they want to! While these armies and propagandists in the culture wars clash down below, in the enormous space between the two sides, the people of the world try to get on with their lives, alternately baffled, bored, and betrayed by the horrible noises and explosions that I can all around. I think it's time for this toxic binary, zero-sum madness to stop before we destroy ourselves.

I'd better nail my colors to the master before I get it further than this. It's only polite to give you a sense of where I come from. All my adult life, I have been what you might call a lefty, a soft lefty, a liberal of the most hand-wringing, milksop, milquetoast variety. Not a burning man the barricades socialist, not even really a progressive worth the name. I've been on marches, but I've never quite dead waved placards, banners. Am I a loathed member of that band? An SJW? A social justice warrior? I don't think highly of social injustice I have to say, but I character myself mostly as a social justice warrior.

My intellectual heroes growing up were Bertrand Russell and G. Moore, liberal thinkers, people like that—writers like E.M. Forster. I believed, and I think I still do believe in the sanctity of human relations, the primacy of the heart, and friendship and love and common interest. These are more personal interior beliefs than they are political exterior convictions. More a humanistic version of a religious impulse, I suppose. I trust in humanity; I believe in humanity, I think I do—despite all that has happened in the 40 years of my adulthood.

I am soft, and I can easily be swept away by harder hearts and harder intellects. I'm sometimes surprised to be described as an activist, but over time I have energetically involved myself with what you might call causes. I grew up knowing that I was gay. Well, in fact, from the very first I knew I was gay! I remember when I was born looking up and saying, "That's the last time I'm going out one of those!" I'm Jewish, so I have a natural—I was horror of racism. I naturally want racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, bullying, bigotry, intolerance of all human kinds to end.

That's surely a given amongst all of us. The question is how such a golden aim is to be achieved. My ultimate objection to political correctness is not that it combines so much of what I have spent a lifetime loathing and opposing, preaching us with great respect, piety, self-righteousness, heresy hunting, denunciation, shaming, assertion without evidence, accusation, inquisition, censoring. That's not why I'm incurring the wrath of my fellow liberals by standing on this side of the house. My real objection is that I don't think political correctness works. I want to achieve—I want to get to the golden hill, but I don't think that's the way to get there.

I believe one of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right than to be effective, and political correctness is always obsessed with how right it is without thinking of how effective it might be. I wouldn't class myself as a classical libertarian, but I do relish transgression, and I deeply and instinctively distrust conformity and orthodoxy. Progress is not achieved by preachers and guardians of morality, but to paraphrase my own Samyatin by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics. I may be wrong; I hope to learn this evening. I really do think I may be wrong, but I am prepared to entertain the possibility that political correctness will bring us more tolerance and a better world, but I'm not sure.

And I would like this quotation from my hero, Bertrand Russell, to hover over the evening: “One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision. Let doubt prevail.” [Music] So, great set of opening statements to set the scene. We're now going to go into a round of rebuttals to allow each of our presenters three minutes to reflect on what they've heard and to make some additional points.

We're gonna do that in the same order that we had the opening statements. So Michelle, you’re up first. We'll put three minutes on the clock for you. So first, I would say that I think that the attempt to draw as I cottony between individual rights and group rights is a little bit misleading. Traditionally, there have been large groups of people who have not been able to exercise their individual rights.

And I think that a lot of the claims that are being made on behalf of what we politically cracked types call marginalized groups are claims that people who, you know, have identities that have not traditionally been at the center of our culture or been at the top of our hierarchies, have as much right to exercise their individual talents and realize their individual ambitions. When we say that we want more women in power, or more people of color's voices in the Canon or in the curriculum or, you know, people directing movies—all of these things are not because, at least on my part, I'm interested in some sort of very crude equity, but because there are a lot of people who have not traditionally been able to realize themselves as individuals.

That's what the women's movement was; that's what the civil rights movement was; that's what the gay rights movement was; that's, in some ways, what the trans rights movement was. I mean, far from a collectivist movement, this is kind of liberalism—classical liberalism pushed to its extreme, right? These are people saying, "I have the right to define my identity against the one that was collectively assigned to me." Finally, I would say, you know, a lot of the things that Stephen Fry said, you know, particularly his temperament, we’re probably in agreement, but this Inquisition, this censoriousness. On the one hand, I sort of— I see where he's coming from, but I think it's a little bit virtual, right?

I mean, who's really censoring you? I understand what it feels like to feel censored; I understand what it feels like to be on the wrong side of a Twitter mob or get a lot of nasty comments, but—and that's a bad feeling, you know, and it's a counterproductive tactic, but that's not censorship. You know, and again, it's especially strange coming from a country where, you know, the President of the United States is trying to levy additional postal rates on the owner of the Washington Post, you know, in revenge for its reporting, and people who have kneeled to protest police brutality at football games have seen their careers explode.

You know, or women who have challenged Mr. Peterson have been hounded by threats and trolls and misogynist invective.

Jordan, we're gonna have three minutes up on the screen there; please respond to what you've heard. Well, I guess I would like to set out a challenge, and somewhat the same format as Mr. Fry did, to people on the moderate left. I mean, I've studied totalitarianism for a very long time, both on the left and on the right, in various forms, and I think we’ve done a pretty decent job of determining when right-wing beliefs become dangerous.

I think that they become dangerous when the people who stand on the right evoke notions of racial superiority or ethnic superiority, something like that. It's fairly easy to draw a box around them and place them to one side, necessary, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job of that. What I fail to see happening on the left, and this is with regards to the sensible left because such a thing exists, is for the same thing to happen with regards to the radical leftists. Okay, so here's an open question: if it's not diversity, inclusivity, and equity as a triumvirate that mark out the two excessive left, and with equity defined, by the way, not as equality of opportunity, which is an absolutely laudable goal but as equality of outcome, which is how it's defined, then exactly how do we demarcate the two extreme left? What do we do, do we say, "Well, there's no such thing as the two extreme left"?

Well, that's certainly something that characterized much of intellectual thinking for the 20th century as our high-order intellectuals, especially in places like France, did everything they could to bend over backwards to ignore absolutely everything that was happening in the catastrophic left world in the Soviet Union and in Maoist China. Not least we've done a terrible job of determining how to demarcate what's useful from the left from what's pathological.

And so it's perfectly okay for someone to criticize my attempts to identify something like a boundary. We could say diversity, inclusivity, and equity, especially equity, which is in fact, equality of outcome, which is an absolutely abhorrent notion if you know anything about history, you know that. And I'm perfectly willing to hear some reasonable alternatives, but what I hear continually from people on the left, first of all, as my opponents did to construe every argument that is possibly able to be construed on the axis of group identification, and it failed to help the rest of us differentiate the reasonable left, which stands for the oppressed necessarily, from the pathological left that's capable of unbelievable destruction.

What I see happening on the university campus is in particular, where the left is absolutely predominate—and that’s certainly not my imagination, that's well documented by perfectly reasonable people like Jonathan Haidt—it’s an absolute failure to make precisely that distinction, and I see the same thing echoed tonight. Thank you.

Michael, give us your rebuttal. I feel freer already! I don't know what mythological collective Mr. Peterson refers to. I'm part of the left; they're cantankerous. When they have a firing squad, it's usually in a semi-circle. Part of the skepticism of rationality was predicated upon the Enlightenment project, which says we're no longer going to be subordinate to skepticism, to superstition; we're gonna think and we're gonna think well. Thomas Jefferson was one of the great arbiters of rationality, but he was also a man who was a slave owner. How do you reconcile that?

That's the complication I'm speaking about. That's not either-or; that's not a collective identity. Thomas Jefferson believed in a collective identity that is during the day, at night, he gets in Luther Vandross songs, went out to the slave quarter, and engaged in sexual relations and had many children with Sally Hemings. His loins trumped his logic! And when he talks about postmodernism, I don't know who he's talking about. I teach postmodernism.

It's kind of fun! Jacques Derrida—just to say his name is beautiful! Michel Foucault, Michele Foucault, talked about the insurrection of subjugated analogous people who had been marginalized now beginning to speak—the subaltern, this Gayatri Spivak talks about it in postcolonial theory. The reason these people grew up and grew into existence and had a voice is because they were denied, as Ms. Goldberg said. Our group identity was forced upon us; we were not seen as individuals!

Babe Ruth, when he broke the home run record, he didn't bat against all best ballplayers; he batted against the best white ballplayers. When it's been rigged in your favor from the very beginning, it's hard for you to understand how much you've been rigged! You're born on third base and think you hit a triple at the Toronto Blue Jays game. And here we are deriving our sense of identity from the very culture that we ignore.

Look at the indigenous names and the First Nations names: Toronto, Saskatchewan, Winnipeg, Tim Hortons! But I'll tell you, there's an envy of the kind of freedom and liberty that people of color and other minorities bring because we bring the depth of knowledge in our body. There's a kind of jealousy event, as the greatest living Canadian philosopher Aubrey Drake Graham says, jealousy is just love and hate at the same time.

And so for me, I think it's necessary. I agree with Mr. Fry; we shouldn't be nasty and combative, and yet I don't see nastiness and competitiveness from people. I see them making a desire to have their individual identities respected. When I get shot down for no other reason than I'm black, when I get categorized for no other reason than my color, I am living in a culture that refuses to see me as a great individual. Now it’s interesting to hear that there doesn't seem to be a problem, but yet I think we all instinctively know that there is some kind of problem.

There isn't censorship, of course, not in the way that there is in Russia. I've been to Russia; I have faced off with a deeply homophobic and unpleasant man, and there’s political correctness in Russia; it's just political correctness on the right, and that's what I grew up with. Political correctness meant that you couldn't say certain things on television, couldn't say [ __ ] for example on television, because it was incorrect to do so.

And as always, the same reason was that someone would appear and say, "I'm not shocked!" Of course, no! I'm not shocked; I'm not offended! I'm offended on behalf of others, young impressionable plastic minds—the vulnerable. And that’s not good enough. It's so often people saying, "See! I don't mind being called a [ __ ] or a [ __ ] or every way or mad person because I've got mental health issues; I don't mind people insulting me!"

And people say, "Well, that's alright for you, Stephen, because you know you're strong." Well, I don’t feel particularly strong, and I don’t know that I like being called a [ __ ] in a kite particularly, but I don't believe that the advances in my culture that have allowed me to marry, as I have now been for three years, to someone of my gender, I don't believe they are a result of political correctness.

And maybe political correctness is actually just some sort of live trout that the harder we squeeze it, the further it goes away. And you will be saying, "I'm not talking about this redness." You're talking about social justice, with which I agree with you! Whether you want to call it identity politics or the history of your people—the history my people—my people were slaves as well, but the British were slaves, and Romans, and the Jews were slaves of the Egyptians.

All human beings have been slaves at some point, and we all in that sense share that knowledge of how important it is to speak up. But Russell Means, who was a friend of mine, towards the end, who founded the American Indian Movement, said, "I forgot! I could say; come in Indian or a Lakota Sioux or Russell. I don't care what you call me! It's how we treated that matters!"

And so I'm really addressing a popular idea also actually in barrel askers, in the new PR, that said, "Call me an Eskimo; it's obviously easier for you because you keep mispronouncing in nuclear." You know, words do matter. The—just then with a quick story. Gay rights came in battling them because we slowly and persistently knocked on the door of people in power. We didn't shout; we didn't scream. People like Ian McKellen eventually got to see the Prime Minister, and when the Queen signed in the Royal Assent—she has to for the bill allowing equality of marriage—she said, "Lord, you know, I couldn't imagine this in 1953, really? It's extraordinary, isn't it? Just wonderful!"

And handing it over—now, it's a nice story, and I hope it's true, but it's nothing to do with political correctness! It's to do with human decency! It's that simple! [Music]

So some great rebuttals there, strong opening statements. Let’s move now into the moderated cross-examination portion of this debate and get both sides engaging on some of the key issues here. And I think what we've heard here is a bit of a tension; let's draw it out a bit more between the rights of groups to feel included, to have, in your words, Michelle, the opportunity for individuality and a belief on the other side that there's something at threat here when these groups are overly privileged through affirmative action or other outcome-oriented processes.

So Michael, to start with you, why isn't there just harm that's done to groups by privileges—their group identity, whether it be a group identity of race or gender—and not immediately treating them as individuals in the way that Jordan and Stephen would like to see you see them first? Well, a couple of things. First of all, there was no arbitrary and random distinction that people of color and other minority groups made when I talked about the invention of race, the invention of gender—the invention of groupthink.

That was not done by those groups that have been so named. As Ms. Goldberg said, first of all, you've got to acknowledge the historical evolution of that reality, and the concept of group identity did not begin with them. It began with a group that didn't have to announce its identity. When you are in control, you don't have to announce who you are. So that many white brothers and sisters don't see themselves as one among many other ethnicities or groups. What they see themselves as, I'm just American, I'm Canadian! Can’t you be like us? Can’t you transcend those narrow group identifications?

And yet those group identifications have been imprinted upon them by the very people who now, because their group power has been challenged, let's make no mistake about it, there’s a challenge. I agree with Mr. Fry in a kind of nether land of how sweet it would be to have a kingly and queenly metaphor about how to get it resolved; that ain’t the real deal, homie! And in the real world—

And in the real world, there’s stuff at stake. What’s at stake? Our bodies! What’s at stake? People’s lives! What’s at stake? People are still being lynched, killed in this country because of their sexuality and their racial identity are still being harmed!

So, I'm suggesting to you it’s not that we are against being treated as individuals. That's what we're crying for! Please don't see me as a member of a group that you think is a thug, a [ __ ], annihilus, the pathological person. See me as an individual who embodies the realities we're in.

But I'll end by saying this: In America, we have the Confederate flag. I don’t know if y’all are familiar with that; we have a Confederate flag. We have white guys, mostly in the South, but others as well, flanked most Confederate flags that are part of the South that refused to cede its legitimate conquests at the hands of the North. There has been a politics of resentment. Every—you talk my politics of identity wearing that flag, not the American flag! They are not American; they are celebrating a secession, a move away from America!

And a man named Colin Kaepernick, who is a football player, saying I want to bring beauty to that flag, has been denied opportunity! So we have to really set the terms of debate in order before we proceed. Good point. Shorten—let’s have you jump in on this idea of what you see as the pernicious danger of groupthink when it comes to ethnicity, when it comes to gender. Why do you think that's one of the primal sins in your view of "political correctness?"

Well, I think it's one of the primal sins of identity politics players on the left and the right, just to be clear about that. Personally, since this has got personal at times, I'm no fan of the identitarian right. I think that anybody who plays a game, a conceptual game, where group identity comes first and foremost risks an exacerbation of tribalism.

It doesn't matter whether it's on the left or the right. With regards to the idea of group rights, well, there's a fundamental—and this is something we've fallen into terribly in Canada, not least because we had to contend with the threat of Quebec separatism. But the idea of group rights is extraordinarily problematic because the obverse of the coin of individual rights is individual responsibilities.

Then you can hold an individual responsible, and an individual can be responsible. And so that's partly why individuals have rights. But groups? How do you hold a group responsible? The whole idea is not—it’s not a good idea to hold a group responsible.

If, first of all, it flies in the face of the idea of the sort of justice systems that we've laid out in the West that are essentially predicated first on the assumption of individual innocence but also on the possibility of individual guilt, not group guilt. We've seen what happened in the twentieth century. Many, many times when the idea of group guilt was enabled to get a foothold, let's say, in the polity and in the justice system, it was absolutely catastrophic.

So okay, fine. Group rights? Well, what are you gonna—how are you gonna contend with the alternative to that? The opposite of that? Where’s the group responsibility? How are you gonna hold your groups responsible? Well, we don’t have to talk about that because we’re too concerned with rectifying hypothetical historical injustices, and otherwise. And that’s certainly not to say that there weren’t any shortage of absolutely catastrophic historical injustices; that’s not the point.

The point is how you view the situation at the most fundamental level. And group rights are an absolute catastrophe, in my opinion. But let’s—Michelle, come in on that point. This is something you've written about, the idea that, you know, in identity politics, the identity, the group, is an absolutely valid part of the discourse and individuals could and should be seen and participating in groups as they enter into the civic space.

I'm not sure that we necessarily have to analogize from individual, you know, the opposite of individual rights is individual responsibility. I'm not sure that that analogy necessarily holds for the groups. I mean, in the United States—and one of the things that I think is complicated about this discussion is that we're talking about three very different cultural contexts, three different histories, three different kinds of legal regimes.

But in the United States, a great—a huge part of our politics has been groups struggling for rights for their individual members, right? I mean, so women in the United States, you know, seeking the right to reproductive control of their body; you know, African Americans in the United States seeking redress from police brutality or discrimination, or simply the kind of tendency in America of white people to call the police whenever they see an African American in a place where they don't think that they're supposed to be?

And you simply—I don't see how you can contend with any of those social problems if you see society as just an ocean of atomized individuals, you know? And I just—again, I think that there is nothing pernicious about people banding together on the basis of their common identity to seek redress for discrimination and exclusion. I mean, I think that that is everything that's best about our democracy—that is the definition of progress!

And so again, I just—I keep stumbling with the idea that this is how tyrannical or that way lies Stalinism. And you know, a lot of times people who are opposed to political correctness talk about the concept of category creep, or say—no, no, yeah, category creep which is a concept that was originated by, I believe, an Australian academic.

And it's basically kind of a failure to draw distinctions, right? So that you kind of can't see the difference between, say, a KKK grand wizard and a conservative like, say, Ben Shapiro. Or, you know, that you kind of see everybody to your right as, you know, fascist, sexist, totalitarian, and intolerable. And I think that that is a real thing that happens in part because, you know, undergraduates often think in broad and slightly overwrought categories.

I know I did when I was—when I was a kid; yeah, maybe still do. But I hear a lot of category creep in, again, the argument against political correctness or against seeking group redress—the idea that kind of—that way lies dehumanization, or, you know, that you're kind of…

One minute, you’re naively agreeing with Mr. Frey, to me. This is a category creep idea I want to get, Steven, come in on this part of your opening remarks. You're a category creep. Stephen, respond to that.

It's nice; I'm still very lost about why we aren't talking about political correctness. We're talking about politics, and that's fine. I share, you know, I share exactly what you think about it. I'm not an enemy of identity politics, per se. I could obviously see where it goes wrong and where it’s annoying. Let’s be empirical about this. How well is it working for you in America at the moment?

Not well at all, really! Easy! You can ask me in a moment. The reason Trump and Brexit in Britain and all kinds of nativists all over Europe are succeeding is not the triumph of the right; it's the catastrophic failure of the left! It's our fault! We absolutely—my point is not that I've turned to the right or anything like that, or that I'm nice and fluffy. I want everybody to be decent.

I'm saying [ __ ] political correctness! Resist! Fight! If you have a point of view, fight it in the proper manner, using democracies. It shouldn't be! Not channels of education, not language! You know, it's so silly. There’s a chess rule, you know, in chess. The best move to play in chess is not the best chess move; it's the move your opponent least wants you to play, and at the moment, you're being recruiting sergeants for the right by ignoring and upsetting.

Instead of fighting, or persuading, political correctness is a middle course that simply doesn't work. Well, first of all, points you said the empirical and the empirical, as far as I know, the word means that which can be verified to falsify through the senses—exactly.

So if we look at it in an objective way, the reality is that people don't have equal access to the means to articulate in a very moment. You're talking; I'm talking about the empirical results of this political attitude. I understand that, but my point is simply this: I’m suggesting to you that people use the weapons at hand.

Now it was Ibrahim Joshua Heschel, the rabbi, who said everybody's not guilty but everybody's responsible, right? That's a distinction there. Everybody clearly is not guilty, but what's interesting—look at the flipside. If you have benefited from 300 years of holding people in servitude, thinking that you did it all on your own, why can't these people work harder?

Let me see, for 300 years; you ain't had no job! So the reality is, for 300 years, you hold people in the bands; you hold them in subordination. You refuse to give them rights. Then all of a sudden, you free them and say, "You are now individuals," not having the skills—if you have no skills, you’re—

Reach up to about America first of all, I'm some of the American society first of all, so I'm about the northern hemisphere. I've come on every society where enslavement has existed, but I'm speaking specifically of the repudiation of individual rights among people of color in America, who were denied the opportunity to be individuals.

So I obviously, an ideal, and I think Michelle Goldberg does too, agree with the emphasis on individuals. What we're saying to you is that we have not been permitted to be individuals; we have not been permitted to exercise our individual autonomy and authority! The refusal to do so—

To recognize me as an individual means when you roll up on me, and I'm a 12-year-old boy in a park, and you shoot first in ways you do—the black hands that you don't do the white kids, you are not treating that person as an individual. If we're living in a society where women are subject to aberrant forms of horrid patriarchal, sexist, and misogynist behavior, you're not acknowledging the centrality of the individuality of women.

You are treating them according to a group dynamic! And if we get beyond the ability of people on the right to understand the degree to which they have operated from the basis of benefit from group identity without having said, "I am," by saying this, "The great American philosopher Beyoncé Knowles" saying that it has been said that racism is so American that if you challenge racism, you look like you’re challenging America!

We are challenging inequality; we are challenging the refusal to see me as an individual! When we overcome that, have at it!

We're all money goes for a moment that I've benefited from my white privilege. Okay, so let’s assume now, that’s fine. Yeah, well, that’s what you would say. So, let’s say—here, let’s get precisely this. Was that in a very individual of you?

Let’s get precise about this, okay? It’s good to be precise. What degree is my present level of attainment or achievement a consequence of my white privilege? I don’t mean sort of. I mean, do you mean 5%, do you mean 15%, do you mean 25%, do you mean 75%? And what do you propose I do about it? How about a tax? How about a tax that’s like specialized for me so that I can account for my damn privilege? You saw that great? Don’t write about it!

Now, let’s get precise about one other thing, okay? We’ll get precise. Yes, and so if we can agree, and we haven't, that the left can go too far, which it clearly can, then how would my worthy opponents precisely define when the left that they stand for has gone too far? You didn't like equity, equality of outcome?

I think that's a great marker. But if you have a better suggestion, please don’t sidestep the question! So let's figure out how I can dispense with my white privilege and so that you can tell me when the left has gone too far, since they clearly can. And that's what this debate is about—about political correctness! It's about the left going too far!

And I think it's gone too far in many ways, and I’d like to figure out exactly how and when the reasonable left could make its descendants again, and we could quit all this nonsense.

Do you mind if I answer? See what I will answer you, but I just want to answer Stephen Fry first because you talked about, you know, this is how we got Trump, unless this is the failure of the left. And so I am, you know, I’m a journalist. I went to a ton of Trump rallies during the campaign in different parts of the country, and you're right: everywhere I went, I heard complaints about political correctness, you know, far more than I heard complaints about, say, NAFTA.

But when you asked people what they meant by political correctness, you know, they called a woman they worked with "girl," and she got mad at them. And you know they couldn't in public wonder aloud whether the President of the United States was really a Muslim, you know? They didn't like that they couldn't make gay jokes anymore, and so on. On the one hand, you're right, and I've written about this—I think that when you try to support, you know, that when people have these prejudices and you try to suppress them, it can create a kind of dangerous counter-reaction.

But I also think that, you know, what they were reacting to again, to go back to the title this debate, what they called political correctness, you know, the fact that they had to have this or being black president who they felt talked down to them, which is really what they meant—I don't see a way around that because that is, like I said, that's progress!

So to go to the question of why the left goes too far, I mean to me it's pretty easy: violence and censorship! Right? I'm against violence, and I'm against censorship, but I also, looking around the world right now, when the idea that there is this—I understand, again, there is like a problem of kind of left-wing annoyance, right? There’s a lot of things that kind of people, random people on the internet in particular are able to swarm individuals and turn kind of stray remarks into social media campaigns, and this is often, you know, completed with political correctness.

And it's a bad phenomenon; I wish there was a way to put an end to it! I don't think there is no way to put an end to it simply by having kind reasonable liberals or reasonable socialists denounce it because it's just a kind of awful phenomenon of modern life, and if you want to have a debate about whether social media is terrible for democracy, I will be on the gay side.

But right now, where I really disagree—well, a couple of there are a couple places I really disagree, but the idea that the radical left poses a greater threat than the radical right, when you see actual fascism ascendant all over the world, strikes me as something that you can literally only believe if you spend your life on college campuses.

So, Michael, I want to come to you on those—Greg Michelle on Jordan's point about how does he, in a sense, get an equal voice in this debate back if it is implied that his participation brings with it this baggage of white privilege that doesn't allow him to see clearly the issues that are before us but that is to be complicit in the very problem itself, terminologically, your beginning at a point there’s already productive and controversial.

You're saying how can he get his equality back? Who are you talking about? Jordan Peterson, trending number one on Twitter, Jordan Peterson, international’s in an international bestseller! I want him to tweet something out about me in my book. Jordan Peterson! This is what I'm saying to you; why the rage, bruh?

You’re doing well! But you’re a mean man—a white man! And you’re gonna get us, right? I have never seen so much whine and snowflake king. There’s enough whining here to start a vineyard and what I’m saying to you, empirically and precisely when you ask the question about white privilege. The fact that you ask it in the way you did is dismissive, pseudo-scientific, non-empirical, and without justification.

A. The truth is that white privilege doesn't act according to quantifiable segments. It's about the degree to which we are willing as a society to grapple with the ideals of freedom, justice, and equality upon which is based. Number two—what's interesting to me is you're talking about not having a collective identity. What do you call a nation? Are you Canadian? Are you Canadian by yourself? Are you an individual? Are you part of a group?

When America formed its union, it did so in opposition to another group! So the reality is, is that those who are part of group identities and politics denied the legitimacy and validity of those groups—in the fact that they have been created thusly, and then have resentment against others. All I'm asking for is the opportunity—that this quotation you talk about the difference between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity—that's a state/retired argument, hackneyed phrase, derived from the halcyon days of the debate over affirmative action!

Are you looking for outcomes that can be determined equally, or are you looking for opportunity? If you free a person after a whole long time of oppression and say, "Now you are free to survive," if you have no skills—if you have no quantifiable means of existence, what you have done is liberated them into oppression!

And all I'm suggesting to you—Lyndon Baines Johnson, one of our great presidents, said, "If you start a man in a race a hundred years behind, it is awfully difficult to catch up." So I don’t think Jordan Peterson is suffering from anything except an exaggerated sense of entitlement and resentment, and his own privilege is invisible to him, and it’s manifest with lethal intensity and ferocity right here on stage.

Responded well! What I derived from that series of rebuttals, let's say, it’s twofold. The first is that saying that the radical left goes too far when they engage in violence is not a sufficient response by any stretch of the imagination because there are sets of ideas in radical leftist thinking that led to the catastrophes of the 20th century, and that was at the level of idea, not at the level of violent action.

It's a very straightforward thing to say you're against violence. It's like being against poverty! It's like, you know, generally speaking, decent people are against poverty and violence, and it doesn't address the issue in the least. And with regards to my privilege or lack thereof—I mean, I'm not making the case that I haven't had advantages in my life and disadvantages in my life like most people. You don’t know anything about my background or where I came from; it doesn't matter to you because fundamentally, I’m a mean white man, and that's a hell of a thing to say in a debate.

Say, [ __ ], Barry brings, I want to move on to men and women. The mean man white comment was not predicated upon my historical excavation of your past; it’s based upon the evidence that really speaks—the denial of a sense of equanimity among combatants in an argument. So I'm saying again, you're a mean man, a white man, and the viciousness is evidence.

Okay, where's that change the decks here? Let's talk about another big factor of the so-called politically correct movement right now, which is the #MeToo movement and the extent to which we've seen this resurgence, this awakening around what have been a horrible series of systemic abuses and injustice toward women. Some people, though, Michelle, would say that we're in a cultural panic now, that the pendulum has swung too far, and that there is a dangerous overreaction going on, where people's rights, reputations, due process has been thrown to the wind.

How do you respond to that? Well, first, people started saying that within like two weeks of the first Harvey Weinstein story is breaking, right? The minute Harvey Weinstein—and people actually started losing their jobs over this, right, which was something quite new, that men with histories of really serious predatory behavior were suddenly losing their jobs. You know everybody had known about it for a long time, and there had been a sort of implicit impunity, and suddenly that was taken away, and it created this cultural earthquake. And as soon as it did, it created a lot of anxiety, like what if this goes too far?

You know, I mean, the #MeToo movement was only a couple of months old when my newspaper started running columns from people saying, "Why can’t I criticize #MeToo?" which they were doing in my newspaper! So on the one hand, gift of course, is due process important, obviously. I think that when you look at who has actually lost their jobs—who's actually lost their livelihoods? I mean, look around. It's people—it's not people in general; it's people who, you know, there are tens of millions of dollars of settlements and they lost their job for four months and now they're staging comebacks.

You know, Bill O'Reilly is about to get a TV show on a new network. So the idea that again this idea that kind of like men everywhere feel like they can't talk anymore, and everybody's walking on eggshells, and I don’t know, maybe that's true in your offices, it’s not true where I live. You know, and the #MeToo movement has been particularly active in media, you know, there was this thing—I don't know how many of you guys read about the "Shitty Media Menlist." A woman wrote about it; she started this sort of open-source document where women could lift men in media that everybody knew about, but nobody had ever done anything about. And it very quickly went public, and there was something sort of disturbing in it, right?

You don’t like these anonymous accusations floating around? Most feminists I know, including myself, are kind of, you know, freaked out by it and thought it was unfair to have people's reputations held up like this. But if you look at what happened to the men on the list, nothing! You know, they still have their jobs!

I know men on that list; I work with men on that list. The people who actually people have only by and, as far as I can think, in media, the people who have lost their jobs and lost their careers have been for extremely serious misbehavior documented by multiple women who had corroborating witnesses. And so again I understand this anxiety that relations between men and women are changing.

Of course, that causes a lot of cultural anxiety, but I don't know that it's rooted in anything real! They get his view on this. Are we in cultural panic? Is the response, Michelle says, commensurate with the moment? I'm very confused by this. Of course, I recognize the best reality of Weinstein and the monstrosity of his behavior, and it was shocking to me!

I actually worked from script doctoring, because it's called, and I never had the bathroom toe—for pretty obvious reasons. But it’s, you know, grotesque! And I can’t imagine how vile it must be for such a powerful man, and he was—I used to play a game at the Cannes Film Festival where these years of power were walking from one hotel at them at the end there, all the way up to the Palais des festivals; you would get 10 points every time you heard the word Harvey, and you'd usually, a 10-minute walk, you'd have 300 points because it was, "Harvey's got the script; Harvey's got it; yep, I've got a meeting with Harvey at the Majestic in the afternoon!"

He was immensely powerful, and I think that's obvious, that someone in that position abusing and threatening and hindering the livelihood of women is grotesque and in the extreme. But I have to tell you, there is a genuine feeling amongst many people I know that we can’t speak our minds. We can't actually speak to the true nuance, the true depth of sexual romantic feeling between men and women.

It's not a subject that I'm absolutely expert on, but it counts between men and men as well, though I know when it's men and men, you might say, "Well, that's different because they're women who've had a different experience in history," and I don't want to enter that particular feel, but I would say that there is real fear in my business, which is where this all started—show business, acting, and so on.

Yeah, people are rather afraid to speak about a piece of, you know, publicity that's come out or a statement that's been made. You just go, "Yep, absolutely," and wait for the people that leave the room before you can speak honestly with your friends, and that's—I’ve never experienced that in my entire 60 years on this planet, this feeling that—and I’m not characterizing feminists as in East Germany, but it's like that—

The stars—you’re listening! You better be careful—they're listening! And that's a genuine feeling, I'm saying that, from my hand to my heart, I'm not saying it to make a point other than the fact that it’s true! And it's worrying! But the sexual misadventures and horror experiences is worrying too.

So the two worries—they're not solved. Let's bring out Jordan on this because you've written and commented about it a lot. Well, I think I’m going to point out two things again. The first is that my question about when the left goes too far still hasn’t been answered, and then the second thing I’m going to point out is that, you know, it's conceivable that I am a mean man, you know, I mean maybe I'm meaner than some people and not as mean as others.

I think that's probably more the case, but I would say the fact that race got dragged into that particular comment is a better exemplar of what the hell I think is wrong with the politically correct left than anything else that could have possibly happened. [Applause] Imagine the hurt, the anxiety, the insult that you might genuinely feel according to what I felt was an appropriate comment of description at the moment of its expression.

But imagine now those hurt feelings, and we've gone, "Okay, you feel great. You feel great about it." It's really—different. I'm not a victim; I'm not hurt! You're Paul’s, okay? You wouldn't be a victim, so what's interesting is that whatever non-traditional feelings of empathy you endure at this particular point—the point is imagine then the horrors that so many other others have had to put up with for so long when they are refused to acknowledge their humanity!

Now I take your point seriously, so you're let—let me finish; let me finish. So you’re not my Inquisitioner, okay? What I'm saying to you is that when you said you were upset that I added the element of race there, right? When I said, "Mean mad white man?" Well, what’s interesting is that you may have felt that you were being ascribed a group identity to which you do not subscribe!

You may have felt that you were being unfairly judged according to your particular race! You may have felt that your individual identity was being besmirched by my rather careless characterization of you, all of which qualifies for a legitimate—you know, response to me! But also, the point we've been trying to make about the refusal to see our individual existence as women, as people of color, as First Asian people in the light.

My point simply has been the reason I talked about race in that particular characterization is because there's a particular way in which I have come to a city—I don’t know if there are a lot of black people out here, not sure—but I constantly come to places and spaces that are not my natural habit, and other than intellectual engagement and the love and the fury of rhetorical engagement, yes, but I often go into hostile spaces where people will not vote in favor from my particular viewpoint because I'm interested as an individual of breaking down barriers so that people can understand just how complicated it is!

So what I'm saying to you is that I would invite you in terms of the surrender of your privilege to give you a specific response—come with me to a black Baptist Church! Come with me to a historically black college! Come to me to an indigenous or First Nations community where we're able to engage in some of the lovely conversation but also to listen and hear! And when I added race to that, I was talking about the historical events in ability to acknowledge others' pains equally to the one that they are presently enduring!

So human being, well, I’ve seen the sorts of things that you’re talking about! I happen to be an honorary member of an indigenous family. So don’t tell me about what I should go see with regards to oppression! You don’t know anything about me! You ask my question, I gave you a— [ __ ].

Yeah, you gave me a generic response and generic raise—a taste. Or sports. Jordan Peterson, I would like for you to come with me, Michael Eric Dyson—to a black Baptist church; you’ve been there otherwise! I would be happy to do that! Okay! Alright, I’m gonna hook you up! I’m gonna hook you up and make sure that happens!

One more quick round and then we’re going to go to closing statements. And assume for I want to get your response to why, you know, a generation from now, looking back on this debate, we’re not going to see this quote so-called politically correct movement in the same way, let’s say that we now understand the positive contributions of the civil rights movement—that that was a movement that advanced a series of ideas about human dignity. People who previously didn’t have that dignity—

We're now having another debate, another social debate about different groups and communities that we're trying to convey a sense of new dignity to them. Why won't this be, in a sense, looked back upon as something positive a generation from now? I think people will look back on this debate and wonder why political correctness wasn't discussed. [Music]

I said it! I said it! Slippery! I mean, it's interesting to hear talk about raising, about gender, and because you – and it's something that I've thought about a lot and I can learn a great deal about! But I'm not sure why I came to this debate. I was interested in what I've always been interested in: the suppression of language and thought, the closing down the rationalist idea that seems beguiling that if you limit people's language, it may somehow teach them a different way of thinking—something that would have delighted the inventors of George Orwell's Newspeak, for example.

And it seems to me it's just implausible—it doesn't work, and that's what I mean by empirical. It doesn't stand an empirical test; it isn't experientially validated as we see from the political landscape now. And I worry that we may, in the future, so I’m so disappointed that the subject has just revolved around academia, which was predictable because that's the sort of crucible in which these elements are mixed.

But even more disappointed that really I haven't heard from Michelle or from Professor Dyson as to what they think political correctness is because what they've talked about is basically saying progress in our view is progress!

Well, I agree that’s—yeah, so it is, too, and good on progress—I’m all for it. But now how is it you’re saying political?

What we call it is the greatness, you call progress! That’s what you’re supposed to be arguing! I want to know what you mean by political correctness! Well, you know the reason months ago, right? You contacted me to ask if I wanted to do a debate about identity politics, and then you presented me with this resolution, and I said, "Well, there are like a lot of things that people call political correctness that I'm not going to defend."

But then I realized who I was debating, and saw that there was a lot of things that you, Jordan Peterson, call political correctness that I call progress. And to some extent you to Stephen Fry—you know, when you talk about it being outrageous to tear, that we’re not outrageous, I won’t forward to your mouth, but that we shouldn’t be tearing down statues of kind of notorious racists—that we should just instead be throwing eggs at them—you know?

So those sorts of things, if you call them political correctness, I call them progress. Now this feeling of being silenced, which I understand, although it seems very vague, right? You kind of are not quite putting your finger on who is silencing you except for a vague fear that if you say something untoward you’re going to be the subject of, I’m not sure, shaming, but by what? By the advancing—that's the point here!

What I'm saying is that it's a feeling! It's a feeling that is this sort of intangible result of—on right now! You’ve all seen the sort of show trial thing where the person then apologizes, “I have so much to learn about sexual politics!” I am really sorry that signed a lawyer crossed out the name of the person!

It's real! A mistake of our left is that we underestimate the right! The right isn’t as stupid as we’d like them to be, if only they were! If only they weren’t so cunning, so sly, so smart, so aware of our shortcomings!

And I just fear that political correctness is a weapon—

That they value—that the more we tell the world how people should be treated, how language should be treated, what words are acceptable, what attitudes are acceptable, what HR meeting is going to tell you in a long pool appointed list about how you look at people!

All of this is meat and drink to bad people! To malefactors, to bad actors! I'm not coming myself as one of those bad actors in that sense