Free Speech and the Satirical Activist | Andrew Doyle | EP 178
[Music] Andrew Doyle is with me today. Andrew is a British comedian, playwright, journalist, political satirist, and author who co-created the fictional character Jonathan Pie and the equally, or perhaps even more, fictional character Titanium McGrath. He recently published his first book, "Free Speech: Why It Matters," which came out in 2021 but previously published two more as the aforementioned Titanium McGrath. The first of those was "Woke: A Guide to Social Justice," published in 2019, and the second was "My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism," published in 2020.
I haven't met Andrew before; I'm looking forward to talking with him about free speech and about his satire and about the intersection between those two and whatever else comes up. Thank you very much for coming on today; I'm looking forward to speaking with you.
"Thanks so much for having me."
"So shall we start perhaps with the discussion of your book? I finished it yesterday. I've become notorious, I suppose, for my particular take on free speech, and so it was a book that interested me. Tell me why you wrote it and what you learned in all of those things."
"Well, it's not the sort of book I ever envisaged that I would have to write. I think if you go back 10, 15 years, the idea that free speech, which is obviously what the seedbed of all our liberties would be something that we would have to defend, would have probably seemed a little bit ridiculous to me because I basically took it for granted. I thought that everyone was on that side.
But I fear that something has happened, particularly over the past 10 years or so, and it is connected, I feel, with the rise of this social justice movement, what we might call critical social justice, or however we want to call it. A lot of people call it the woke movement, however you want to label that ideology, which at its heart has a real mistrust of free speech. You hear it all the time in the kind of phrases that the activists use: phrases like ‘words are violence’ or ‘oh, this kind of language normalizes hate’ or ‘legitimizes hate’ or all this kind of thing, and there's a real genuine mistrust of the power of language to effectively corrupt the masses.
What I wanted to do, I suppose, was try and marshal a defense for this principle that I had always taken for granted, but at the same time attempt to grapple with the concerns that people might have. Because my worry with the culture war, as we call it, is that you have two sort of extreme poles arguing against each other and most people are caught in the middle. I think most people are broadly for the idea of free speech, but they have a few reservations, for instance, when it comes to demagogues espousing hate or hate against a particular minority group or something like that. Or people are concerned about the ways in which language can cause harm, and I don't think anyone would deny that words can be hurtful.
So most people, I think, are somewhere in between and are open to persuasion. I think my principal argument in the book is that absolute freedom of speech is always going to be better, and in fact by promoting free speech you're doing something to help those very people that you are concerned about.
So, recently, the Scottish Parliament passed a hate crime law that has its supporters and also its detractors, and I'd be interested in your feeling about that. Now you said, I believe in this book, if I remember the statistics correctly, that there have been 120,000 incidents of police investigated speech hate crime in Britain.
"In how long since?"
"Yeah, that's been over the last five years or so. It's worse than that. The statistic I quote is between 2014 and 2019, there were 120,000 recorded incidents of non-crime—they call them non-crime hate incidents—and this is something which is now routine in the UK. I mean, obviously I'm going to be talking about the UK and the US, and Canada is a very different kettle of fish, I'm sure, and I'm sure a lot of the people who are watching won't be familiar with the problems we have in the UK.
Of course, we don't have constitutional protection for free speech. We don't have a First Amendment. We don't have anything like that, so we are particularly vulnerable. And at the moment, unfortunately, in the UK, the police, who are trained by the College of Policing, do issue very specific guidelines about this, and anyone can check this, because if you go to the government's website on hate crime and hate speech, they make very clear what they're talking about. What they say is that there are five protected characteristics, and these fall into race, gender, sexuality, gender identity, and disability.
I think I might misquote that, but there’s one missing, but anyway there are five protected characteristics. If a victim—and they do use the word ‘victim’ rather than ‘complainant’—if a victim perceives that any speech or crime was motivated by hatred towards any of those five protected characteristics, then it qualifies as a hate crime, if it's criminal.
If it's not criminal, if it's just speech or something like that, it qualifies as a non-crime hate incident. Police will investigate that, and they will record that. And although non-crime incidents don't lead to prosecution, they do go on a criminal reference check that many people take; we call it a disclosure barring service here, so it can affect your employment prospects.
"And is that without a trial?"
"That was recorded without a trial, of course. So you get a quasi-criminal record; you get something flagged up, particularly if you're applying for a teaching job, say, something like that, where you're working with children, it's very important, and you get this thing flagged up. So it does have serious ramifications. But even beyond that, we have hate speech laws which are encoded into the Public Order Act, which is one example, but the other—the main example—is the Electronic Communications Act 2003.
In this country, and I do quote the statistic in the book as well, we have roughly 3,000 people arrested a year for offensive things that they have said online. That's, in other words, nine people a day roughly the police in the UK are arresting, and people in the UK will be familiar with this because if you see the Twitter accounts of various police forces, various police departments across the country, they often put things out like, you know, make sure you don't say anything offensive or thoughtless online, or we will be knocking on your door. They say these very kind of frightening things.
There was a recent police display outside a supermarket in the UK; it went viral, this image. It was them next to a big digital billboard, and the slogan on the billboard was 'being offensive is an offense,' and this was flanked by police officers who were socially distant, but they were there in their masks, which made it seem slightly more sinister. They got in a lot of trouble for that because people were saying, well, being offensive surely isn't a crime.
But actually, the problem with that is that the police clearly thought it was a crime, and they were acting on that basis. They obviously hadn't just concocted this billboard out of nothing. They'd really considered what it should say. More to the point, actually, they were right—in this country, you can go to prison for jokes, for offensive remarks, and people have gone to prison and have been arrested routinely for causing offense.
And of course, the notion of offense is incredibly subjective. In fact, the legal stipulation in the Communications Act is that you will have broken the law if the judge and jury deem that you have communicated material that is quote-unquote 'grossly offensive.' Well, I don't know how you define that. I wouldn't also—who defines it is the real question, as far as I'm concerned.
I mean, I've looked into this legislation to some degree, and one of the things that struck me about it was that it seems to be purposefully left up to the hypothetical victim to define offense, which has become a subjective reality. If—you can understand why that might be to some degree because how would you define hate, and how would you define offense, especially the latter—without making recourse to someone's subjective experience? But then, of course—well, we'll delve into that in a moment.
I should start with the hard question, I suppose, which is, well, clearly people can say hateful things, and those things can be damaging psychologically and physiologically, I suppose, if people are stressed enough. The borderline is very difficult to identify. Why is it that people shouldn't just assume that you're a mean loudmouth and that they shouldn't pay any attention to you at all because you're concerned about this? That's the general criticism of critics of hate speech, let's say.
And so why in the world aren't the people who are putting this forward just trying to make the world a nicer place? What's the big problem here?"
"Well, I think a lot of people do assume that I'm a mean loudmouth. I think they assume that about most people who defend freedom of speech. But—and I'm sure the latter part of your question is absolutely right insofar as I imagine a lot of the people who are skeptical about free speech are in fact trying to make the world a better place. So I don't think that's mutually exclusive.
I mean the problem here is that the legislation as it currently stands here means that, for instance, if you say something critical about me and I perceive that it was motivated by hatred towards me on the basis of my sexuality, for instance, I could phone the police, and that would be recorded and would appear on hate crime statistics in this country. Because it's all about perception. That word is used about five or six times within the one passage in the hate crime legislation, the word ‘perception’ of the victim, and again I say ‘victim’ not ‘complainant,’ which suggests a complete disregard for due process, but I suppose we can leave that aside.
But the most frightening misconception I have found when it comes to people defending free speech is that they are doing so because they want to have the right to say appalling things about people with no comeback whatsoever, and they want to go back to some imaginary good old days, you know, where you could just be casually homophobic and racist and sexist and all the rest of it and no one would call you out for that. Now, I don't know anyone who falls into that category, and most people who are advocating for free speech are doing so precisely because they are aware that in countries where free speech protections are meager, minorities tend to suffer the most.
In fact, there seems to be a corollary to me that those who are genuinely for free speech are also for equal rights and protecting the vulnerable in society. This perception, which I really find unpleasant, this perception, that if you are standing up for this most foundational of principles of freedom of speech, if you’re standing up for that, you can only be doing so if you have a nefarious motive—I mean, what a horribly pessimistic view of humanity. It seems to be a direct derivation of the hypothesis, for example, that all Western social organizations are based on power and are best conceived of as tyrannical.
So if that's your view, why would you not assume that most uses of speech are essentially an exercise of power in the service of tyranny? But then why would you assume that the government in control of any particular country isn't part of that tyranny that you're describing? It seems odd to me to be mindful of the potential for tyranny but then to outsource all your individual liberties to the state. It seems contradictory to me.
Well, I guess the way that that is elided over is by allowing the hypothetical individual victim to define the offense. This is the problem, though. This is, I mean, the problem I've run into, and this is why partly why I appreciated your book, is that increasingly people are called upon to defend fundamental assumptions that were so taken for granted that virtually no one has an argument that's fully articulated at hand. When no one questions free speech, no one has to defend it thoroughly. As soon as it's questioned, well, it becomes an extraordinarily complicated problem. The same with gender identity. When no one's paying attention to it, it's obvious, but as soon as you have to think it through, it becomes a rat’s nest, to say the least.
When I was in the UK a few years ago, I saw a number of things that I felt were disturbing. People seem to have accepted the omnipresence of CCTV cameras to a degree that I found horrifying, frankly. I don't like CCTV cameras. I don't like the message they portray, which is that everyone is criminal enough so they should be surveyed all the time and someone needs to be watching. I noticed too, in London in particular, that many buildings had instituted airport-level security, so that you had to pass through a metal detector and have your bags checked, etc. while you were moving in and out of buildings. It struck me as quite horrifying, given that, as far as I'm concerned, Great Britain and its legal and parliamentary traditions are the epicenter or at the epicenter of Western freedoms.
I mean, you could make a case for France, I suppose, but not a strong one, as far as I'm concerned. Yet your citizens seem to have accepted this with virtually no problem. And now, on the heels of that, we have this multiplication of hate crime that’s as much a surprise to me as it is to you.
"I mean, you won't have seen all of the CCTV cameras. Apparently, they're absolutely everywhere. You can't walk anywhere in the UK without being potentially monitored. I'm not saying someone's watching you all the time, but things are being recorded and digitized.
Yeah, and it's interesting to me because I remember back in the early 2000s when the government was trying to push through its ID card scheme, and broadly speaking, the left were unanimously against it, and they didn't like this idea of living in a society where there's someone on the corner saying, 'Papers, please.' No one really wanted that, but we've become very docile and very accepting of the idea that we need to be coddled and monitored by the state.
I mean, I know there's a recent debate about vaccine passports, and people seem very blasé about this idea that we might have to have our ID embedded and encoded onto a card to get anywhere or to do anything. So I think there's something going on there, and it is connected with what you've brought up in terms of hate crime legislation. We've just become accustomed.
I mean, you mentioned specifically the problem in Scotland, and seriously, it relates very closely to what you're saying because the SNP, who are the only really party with any clout in Scotland—that's the Scottish National Party—and it's never a good idea, is it when you have one political party which doesn't really have an opposition? Actually, they have a reputation for quite nanny-statish policies. You know, they introduced a—what was it called?—the Named Person Scheme. It didn't go through in the end, but they wanted to assign every child born in Scotland with a state guardian. You know, they effectively didn't trust the parents to raise their own kids. They have other examples, you know, minimum pricing on alcohol or a ban on two-for-one pizzas because they don't trust poor people not to gain weight.
So all sorts of these sorts of policies. But in this current hate crime bill, which has just sailed through because there's no opposition, Hamza Yousaf, the justice secretary, has pushed through—he specifically included an element to this bill which says that they can criminalize you for things you say in the privacy of your own home. I mean, that to me is just—I mean, that's just a given. I would have never thought that anyone in this country would not consider that to be an incredible invasion. You can make a strong case for Scotland as the ground zero for many of the developing many of the concepts that undergird the entire Western notion of freedom, and to see that emerging in Scotland is absolutely stunningly terrifying as far as I'm concerned.
You think of Mel Gibson with a face covered in woad shouting ‘freedom’ as he's executed. You know, in Braveheart, you do think of Scotland as being associated with it, but honestly, Scotland for some reason—and I don't know what it is; it might be to do that it's effectively this one-party state—it seems to have this incredible sense. They've really bought into this idea that unless they can police the thought—sorry, the thought and speech of their citizens, then they will just run amok.
There's another element to that bill. I don't know if you know about this. There's a specific element in the bill which talks about the public performance of a play. So they've effectively said that they will criminalize public performances, so say if it can be deemed that those performances were designed to stir up hatred. That's the formulation: 'stir up hatred.' I'm not quite sure what that means necessarily, but when Hamza Yousaf was questioned about this in Parliament, he actually said, ‘Well, theoretically, a neo-Nazi or someone from the far right could get together with a group of actors and put on a play to recruit people to his cause.’ And as I said at the time, you know, I don't know any neo-Nazis, but they're not into amateur dramatics—that's not their thing.
They wouldn't get involved. And yet he's got this idea in his head that that is a feasible—I mean, it seems ridiculous, but it's not really because the ramifications are quite serious. And the way it's just gone through without any opposition really, really troubles me.
I mean, there have been modifications, I should say, in fairness. In the initial draft of the bill, they had said that you could be criminalized irrespective of intention. In other words, yes—that was terrifying, awful. I mean, if you wrote a play that then stimulated someone to join the far right, then you were still responsible, whether you intended it or not.
Now the problem is, you know, with theatrical representation or any kind of artistic representation, is sometimes you want to represent the worst aspects of humanity because that's part of drama and literature and all the rest of it. I mean, there would be no artistic freedom if that went through. So unfortunately, that element of the bill was modified.
Well, and also the attempt to reverse the idea that intent is important—that's even more catastrophic. It's always been a miracle to me that our legal system ever became psychologically sophisticated enough so that intent rather than outcome was what mattered. Because you have to be a sophisticated thinker to see that someone has done damage to someone else, but because the intent wasn't there, the severity of the action is dramatically mitigated. That's a sign of maturity and sophistication to note that, and the fact that it's built into the legal system is nothing short of remarkable, and then to remove that and to make the felt consequences the arbiter of the reality of the situation is a dreadful assault on the integrity of the law, as far as I can tell.
Moreover, it's something that everyone intuitively understands. We all understand the difference between murder and manslaughter. We all understand that intent, actually, does, like you say, escalate the severity of a crime. And it's bigger than that, isn't it? Because this idea that intention doesn't matter is actually built into so much of this, what we call social justice discourse. If you think of critical race theory, it's just a given that there are racist structures, and you can be racist without intending to be racist.
And I really do dispute that because I think in order to be racist, intention has to be at the heart of that. Otherwise, it's incoherent to me. But this is really a degraded view of humanity, I feel, where we are effectively like marionettes and that we're just being played, and that we don't have any agency anymore. And therefore, we can't be responsible for our own words— not just our actions; we can't be responsible for our own words and the ramifications. So we have to be controlled and we have to be stifled by the state, and it's very—it makes me very nervous.
So I've been thinking through the importance of free speech, I suppose, from a psychological perspective. And it seems to me that, well, we can walk through some axioms, and you can tell me what you think about them if you would. So I mean, the first thing we might posit is that it's useful to think—it’s better to think than not to think. And that might seem self-evident, but thought can be troublesome and stir up trouble, and your thoughts can be inaccurate. So it's perhaps not that unreasonable to start the questioning there.
But I think it was Alfred North Whitehead who said that thinking allows our thoughts to die instead of us. And so he was thinking about the evolution of thought in some sense from a biological perspective. So imagine a creature that's incapable of thought has to act something out, a representation of the world or an intent; it has to be embodied. And then if that fails, well, it fails in action. And so the consequence of that might be death; it might be very severe.
Whereas once you can think, you can represent the world abstractly, you can divorce the abstraction from the world, and then you can produce avatars of yourself. Sometimes in image, like in dreams, let's say, or in literature and fiction and movies, and so on—produce avatars of ourselves that are fictional, and then run them as simulations in the abstract world and observe the consequences. We do that in our stories; we do that when we dream; we do that when we imagine in images and depict a dramatic scenario playing itself out.
But then we also do that in words because we encode those images—it’s one more level of abstraction. We encode those images into words, and those words become partial dramatic avatars, and then the words can battle with one another. So thought seems to work—let's say verbal thought. You ask yourself a question; you receive an answer in some mysterious manner. There's an internal revelation of sorts; that's the spontaneous thought. You know, when you sit down to write a book, thoughts come to you, perhaps because you pose yourself a question, and no one knows how that works but we experience it.
That thoughts manifest themselves in the theater of our imagination, so that's the revelatory aspect. And then there's the critical aspect, which is, well now you've thought this, and perhaps you've written it down. Can you generate counter positions? Are there universes that you can imagine where this doesn't apply? Are there situations where it doesn't apply? Are there better ways of formulating that thought?
But I would say with regard to critical thought, and to some degree with regard to productive thought, an indeterminate proportion of that is dependent on speech. I don't think it's unreasonable to point out that thought is internalized speech and that the dialectical process that constitutes critical thinking is internalized speech. So you and I are engaging in a dialectic enterprise; you'll pose something, and I'll respond to it, and you'll respond to that, and we're in a kind of combat. There's some cooperation about it as well, and we're attempting to formulate a truth more clearly, at least in principle if we're being honest—we do that when we're speaking.
So our thought—the quality of our thought—is actually dependent on our ability to speak our minds.
"Absolutely. And I couldn't agree more because I think speech is the way in which we collaborate on our thoughts. You know, that's how it works. You refine those thought processes that you've described. I mean I'm no psychologist, but I understand this basic premise that we have these various thoughts that are continually in conflict within ourselves. Unless we're able to articulate them and to engage in others through that process—through that transactional process of speech—then those thoughts are never refined, and they remain in this kind of infancy, and this is, yes, they're as refined as we can make them as individuals, but that's also assuming that you even have the words, which you also learn in the dialectical process, right?"
"Exactly. It's not as though the truth is ever fully graspable, but we can get nearer to it through that collaborative process of speaking and articulating the thoughts. In fact, even in the act of, like you say, writing or articulating yourself, as with your self-authoring program, for instance, the act of writing things out is what clarifies the points of view for you. I've actually found that the way that I think about these issues now is largely a product of the fact that I've written so much about it and changed my mind through the act of learning how to express myself on these points.
And the consequence of not having that opportunity, I think, is something I would barely want to contemplate. And I think that, to give an example of the moment, which is that because any kind of attempt to have a discussion or debate about the perceived conflict between trans rights and gender-critical feminism—because to even attempt that discussion at the moment will have such grave social consequences and certainly in terms of career prospects. Major consequences, people will not have that discussion.
I have people I know in politics, in the media, and they say to me quite honestly, I will not talk about this; I have concerns; I have qualms; I want answers to questions, but I absolutely will not open my mouth about this. And if you don't do that, this is why no one understands the issue; this is why no one has reached any kind of consensus on this issue. All we have is a sense in which to have the 'quote-unquote' wrong opinion makes you a pariah, and therefore I'd better not have that opinion.
Well, then that's not a sincerely held conviction; that's just—if the definition of wrong is continually transforming and in an unpredictable manner, then it's best just to sidestep the issue entirely, and then that leaves it murky and ill-defined. And assuming that you believe that thought has any utility—and so when you're sitting down to write, when I'm sitting down to write, and I produce a sentence, you know it might have come from some theoretical perspective—maybe I'm approaching something from a Freudian perspective or a Marxist perspective or an Enlightenment perspective, etc.
I mean, it's a psychological trope, I suppose, that we all think the thoughts of dead philosophers, right? We think we have our own opinions, but that's rarely the case. It's not that easy to come up with something truly original and generally make incremental progress at best. And so your ability to abstractly represent the world and then to generate avatars that can be defeated without you dying is dependent on your incorporation of a multitude of opinions, and that in itself is a consequence of—I mean that works to the degree that communication is actually free and that you can get access to as much thought as you can possibly manage.
So I can't see how you can deny the centrality of free speech as a fundamental right, or the fundamental right perhaps, unless you simultaneously deny the utility of thought. But maybe if you are also inclined to remove the individual from the central position of the political discourse, then maybe you can also make the case, at least implicitly, that individual thought doesn't matter and that mostly it's just causing trouble. But I think individual thought is key.
And actually, even in the outline you've described there, there is individual agency in reaching a conclusion that has been articulated before, insofar as if you are engaged with a multitude of writers and philosophers and artists and ideas and you've come out with a perspective—well, that perspective may not be original to you, but the process that you've gone through to reach that viewpoint is individual to you. There's a power in that. There's something important about that—there's something crucial.
If you're a practicing psychotherapist, one of the things you have to learn is to not provide people with your words too much. What you want is for them to formulate the conclusion and you can guide them through the process of investigation. You talked about the self-authoring process, which is online at selfauthoring.com, that it steps people, say, through the process of writing an autobiography, of analyzing their current virtues and faults, and of making a future plan. The utility of all of that is dependent on the person who's undertaking the exercise generating their own verbal representations, right?
And that seems to cement it somehow as yours. If you've come up with the words and so it's that it's the uppermost expression of personhood—the ability to have the words that you should speak reveal themselves to you and to have the right to express them as you see fit.
"Yes, in which case, if you are merely repeating an accepted script, then to what extent can you say to can you even say to be an individual at all? This to me, I think that's part of the philosophical conundrum is that if you believe that all people do is repeat predigested scripts, especially if your view is that the fundamental human motivation is power and the entire social landscape is nothing but a competition between equally, what would you say, selfish and single-minded power drivers, then there is no individual; there's no individual in that conceptual world.
And it seems to me that that's the world that we're being pushed to inhabit and are criticized for on moral grounds for criticizing. And I'm still trying to get my hands around this. I mean, when I went to Britain, I saw the CCTV cameras and the increased security, and it isn't clear to me how that's related to the social justice issues—the so-called social justice issues that we're discussing—but they seem to me in some very difficult to comprehend way part and parcel of the same thing, the same dangerous thing."
"Well, I think it's probably connected just in terms of this distrust of humanity or this belief that people need to be shepherded. Otherwise, left to their own devices, chaos will reign. I think that's the connection. It's not directly connected, as far as the issues relating to liberty and CCTV obviously predate what we now call whatever the current social justice movement is called.
But I think there is something there. I mean, the censorship, the impulse to censor what people read, and this is something that particularly hits home to me in the arts, is based on this view that ultimately it's the people, or the populous, that is liable to corruption if they're exposed to the wrong materials. And what's very interesting to me about that—I mean, you've written a lot about the way in which literature, for instance, informs our experiences—because it is, in a sense, like when you read philosophers, you're feeling your way through other lives and other experiences that are transhistorical and cross-cultural, and they inform the way that you react in your own individual experience.
But if you start to say, as an artist, no, you can only represent, for a start, what you personally are or have experienced, and you cannot represent anything which is morally problematic, to use the phrase that they absolutely adore, then art fails to—and literature in particular fails to function in the way that it should because you can't explore those things.
This is why I often, when it comes to censorship of the arts, I often go back to what Oscar Wilde said about this. He said, ‘there's no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written; that is all.’ And that actually art and morality sometimes are not one. In other words, art shouldn't just be about promoting whatever the ethical trend is of any given time. It's much bigger; it's not art at that point at all, as far as I'm concerned.
If you can state the purpose of the art in explicit terms, especially if it's in accordance with a let's say an ideology that's shared by a multitude of people, it's not art at all; it's propaganda. It's totally banal.
I mean, this is why so many people are getting sick of Hollywood. I mean, to bring it down to a different level, people are sick of the entertainment on their TV, on their streaming services, and on Hollywood, because they have this constant feeling that they're being hectored by some moralistic person in a studio, saying, you know, our focus here is on diversity; our focus here is on the right moral message, that the message of the story is one that would be approved by a group of intersectional activists.
And you get this all the time seeping into mainstream entertainment, and people get really, really sick of it. It's not that when you see a lesbian kiss in Star Wars that offends you because you're a homophobe—most sci-fi fans have never had a problem with diversity or anything like that. What bothers them about it is this sense of someone saying to them, we think you're all evil bigots and you need to be educated, and that's why we're going to shoehorn in a lesbian kiss into the end of this film. That's why people have a problem.
I mean, you had it yourself recently with that ludicrous Marvel Comics thing where you became the Red Skull, and that to me was a perfect example of the banality of an artistic endeavor that becomes an exercise in political pedagogy, because that was quite clearly—I mean, you couldn't even say it was satirical because it cannot be satirically effective if the thing that they are comparing you to is the precise opposite of the thing you believe.
I mean, of all the sort of public figures I can think of, you have the most clear track record of opposing tyranny in all its forms, which anyone who knows anything about your work will know. You've spent years lecturing about the evils of authoritarianism, including Nazism. So the idea that you would then become this super magic Nazi is propagandistic; it's totally banal artistically, firstly. You can't—it's not satirically right.
But also, it's just—you know what it reminds me of, actually? I don't know if you remember, after the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, there was a film made in Pakistan called "International Guerrillas," where they turned Salman Rushdie into this evil villain playboy who was colluding with the Israeli military services. And at the end of the film, these flying copies of the Quran float down and shoot laser beams into his head and kill him off. And that is such a ridiculous, laughable film. You put your enemy as the main villain, and you just misrepresent him in that way. Well, that's just what they did to you. It's as banal as that, and I think people are sick of that."
"Well, the response, thankfully, seems to indicate that—no, it didn't, did it? People, it didn't do me any harm as far as I can tell. I mean, it was very shocking to me that it happened. It took me about 12 hours to regain my composure because I actually couldn't believe it to begin with. I was sure that it was a fabrication.
Especially, but then it was even more shocking when I found out who authored it. It wasn't—it was someone who had an intellectual reputation.
"And so, but he's an activist, isn't he?"
"He's an intersectional activist; his opinions definitely place him on the side of the radical left, so it's very difficult to—so there’s an attack on the essence of free speech. I mean, I remember reading Derrida. Derrida criticized our culture—Western culture has fallen logocentric, yeah? And it's really actually quite a precise word.
So the phallic part of it is masculine, obviously related to the phallus, and logos is central to Greek rationalism, but it's also the central concept of Christianity. And the logos is something like the magical power of genuine and true speech. It's something like that. And there are representations of the magical power of speech that predate Greece and Christianity. You see it in Mesopotamia. The equivalent to the savior in ancient Mesopotamian religious thinking was Marduk, and he could speak magic words. He had eyes all around his head, which meant that he paid attention to everything, but he could speak magic words.
And so that idea of the centrality of speech and its association with the very fabric of reality—that's been an idea that has strived to make itself manifest for thousands and thousands of years. I mean, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, in the biblical tradition, the word is given cosmological status as the thing that brings habitable order out of chaos, and it's identified with divinity itself.
And so the assault on free speech is an assault on a principle that's fundamental beyond, say, its centrality—its central importance—to the Enlightenment and its—you know, it's an assault on the logos itself."
"I agree. This is why I always mistrusted the post-structuralists when I was studying for English. It was the Derrida and Foucault and Lyotard that were taken as a given. And this idea that there's no—there is no truth beyond language, you know, language is all. The way in which we construct our perception of reality and our perception of truth, and actually there is no truth at the heart of it, I just found it so depressing, depressingly pessimistic.
Because it also means that you can construct any kind of reality you like, and maybe that's part of the motivation for it, is the hypothetical lack of constraint by anything that seems to imply, right? I mean, if there's no canonical reality, well, there's no responsibility, that's for sure. You could argue that there's no meaning and it's deeply pessimistic, but maybe the payoff for that is no responsibility. But there's also no constraint of any sort; there's certainly no ethical constraint.
And I mean, I keep trying to dig to see what's at the bottom of this anti-logos sentiment, and it's a very difficult thing to make it, right? Maybe it's not even as deliberate as the way that it sounds. Maybe it is just the fact that these theories, for whatever reason, became fashionable in universities about 20 years ago, and now, for whatever reason, they have escaped into the mainstream, and, you know, I mean, most of the people that push this stuff don't read Foucault, and they don't know about the people whose ideas they've imbibed and actually very much misunderstood.
You know, I mean, the whole point of the postmodernist was to trash the notion of grand narratives. And what we have now in the social justice movement is an incredible grand narrative. You know, we are on the right side of history; we are the righteous ones, and everyone else needs to be, you know, decimated. And it seems to me that this stuff—I don't think it's as conspiratorial as that. I think it's just sort of circumstances of history, one thing after another, and this is where we're at now.
But the end result that we have to deal with, which I think you've alluded to, is this idea that if there is no such thing as reality beyond language, then you are at liberty to just construct whatever a pseudoreality that you desire or is easiest for you. And we see elements of this reverberating, I think, in a lot of the discourse at the moment of things like lived experience. You know, you can present as much data as you want, but it will be disregarded if it doesn't tally with what lived experience really means, which is what I want to be true.
Well, there's also this insistence that seems part of it that—I mean, I objected to some legislation that was passed in Canada, and that's sort of what propelled me into public visibility, let's say. And to begin with, I was mostly concentrating on the violation of the principle of free speech that the legislation seemed to me to represent, because it compelled certain utterances. And I was never a fan of hate speech laws to begin with, and this was something beyond hate speech laws, because hate speech laws stop you from saying things, whereas compelled speech laws force you to say something, which is much worse, even though the first one is also ill-advised, ill-advised as far as I'm concerned.
But I've realized more recently that I was also disturbed, although in a less explicit manner, with the theory of identity that was an implicit part of the legislation. So, with gender identity, for example, and we're engaged in a discussion across our culture about gender identity. I mean, I know as a personality psychologist that there are females, biological females, who have masculine personalities, and there are biological males who have feminine personalities, that the link between personality as such and biological structure is suggestive but not absolute, and there's a lot of variability.
But the idea that identity is something that you define yourself and that you can change at will at any point seems to me to be entirely counterproductive and dangerous because it's inaccurate. So your identity isn't merely your membership in whatever group you happen to identify with at that moment; it's certainly not merely your sexuality or merely your race. In fact, your identity is barely your race, because your identity is something more like how you conduct yourself in the world.
And if you define yourself as black, let's say, that doesn't give you much of a map to encountering and approaching the world—it's not nowhere near detailed enough. And then the idea that you define it—I’ve been thinking about that a lot. You never define your identity by yourself. You can't because you're surrounded by other people, and they have to play along with you. And if they don't play along with you voluntarily, which means they appreciate the quality of your game and they understand it, then you're either going to be alienated or you have to impose your identity by force.
But that's also not a very good solution. I mean, I just spent some time interviewing one of the world's foremost authorities on aggression, and that will be released a bit, perhaps it's been released before this will be released. He's done longitudinal studies of aggression, and if the idea that our social structures are predicated on power was true, then children would start out not being aggressive, and they would become more aggressive with time, and the more aggressive children would be more successful. And none of that is true; children start out more aggressive than they are on average by the time they're adults. Aggression levels decrease with age rather than increasing, and there's no evidence whatsoever that it's a useful long-term strategy in the social world.
Identity is something you negotiate, the way you negotiate a game. It has to be that way; it's just there's something rather sinister, isn't there, about the way in which present-day identity politics is about imposition onto others rather than an assertion of who I am or whatever that might be.
I mean, I always mistrusted him, so I can see the utility of identity politics, politically speaking, in scenarios where people are marginalized. I understand why gay people collectively came together back in the '60s to fight for their rights, because there was obviously a serious problem, or the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland in the '60s and '70s, and that kind of thing, where Catholics weren't able to have the vote or to get housing.
So that sort of makes sense to me. The current identity politic, or what we might call identitarianism, a lot of it strikes me as about power. In fact, I feel like they would be an incredible subject for Foucault if he were alive today because I've noticed this correlation—and a lot of people have noticed this correlation and I never get an answer about this—but why is it whenever I'm online, whenever I'm viciously attacked or threatened, something particularly pernicious, the person doing it always has their pronouns in their bio or a rainbow gay flag in their bio?
Why is there a correlation that I've experienced again and again? I mean, it's almost inevitable at this point between the need to self-identify in terms of sexuality and gender and a kind of cruelty or viciousness or a need to attack an aggression. One of the things that disturbs me constantly about ideological representations of the world, broadly speaking, is that their fundamental danger is that they always contain a too convenient theory of evil and malevolence.
And for me, any theory that locates the fundamental problem of evil somewhere other than inside you is dangerous. Now, that isn't to say that social structures can't be corrupted and aren't corrupt—it's that's an existential problem in and of itself; it's always the case that our social institutions aren't what they should be and they're outdated and they're predicated to some degree on deceit, and people who use power can manipulate them sometimes successfully.
That problem never goes away, and it never will. But when the evil can be easily located somewhere else, then you have every moral right to allow your unexamined motivations to manifest themselves fully because you can punish the evil doers and always remain on the moral side of the fence. There's a huge attractiveness in that, I think.
I mean, this is something you've explored a lot with the idea from the Solzhenitsyn’s idea about the good and evil cutting through the heart of every human being because that, to me, really gets to the heart of a lot of what I would call a kind of infantile culture, I think.
This is a symptom of childishness. You know, whenever I was learning about literature and what constituted more sophisticated literature and what didn't—Disney films, childish films, let's take Tolkien for instance. Good people look bad; sorry, bad people look bad. They look like orcs, they're ugly, and they are villains, and then there are heroes, and they are good. There isn't complexity.
And if you have a more complex novel, like a Mervyn Peake novel, where people aren't necessarily good or bad, they're both; they struggle within themselves and with other people—that is a mark of a kind of adult novel as opposed to a childish novel, right? And that's quite an important distinction.
And I think most of the political and ideological battles that I find myself in the middle of—and I'm sure you do as well—are because people are just reducing everything to this binary of good versus evil and putting themselves on the side of good. It is a very infantile, almost like a caricature of religion. You know, it's—and I see it again and again.
We had it in this country with the Brexit vote. Effectively what happened in the vote here, and the reason why it became so toxic and families fell apart—and you wouldn't believe—I know it wasn't reported very much elsewhere, but it was like a kind of ideological civil war here, but not a very sophisticated one because it came down to this narrative that if you voted to leave the EU, you were evil, racist, stupid, and if you voted to remain, you were good and progressive and all the rest and noble and virtuous, right?
And of course, there are all sorts of good reasons to have voted either way, and this kind of caricature. And it happens again with—well, you described it as a caricature of religion, and I think that's what an ideology is. And this is one of the reasons that I've been inclined, let's say, to go to have my shot at the rational atheists, much as I'm a fan of enlightenment thinking.
I mean, I was convinced as a consequence of reading Jung, but also Dostoevsky and also Nietzsche, and primarily Solzhenitsyn, I would say as well, and then biology as well, as I studied that more deeply, that there's no escaping a religious framework. There's no way out of it, and if you eliminate it, say, as a consequence of rational criticism, what you inevitably produce is its replacement by forms of religion that are much less sophisticated.
I mean, well, it's not a religion; it's fundamentalism, really. It's, you know, if I look back to my Catholic upbringing, actually acknowledging your own capacity for sin is at the heart of Catholicism. That's why we have the confessional; that's why you sit there and tell this stranger all these things you've done wrong, because it's recognizable.
Well, that and that's far from trivial; it's unbelievably not trivial. And because it was so common, like a common part of Catholicism, it can be passed over without notice and so religious—those religious structures that we inherited, I'm going to talk about Christianity most specifically because it's the dominant form of, it's the form of religious belief that primarily undergirds our social structures—it's our operating system.
My producer came up with that term the other day, and I thought it was apt. And it does localize the drama between good and evil inside and makes you responsible for that and encourages you, let's say, to attend to the ways that you fall short of the ideal.
And when you criticize a structure like that out of existence, you don't criticize the questions that gave rise to it out of existence. And the questions might be, well, what's the nature of the good? What's the nature of evil? Those are religious questions. What's the purpose of our life? How do you orient yourself if you're trying to move up, let's say, rather than down? How should you conduct yourself, etc.? Those questions don't go away, and they can't not be answered.
And so the way that a traditional religious structure answers them is in a mysterious way. It uses ritual; it uses music; it uses art; it uses literature; it uses stories—all these things that are outside the realm of easy criticism. And then some of that's translated into comprehensible explicit dogma, and that's the part that's most susceptible to rational criticism.
But when that disappears, I've been thinking about this a lot this week because of what happened to Richard Dawkins recently. And I have my differences with Dawkins and the rest of the rational atheists because I think that they underestimated the danger of dispensing with what they were attempting to dispense with. And I see the influx of religious fervor associated with political ideas as a direct consequence of the lack of separation, let's say, between church and state psychologically. But Dawkins has fallen foul of this new religion; but his case actually really is his testimony to what we're talking about, that this is not a religion in a traditional sense.
It is an infantile religion that only sees things in binaries of good and evil, because he was effectively—he was posing a question about identity. He was saying, if it is possible for Rachel Dolezal to identify as black, why is she universally condemned and derided, but somebody can identify as the opposite sex, and they are celebrated? And all he was doing was posing the question; he wasn't even actually making a claim.
"Well, he was doing what a scientist actually does. I mean, I've been shocked frequently in my interactions with journalists because I've worked as a scientist for three decades, and I'm accustomed to the way that scientists think and speak, and when I'm sitting around with my graduate students and there's a problem or an issue, what they do, my colleagues as well, is generate a bunch of hypotheses about why that might be.
They don't necessarily believe them, but the first trick is to generate as many, what would you say, hypotheses—I said that already—that might account for it, ranging from biological through social, etc. And that is exactly what Dawkins did. He even said that's what he was doing. That puts you on the side of the devil."
"I mean, there was a viral tweet this week from a teacher saying, I will never allow my pupils to play devil's advocate; I will never allow that in the class, because some some views are oppressive and are not to be entertained."
"I mean, but that's the point; that's why the Vatican will call in a devil's advocate when someone is potentially being canonized. Well, if you can't play devil's advocate, you can't think."
"That's it—you have to have a devil's advocate in your head. If you don't have a devil's advocate in your head torturing every thought you generate, you're not engaged in critical thinking."
"Right? That's for sure; that's the scientific process—to disprove yourself. I mean, that's what surprises me about Richard Dawkins' response because I think what he didn't realize is that he was caught in this good-versus-evil binary, and he had he was the heretic now. He had been branded. He posed the question you're not meant to pose, and therefore he's now outed himself as one of the demons. He's there in pandemonium with the other demons now.
So then, of course, backtracked and apologized and said, well, I didn't want to offend anyone. And of course, in an adult rational world, that would be taken in good faith, and what—but he didn't—I don't think he fully appreciates what's going on here is that he's already marked himself as—well, here's his apology, let's say.
'Okay, I do not intend to disparage trans people; I see that my academic disgust question has been misconstrued as such, and I deplore this. It was also not my attempt to ally in any way with Republican bigots in the U.S. now exploiting this issue.'
And so, okay, it's so interesting that that's what he did because, well, it's buying into the tribalism thing, you know? Well, it's also—it's not the best response for to defend him. What he should have said, as far as I'm concerned, was something like, ‘Look people, here's something to think about that I was posing that's what scientists do. And you didn't understand that, but that's not my problem; it's your lack of sophistication.’ But he instead of saying that, he immediately removed himself from the bad people.
And that was the Republican bigots, which just seems to me to pour fuel on the fire. And then he also said that he didn't intend to disparage trans people, which isn't the issue at all.”
“Well, also there's no implication in what he asked that he had ever intended to disparage trans people. But to be fair to him, to be fair to him, I understand when you're caught in the middle of a Twitter storm, you just want it to stop. And I've heard you talk about this as well; it's actually—your response probably isn't going to be the best one; you just want it to go away.”
"Oh, well, look, I mean one of the things that's really worth pointing out here to—it's not like I don't have sympathy for Dawkins. I have sympathy for Dawkins; I sent out a tweet defending him yesterday. I mean, Dawkins is an admirable scientist in my estimation; I learned lots from reading his books.
That doesn't mean I don't have my criticisms of Dawkins, but just because you have criticisms of someone doesn't mean that they've never done anything worthwhile or that you haven't learned something from them, and that's especially true in the scientific realm.
I just don't understand why—okay, so back to the Twitter issue. So what I've seen repeatedly, and this is worth some discussion, is when I'm watching Twitter, when I'm watching these attacks on people, what I've seen the most general pattern of response to be is that it doesn't take very many people attacking you on Twitter before it's seriously psychologically disturbing.
And that is interestingly related to this whole issue of hate speech that we've been discussing because it is the case that vicious attacks have a quite pronounced psychological effect, especially if they're personal. And people generally fold and apologize instantly. If my sense has been, if the Twitter mob is 20 people, it's sort of like they’re reacting to 20 of their neighbors showing up on their doorsteps with pitchforks and torches.
And I think it's actually an admirable response in some sense because a well-socialized person actually does care what their neighbors think. And if you offend 20 of your neighbors, it's possible 20 of your tribe, it's possible that you've done something wrong you might ask yourself that.
Now on Twitter, you're connected to hundreds of thousands of people. And if you offend 20, it's not clear what that means. It might just mean that you said something that feels a lot worse than it actually is as well. It feels amplified because there's all these people who are strangers who know absolutely nothing about you. And it's particularly frustrating because more often than not, when it's happened to me, it's always been an imagined grievance.
It's not actually something I've said; it's something that they've assumed that I've said or a way that they have interpreted this. And the more you try and fight back against it or try and explain your actual position, the more they double down on their—you know, and you've had this as well; people are going after a figment of their own imagination that's impossible to fend off, you know?
And it does do psychological harm and I've never denied that. And this is something I addressed in the book because I quoted—I can't remember her name now—but the writer talking about how hate speech could be said to be violence, insofar as the psychological impact can have—it can have a physiological impact; it can make you sick; it can make you unwell. The impact of words—but of course that—well, the example I use is taxation.
I could become physically sick because I'm under stress from being overly taxed by the government. Does that mean that the government has committed an act of violence against me? It could be applied to absolutely anything, I think.
Well, an anarchist would argue yes, right?"
"Sure, exactly, but that wouldn't be me. And but that—but you could apply that to absolutely any conceivable scenario where anything that has happened to you has led to stress and physical degeneration. And so I don't think it's right to single speech out and say that, but we can say it's a one-sided argument because dangerous as speech free speech is, we don't ever have to deny that there's such a thing as hateful speech.
Yeah, obviously. So when it's pernicious and terrible, it's like, okay, so you're arguing uphill. This is again why it's such a bloody miracle that we ever had free speech to begin with. It's almost inconceivable to me that we managed to generate the baseline presumption of innocence. That's a miracle.
The fact that you can go bankrupt and start again—that's a miracle. The idea that you ever had free speech, and that that was genuinely the case—that's a miracle. And none of this is given the appropriate respect and awe that it deserves because it's so unlikely; it's hugely unlikely.
And all the more reason why we need to defend it. We need to be really, really vigilant about any cracks that appear in this, because it will go away very, very easily if we don't defend it. And it's hard, particularly when it comes to the idea of—that's why I wrote a chapter on hate speech, because—and took the other side's view seriously because just trashing the opposing argument isn't going to help.
We have to talk about it and explain, you know, why it's important. Nevertheless, we also have to argue—like you say, hateful speech exists. Let's start from that point; let's acknowledge that hateful speech exists and it can be hurtful and it can do damage. But then the alternative is a state that might, in the future, be completely unscrupulous that is going to decide for you what you can say.
And those are the things that we have to tackle, and no—but—and the other key thing is that no one knows how to define hate speech. You know, UNESCO, the European Court of Human Rights, they've all agreed there's no way to define hate speech. Every European country that has hate speech laws has different hate speech laws, different definitions, subjective abstract concepts such as hate, such as offense, such as a perception.
You know, these are on the statute books and you don't want this stuff on the statute books because it's all very well—I mean, I know the—we talked about the SNP and their hate crime bill—the defense I'm always running into is people are saying, ‘Yes, okay, technically someone could be arrested and imprisoned for saying an offensive joke; technically, yes, but no one in their right mind, no jury, no judge is going to—we've got common sense. It's okay.’
Well, that's so myopic! I mean, what, because you don't know who's going to be in charge in ten years' time?! You don't know who that judge is going to be. How can you possibly—you can be certain that someone will be in charge that doesn't approve of you and that you don't approve of—that will in fact happen! You don't want vague wording on the statute books; it's going to be exploited at some point, even if it's not today.
There's absolutely no way that you can guarantee it against future abuses of that. And I don't—it is, as you say, it's a certainty. So I'm, yeah, I think it's actually one of the most important arguments that we should make, and that we need to do—you know, free speech needs to be defended in every successive generation. It's not something that you know, you know this—you get it, and then it's there forever. No, that's not true."
"But there's something about human nature. There's something about people in power. There's something about the way that we are that it will collapse. It's an edifice that is not secure at any given time."
"And, but it's hard. It's that thing of being smeared. The risk is you're going to be smeared; you're going to be associated with the worst possible kinds of people, because of course it's only really controversial speech that ever requires protection. And people are going to say, well then you must support what these awful people are saying, and it's hard to make the case, but it's a case that nonetheless has to be made, and particularly by politicians.
I've been incredibly disappointed by the way in which politicians in this country have not made any kind of effort to—if anything, as from what I can see, there are moves even in the English Parliament to push through further hate speech laws. We should be repealing them, not pushing for them. But no one wants to have the argument; no one wants to be tainted."