Free Speech and the Satirical Activist ｜ Andrew Doyle ｜ EP 178 (aoH1g5GYhPw)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=aoH1g5GYhPw

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 Titania 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 Titania 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 a 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. You know, I think if you go back 10, 15 years, the idea that free speech, which is obviously 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 or 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. And you hear it all the time in the kind of phrases that the activists use, phrases like words are violence or this kind of language normalises hate or legitimises hate or all this kind of thing. And there’s a real genuine mistrust of the power of language to effectively corrupt the masses. And what I wanted to do, I suppose, was try and marshal a defence 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. And I think my point, my principle 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 one hundred and twenty thousand incidents of police investigated speech hate crime in Britain in how long since 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 are one hundred and twenty thousand 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, who 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 may misquote that, but there’s one missing. But anyway, there are five protected characteristics. And 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. 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 and barring service here. So it can affect your employment prospects. And is that without a trial? That recorded without a trial? Of course, there’s no trial. So you get a quasi criminal record. You get something flagged up when you’re 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 3000 people arrested a year for offensive things that they have said online. That’s that’s so 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 offence. And this was flanked by police officers who were socially distanced, 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, you know, they were acting on that basis. They’d obviously hadn’t just concocted this billboard out of nothing. They’d really considered what it should say. And 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, have been arrested routinely for causing offence. And of course, the notion of offence is incredibly subjective. In fact, 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 know. And 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 offence, which has become a subjective reality. If if and and you can understand why that might be to some degree, because how would you define hate and how would you define offence without 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 and 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? I mean, which is that’s the general criticism of critics of of hate speech, let’s say. And so why in the world aren’t we 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 sceptical about free speech are, in fact, trying to make the world a better place. 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 in this country because it’s all about perception. That word is used about five or six times within the one passage in the 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 common, the most common and 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, you know, 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. And in fact, there is a it 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. And 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 of humanity. And it seems to be. Well, it seems to be a direct derivation of the hypothesis, for example, that. All Western. Social organizations, particularly Western, are. Based on power and are best conceived of as tyrannical. And so if that’s your view, why would you not assume that most use of speech is 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. 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 it’s 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 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. And it struck me as quite horrifying, given that as far as I’m concerned, Great Britain and its legal and parliamentary traditions are at the epicentre 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 digitised. Yeah, and it’s interesting to me because I remember back in the 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 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, they have a reputation for quite nanny stateish policies. You know, they they introduced a or 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. All sorts of these sorts of policies. But in this current hate crime bill, which has just sailed through because there’s no opposition, Humza 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 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. And you can 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, 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 and it might be to do that it’s effectively this one party state. It seems to have this incredible sense. And they’ve really bought into this idea that unless they can police the thought the thought and speech of their citizens, then they will just run a run amok. It’s there’s another element to that bill. I don’t know if you know about this. There’s a specific element on 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 when Humza Youssef 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 don’t do that. 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 are quite serious. And 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 bill, in the initial draft of the bill, they had said that you could be criminalized irrespective of intention. In other words, yes, if you know, it’s 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 was, 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, you would be there would be no artistic freedom if that went through. So fortunately, that element of the bill was modified. Well, and also the attempt to reverse the idea that intent is important is that’s even that’s even more catastrophic. It 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 and so the damage is real and market and and troublesome and costly. All of that painful. 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 the felt consequences, the the arbiter of the reality of the situation is a dreadful assault on the integrity of the law as such, as far as I can tell. Well, moreover, it’s something that everyone intuitively understands. We all understand the difference between murder and manslaughter. You know, we all understand that intent actually does, like you say, escalate the the severity of a crime and and and it’s and it’s but it’s bigger than that, isn’t it? It’s because this 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 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 not just our actions. We can’t be responsible for our own words and their 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. 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. And 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? And but I would say with regard to critical thought and to some extent, 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 posit something and all respond to it and you’ll respond to that. And we’re we’re 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 then we’ll go ahead. Well, 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 how it works. You refine those thought processes that you’ve described. I mean, I’m not I’m not a 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 why they’re all there is refined as we can make them as individuals. But that’s also assuming that you even have the words, which you also learned in the dialectical process. Right. Exactly. It’s not as though the truth is ever fully graspable, but we can we can get nearer to it through that collaborative process of speaking and articulating the thoughts. And 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 change 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. So when you’re sitting down to write, when I’m sitting down to write, and I produce a sentence, 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. 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 really very, very, very 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 is 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. That seems to cement it somehow as yours if you’ve come up with the words. 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 even say to be an individual at all? Well, I think that’s part of the philosophical conundrum. If you believe that all people do is repeat pre-digested 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 selfish and single-minded power strivers, 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 CTV cameras and the increased security. And it isn’t clear to me how that’s related to the social justice issues that 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 connecting 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 the people are or the populace 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 trans historical 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… In other words, art shouldn’t just be about promoting whatever the ethical trend is of any given time. It’s much bigger than that. Well, it’s not art at that point at all. Well, it’s propaganda. 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, 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. This is why so many people are getting sick of Hollywood, 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 hected by some moralistic person in a studio saying, 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 that offends you because you’re a homophobe. Most sci-fi fans, they’ve 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, it’s not satirically right, but also it’s just… Do you know what it reminds me of? If you remember after the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, there was a film made in Pakistan called International Gorillas, 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. But that is such a ridiculous, laughable film. You put your enemy as the main villain and you just misrepresent him in that way. But 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 it didn’t do me any harm, as far as I can tell. 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. You know, it was someone who had an intellectual reputation. But he’s an activist, isn’t he? He’s an intersectional activist. His opinions definitely place him on 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, as phallogocentric. It’s really actually quite a precise word. So the phallic part of it is masculine, obviously, related to the phallus. And logos is, well, that’s the central concept of 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 the way 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 central importance to the Enlightenment. And it’s an assault on the idea of 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. These were taken as a given in this idea that there is no truth beyond language. Language is all language, 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 depressingly pessimistic because it also means that you construct any kind of reality you like. Well, maybe that’s part of the motivation for it, is the hypothetical lack of constraint by anything that that seems to imply. 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. I mean, I keep trying to dig to see what’s at the bottom of this anti-logo sentiment. And it’s a very difficult thing to get 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. 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. 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. We are on the right side of history. We are the righteous ones and everyone else needs to be decimated. 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 construct whatever pseudo reality 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 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 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 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 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’ll be released in a bit. Perhaps it’s been released before this will be released. He’s done longitudinal studies of aggression. 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. 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 it. 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 with 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 politics, or what we might call identitarians, 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 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? 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. Well, 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. 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. 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 evildoers and always remain on the moral side of the fence. There’s a huge attractiveness in that. Will Barron I think this is something you’ve explored a lot with the idea of Solzhenitsyn’s idea about the good and evil cutting through the hearts 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, 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 was convinced as a consequence of reading Jung as primarily, but also Dostoevsky and also Nietzsche primarily, and Solzhenitsyn, I would say, as well. And then biology as well, as I studied that more deeply. 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 religion. It’s a fundamentalist. 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. Well, that’s far from trivial. It’s unbelievably not trivial. Because it was so common, like a common part of Catholicism, it can be passed over without notice. And so religious structures that we inherited, I’m going to talk about Christianity most specifically because it’s the dominant 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., 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, you know, 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. You know, and I have my differences with Dawkins and the rest of the rational atheists because the danger of dispensing with what they were attempting to dispense with. And I see the influx of religious fervour 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 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 posing a question about identity. He was saying if it is possible for Rachel Dollazal 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. Yeah, 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, and 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. But 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 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. 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 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 he, 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. I don’t think he fully appreciates what’s going on here is that he’s already marked himself as the sinner. Here’s his apology, let’s say. Now, what he should have said, as far as I’m concerned, here’s what he said. 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 intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in the US now exploiting this issue. And so it’s so interesting that that’s what he did because… Well, it’s buying into the tribalism thing. You know, it’s also, it’s not the best response to defend him. What he should have said 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, 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 wanted to go away. No. Well, look, I mean, one of the things that’s really worth pointing out here, and 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. OK, so back to the Twitter issue. So what I’ve seen repeatedly, and this is worth pointing out, is that I’ve seen a lot of people, 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. Yeah. You know, 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 quite a 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 would offend 20, it’s not clear what that means. It might just mean that you said something. It 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 in so far 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 or the example I use is taxation. I could fall 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. 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 it’s speech. But we can say that it’s violence. Also, it’s a one-sided argument because dangerous as free speech is, we don’t ever have to deny that there’s such a thing as hateful speech or damaging speech or corrosive speech or untruth speech or pathological speech in every possible direction. That isn’t the issue. The issue is what’s more dangerous, to regulate it or to leave it be despite its dangers? That’s the only rational argument, the only complete argument, let’s say. That’s the question. Even if you have the most repugnant character who is advocating the most vile ideas about society and attempting to proselytize even someone who’s attempting to recruit people to his or her cause, even something as vicious as neo-Nazism or something like that, the question isn’t, do I support what that person is saying? Because obviously we don’t. The question is, do you take a few instances of people behaving in this way and use that as a reason, a justification to empower the state to make a decision about what people can say and think? That’s the bigger principle that’s at stake here. I worry that with social media and Twitter as well is that we end up buying into the illusion that there are more hateful people in the world than there actually are. Because even the people who send these hateful things probably wouldn’t behave like that in real life. There’s something about the online world. And what it does is absolutely, I mean, this is the heart of cancel culture. This is why it works. Like you said, it’s just a few tweets. That’s all it takes. I’ve seen situations where companies and corporations will backtrack on a policy just because of one or two tweets, because they fear this deluge of people. They have such disproportionate power. And often with this kind of cancel culture, it is often about something that someone hasn’t even said. The example of Dawkins is perfect because a lot of the people and some prominent people I saw were saying, look, Dawkins has now outed himself as a transphobe. If you said to them, where is the transphobic thing? You tomorrow, bucko. Well, quite. Because if someone is transphobic simply because you’ve decided that, it was the same with J.K. Rowling. It became suddenly quite normal for commentators on the mainstream media to say that she has said transphobic things. Well, where? Because I’ve read her comments and her essay on the trans issue that she posted on her blog. And it was a long essay which was very compassionate and nuanced. And at no point, it’s the opposite. She says that she supports trans rights and she would stand there against any discrimination. And I’ve been in these fights all the time. If ever you ask someone to say, can you just quote the transphobic thing that she said, they never can. An adult would say, okay, I can’t find the evidence of my preconception, so therefore I should revise my view. But they don’t. They double down on it and they use kzooistry and whatever linguistic semantic tricks they can to come back around to the conclusion they’d already decided. Same with Dawkins. I mean, not just the American Humanist Association. I saw a major blogger saying that anyone who was defending him is transphobic. And well, if that’s all it takes to be smeared in this way, if it doesn’t matter what you say, if all that matters is what people decide that you believe, then I suppose this goes back to this pseudo reality we were discussing. Well, I guess what Dawkins got in trouble for, let’s take it apart a bit, okay? Because it’s worth doing. He said, this is his original tweet, in 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as black. Some men choose to identify as women and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss. Okay, so he put forth a set of propositions. But the proposition has a point. And the point is, what is it that you can and can’t identify with? And what power do people have to enforce their decision on others? And that’s really the question he’s asking, if you strip it down. And that is actually a question that’s very threatening to, well, let’s see, who would it be threatening to? What would be threatening to anyone who insists that you can choose an identity, say, in the realm of gender, and that you should have the right to enforce your choice, despite other people’s opinions, let’s say. He’s asking why is there an inherent contradiction in the intersectional discourse? Why is it that racial identity is not malleable, and in fact has to be strictly policed? Hence why we have all these debates about cultural appropriation. Why is that so rigid? And yet, even if the lived experience, let’s go back to that, the lived experience of the person tells them otherwise. I mean, Rachel Dollazal wrote a whole book in which she outlines how she feels that she has always been black. It isn’t just, I choose to be black one day. It is something her lived experience is that, in essence, she is. So why is that to be vilified universally without question, and there’s no discussion to be had here? And yet, someone who chooses, in other words, that gender identity is something that is malleable and open to options and actually infinite options. Why? And I think there is a contradiction there. Well, maybe he’s vilified because he asked a question that’s at the heart of the problem with identity politics, period. I mean, particularly because when it comes to race, I mean, virtually all intersectionists would accept that race is socially constructed. This is something they’re always talking about. And so therefore, in a sense, there is more of a case for trans racialism. If you want to say that you can, that it is an identity that can be mixed. Well, in some sense, we already accept trans racialism as a given. And so here’s something I might as well get in trouble for this. Well, if your ancestry is 95% Caucasian and 5% non Caucasian, Asian, black, let’s say, you’re not Caucasian. Generally speaking, you can identify with the minority group. And so at some point, the question becomes, well, it’s a ridiculous question, which is why the whole notion of group identity construed in this way is so pathological. But we obviously accept some degree of trans racial identification. If your racial group is disproportionately in one category, but you identify with the other, and that’s instantly not only accepted, it’s standard practice. Right. I’m with the intersectionists on this in so far as race. We’re all the same. Ever since we’ve broken down the human genome, we know there are no differences between us. So this idea that it must be so rigidly policed, this social construct, these arbitrary ideas. And yet, I think it’s something that’s happening. So now we know exactly why Dawkins got himself in so much trouble. Well, OK. And it probably happens worse. Well, it will, it will, for sure. Magical super Nazis are always in trouble. So you are exactly. Exactly. But then with the question of the gender identity debate, but this is the debate we need to be having is actually the other thing he put his finger on there is that actually people are arguing with different definitions in their heads. For the identitarians, the idea of a woman, a woman is an identity. It isn’t a biological reality. But for most people, the classification of woman is biological reality, not identity. So in other words, and why is it that we cannot have that discussion? OK, so you believe this thing and we believe the other. And that’s why we’re at loggerheads. But let’s have the discussion. Why can that not happen? Why does it have to be if you’ve decided? Well, that’s what we’re trying to unpack is what’s the motivation at the root of this. And it seems to me, I do believe it’s something like a pronounced infantilism. I mean, one of the things I’ve been toying with is the idea that. The the gender that the demand for gender fluidity in late adolescence, let’s say, is something like the consequence of insufficient fantasy play in childhood. That that. I remember, for example, when my son was little, his. Sister and her friends used to dress him up as a fairy princess. They did this with some regularity and I kind of cast a dim eye on that, but I thought it through. And, you know, it sort of disturbed me. And then I thought it through and I thought, wait a second here. Leave the kid alone, leave the girls alone. He is playing out what it means to be female in dramatic play. And he needs to do that because otherwise he can’t understand what it means to be female. That’s how children understand. That’s how adults understand things. For God’s sake, we go to a movie and we watch someone play out of female and we identify with that because otherwise we wouldn’t be enjoying the movie and we get we get a bit of a clue about what it’s like to inhabit someone else’s skin. So there’s this necessity for play in gender roles and that has to manifest itself. And if the play has been interrupted, let’s say by electronic equipment, for example, or any of the other things that might be interrupting it. Well, maybe that desire comes back with a vengeance later. I have to be whoever I say I am. I have to be able to play with this. And well, if it’s a developmental requirement, there’s going to be a lot of insistence behind it. And it looks immature and it is because it should have happened earlier. Most people stabilize their gender identity by the time they’re three or four. But it doesn’t always happen. So there is an infantilism in this demand for fluidity of identity, this insistence that other people play the game that I insist they’re going to play. And then what about the idea that the gender critical feminists would come in and say, well, the idea of a boy dressing up in a dress, there’s nothing inherently female about that or feminine about that in any case, that all of this is a construct anyway. And why can’t we let the kids just, some kids are not gender conforming and they can just do what they want. I mean, the concern I have with the current identity obsessed ideology is that they see a boy in a dress and they will say, well, he could potentially be a woman. And by doing so, are reinforcing the most conservative views of gender to begin with. And that to me, I’m intuitively against that because I wasn’t a gender conforming. I didn’t play football with the other boys. I didn’t dress up in dresses, but I may have done if they were lying around. I find it very odd that this supposedly progressive radical movement is so dependent on the idea of very, very traditional unyielding notions of what it is to be male and what it is to be female. Yeah, but only in the case where the identity is across the sex. That, so you can be, if you’re a man who believes he’s a woman, that’s inviolable and has a biological reference point. But if you’re a woman who thinks she’s a woman, it doesn’t. It’s completely malleable. That’s an inherent contradiction again. And it’s worthy of discussion surely. And the contradiction doesn’t just go away because you won’t allow the conversation to happen. The contradiction gets played out in actuality if you don’t allow it to be dealt with in abstraction. So then the question is, how do we break through? And I mean, this is something I’ve been really, really thinking about is that it’s no longer just a matter of trying to persuade people. It’s almost trying to deradicalize people at this point. How do I explain to someone the world isn’t this fantasy world that you’ve created in your head where it’s just full of transphobes and neo-Nazis and all these and good versus evil. The world is actually much more complex and nuanced and requires discussion and thought. How do you break through someone’s fantasy so that we can have that discussion? Well, it used to be that you sent them to the university so they could study the humanities. That’s the last thing you should do now. Well, that was the answer. I mean, that was the whole point, right, to make people more sophisticated in their conceptions. In which case, is it the case that it’s over now? If people were to be educated out of those problems and now that actually the higher education itself has become so ideologically driven that to go to university means you end up more indoctrinated than when you went there. What hope is there? I sound a bit frustrated here, but I feel like I’m bashing my head against a brick wall because most of the time when I’m caught in an argument with these ideologues, they are arguing, like I say, with a monster they’ve created in their own heads. I’m not the person they think I am. I don’t have the values they think I have. And therefore, the discussion is stymied from the outset and it does make me very frustrated. That’s probably the real reason I wrote the book, actually, because I want the idea of free speech to be elevated again as a sacrosanct principle so that we can have these conversations and so that people don’t get demonized and attacked for things they don’t believe. And so that we can reach some kind of consensus on these issues that we’ve been describing, these contentious issues. Because when you have an issue that’s particularly tendentious, it requires more conversation, it requires more discussion and more understanding. And I don’t think we’re getting that at the moment. Will Barron Yeah, well, I guess I’m somewhat optimistic about that because I can see all the possibility that long form conversations of this sort bring. Will Barron Well, there’s an appetite for them, isn’t it? But is there an appetite for them from the activists and the ideologues who have seized so much control in our major educational cultural institutions? Will Barron Yes, I think so. I think so. I mean, I’ve been struck by how deep the hunger is for genuine conversation and very much heartened by it. And so that’s a counter movement. Will Barron I hope you’re right. I just don’t see any evidence of that from the people I’m talking about. I don’t see it from the people who will say to you, educate yourself. Will Barron Well, it’s another problem too, though, isn’t it? With Twitter, for example, is that it’s never the same people. And that plays with us psychologically, because of course, we are built to more or less assume that we’re interacting with a continuous community. Will Barron Yeah. Will Barron And we aren’t. We’re interacting with a discontinuous community on Twitter. And so we’re led astray in our presuppositions constantly. And I mean- Will Barron But it’s worse than that. It’s like it because it isn’t. I know it’s different people all the time, but they all have the same views on absolutely everything. It feels like you’re arguing with the Borg. It feels like just one mind speaking through many, many voices. Will Barron Yes, well, it is. Then that’s the hallmark of an ideology. It is precisely that. And then I guess it’s a matter of it’s certainly and it’s a matter of trying to understand the ideology ever more deeply to see what it’s actually focused on. Will Barron But I do read their books and I do read their articles and I do try to understand. I don’t believe the people I’m talking about return the favour. They always use the phrase educate yourself. And what they mean by that is read these select books and digest them uncritically. That’s what they mean by educate yourself. They don’t mean read widely and tackle the various views and come to a conclusion yourself. The last thing they want is critical thought. Critical thought is the enemy. Ironically, it’s the enemy of critical theory. Will Barron No, it’s a hallmark of white supremacy culture as far as I can see. Right. That’s what they say. But that’s what they claim. It’s amazing, too, to see that set of ideas propagate itself across the culture so quickly. Will Barron The Canadian federal government in its diversity, inclusivity and equity training program now uses those concepts like associating white supremacy with punctuality, for example. They use those in the training of their civil servants. It’s been accepted wholeheartedly to that degree. Will Barron I’ve seen them. I’ve seen the screenshots that often get leaked of these training sessions. Will it pointed hallmarks of white supremacy, punctuality, politeness, hard work? Perfectionism. Yeah. All these noble things. And I’m thinking, well, if I was a person of color, I would be outraged by this. This idea that this is a culture that’s alien to me. It’s so offensive. But so absurd. You can hardly mount an argument against it. Conscientiousness is a personality trait. And there’s no racial differences in conscientiousness. Will Barron Right. And it wouldn’t matter to me. If it was just a few idiots on Twitter or these extreme… It wouldn’t matter to me. But these people have disproportionate power, institutional power, political power. I mean, the Biden administration is on side with an awful lot of this kind of stuff. And the end point- So is the Trudeau government. I mean, to have this in the training documentation that’s produced by the federal government is just absolutely stunning. It’s also the document that I was referring to, I tweeted about it yesterday, is so badly written that it’s stunning. Will Barron It’s maddening with him. And how is it he’s got away with his history of blackface, for instance? How is it that there is no consistency there? Like, you know- Will Barron Lack of effective opposition is a big part of it. Will Barron It’s insane. I mean, if you look at those old videos, it looks like he spent more time in blackface than out of it. And yet he isn’t the one who’s being attacked and vilified for that. It’s okay. He’s got a free pass. It’s weird to me. Will Barron Yeah, well, the opposition in Canada, and this is a problem in general, is a real problem for our entire culture is that the woke narrative is very romantically attractive. It’s got this rebelliousness about it and this impetus to go out and march in the streets and, you know, to work on a global cause. And like traditional conservatives and even traditional liberals can’t mount a counter narrative. They don’t have the imagination. And it’s a huge problem. Will Barron The trouble is, though, the cause that they’re fighting for is largely illusory. And that, to me, is very frightening. We’ve had people in this country claim that our major universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge, are structurally, institutionally racist. All of the data tells us this is just simply not the case. Will Barron Oh, yes. Well, that’s just happening constantly in Canadian universities. The McGill physics department has now put out a diversity, inclusivity and equity statement. And that’s predicated on exactly those views. Will Barron Well, I think we need to push back against this particular hyper racialization of society, because it is re-inscribing old racial tropes, even to the extent of fear of miscegenation, this old racist idea of this fear of mixed couples. There was an article in The Guardian here recently talking about how finding mixed race people attractive is problematic. It’s almost just taking old racist ideas and just giving them a kind of hint of respectability. And of course, the end point of that is segregation. You saw, presumably, the story in California, the Brentwood School, the elite school that segregated its parents on their, what was it, a dialogue session with the teachers. And you would have white parents in one room and black parents in the other. Will Barron I think that in convocation ceremonies at universities too. Will Barron How can this be anything other than racist? It’s interesting that the group FAIR, the group Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, a lot of those people who are doing great work, I think, are starting to call this neo-racism. There needs to be a label for it. And I think maybe that’s the right way to go about it, because the word racism has almost become meaningless, because the people who use it the most, they throw it around so liberally. I never believe it when I hear someone branded that way. I assume it’s someone not being honest and not being truthful. So what do we call this? What do you call it when people are advancing the cause of racial segregation in the name of anti-racism? What do you call that? I think that’s going to be the real struggle. It’s not just breaking through the fantasy world. I don’t like this idea of having to negotiate someone else’s dreamland. There’s that thing, firstly, but also there’s the linguistic mind fields. How do you convince people? You mentioned the rebellious aspect of it. I think the other reason why it’s so appealing is because the language sounds like you’re doing good. Social justice, anti-racism. Who wouldn’t be anti-racist? Black Lives Matter, of course they do. Who would disagree with that? These phrasing can be used to push through some very pernicious ideas. When it comes to anti-racism, for instance, Ibrahim X. Kendi makes it absolutely clear in his book that he feels to be not racist is simply another form of racism. That this dichotomy doesn’t exist. That’s why I find it very hard when I’m having these arguments because if I say I have a real problem with anti-racism, people will say, oh, I see. So you’re for racism. Then you have to explain what anti-racism means when used by these academics in these very niche fields such as whiteness studies. You have to explain first what that means, why that’s dangerous for society, and how in order to genuinely oppose racism, you have to oppose the discourse of anti-racism. When you say it like that, it’s maddening, isn’t it? It’s the stuff of nightmares because there is no coherent sense. Because so much of it is rooted in language and misdirection through language and shielding what is actually meant, it becomes impossible to win the argument. Maybe that’s the point. They gave the word to us, gaslighting. When they gaslight all the time and say the culture war is a right-wing myth, or the people who are the chief practitioners of cancel culture saying that cancel culture doesn’t exist. When they say the opposite of what is the observable reality, I don’t know how to break through that, how to break through those arguments. Because not only have they constructed a pseudo reality in their own minds, they’ve constructed the language with which to sustain that pseudo reality so no one else can be drawn out of it. That to me is going to be the challenge. Let me ask you, let’s go sideways for a minute now. I suppose this is an exploration of potential solutions as well. This has been a very serious conversation, but you’re a satirist and a comedian as well. Isn’t it terrible how unfunny I am in real life? Isn’t that awful? When I’m doing stand-up, if I’ve got a script, I can be funny, but I can’t be funny spontaneously. People are very disappointed about that. I’m sorry. Well, I’m curious about your motivations. Let’s talk about Titania McGrath. Why don’t you describe her first for everyone? Titania McGrath originated as a Twitter character around April 2018. The idea of the character is that she is a very privileged, po-faced, young, white, intersectional activist who is determined to be offended by absolutely anything. She can problematize absolutely anything. You could give a pair of shoes or a hat or a holiday in Margate and she would find a way to say that it is irredeemably transphobic and white supremacist or something like that. She can do those things that the activists always do, so nothing is ever good enough for her. She’s also immensely privileged. She comes from an independently wealthy background. She lives in one of those gated communities, which is 99% white, but she has a deep mistrust of the working class. She thinks that she is virtuous, noble and good. She goes on Twitter and goes on the attack all the time, trying to isolate things, trying to save the world through intersectional theory. It’s a very recognizable type of act. Even if you know nothing about intersectionality or anything of the stuff that came out of the School of Thought of Kimberley Crenshaw or any of those academics, even if you know nothing about that, you will recognize this type of figure because this figure is ubiquitous on Twitter, on social media. They always have their pronouns in their bio. They always use the same terminology such as hegemony or discourse or problematic or phallogocentric, if you want to go back to Derrida. She knows the right jargon to use, lived experience, cultural appropriation, mansplaining, toxic masculinity, all of those kinds of things. All of these things tend to be slogans in substitute of thought. They’re just things that get thrown out there. What I wanted to do with the character is- Do you know what slogan means? What you mean is etymologically? No, I don’t. Sluegg gherim. It means battle cry of the dead. I love that. Oh, God. That doesn’t send a chill up your back. You didn’t understand it. Well, this is it. I’m going to use that. That’s great because it’s almost like a battleground of zombies who don’t have any capacity for independent thought anymore. I mean, you try get into a conversation with someone like this. I have many times. Well, sure. Very publicly. The slogans that come back at you all the time and the lack of interrogation of those slogans. What I find so frustrating and so horrifying in some sense, I think a great canonical example of that is the interview that Helen Lewis did with me for GQ. It’s now more popular online than the Channel 4 interview, which I think the GQ interview has like 32 million views or something preposterous. I never did talk to Helen Lewis. I just talked to the ideology. I don’t like that. I like to talk to the person and find out what they think. I heard you saying as well that before the interview, she was very frosty and almost as though she had decided what you were in advance. Finally. Oh, there was no almost. She definitely decided what I was before the discussion. She’s been beating the same drum more recently as well, which has driven many people to the interview because she published an article in the Atlantic Monthly and in another locale as well. When you’re faced with those, I just see it all the time so often. To give another recent example, we had the obviously since the Harry and Meghan interview with Oprah Winfrey, and there was a controversy over here because Piers Morgan, who hosts a show called Good Morning Britain, got into an argument with another colleague on the show, a man called Alex Beresford, I think. It was really interesting watching. Once they’d had the argument, they sat down, they tried to talk through the issues. Piers Morgan pointed out that some of the things that Meghan had said in the interview were factually wrong and had been proven to be factually wrong. Alex Beresford’s response was, but that’s her lived experience. Then he said, yes, but we have the evidence here that it is factually incorrect. Again, he said, but it’s her lived experience. That’s that insistence that the fantasy world, the subjective world trumps everything. It’s almost like these phrases, if you use the phrase lived experience or toxic masculinity, you’re in the club. You’ve signaled that you’re right. I know that academics have always done this, the jargon, you’re in the in-group if you’ve got the right, if you know how to deploy the right words. There’s something more sinister about this because it is always- You’re morally right in these situations. That’s the sinister thing. That’s it. It’s morally incontrovertible. You’ve made the statement and that’s it. There’s no further discussion. Yes. Well, you’re not evil. That’s what you’re saying. I’m not evil. I think the reason with Titania, I wanted her to be obsessed with this language and why I read so much of this stuff so that I knew the way that they speak is because I thought the best way to expose the inherent contradictions of that position and the thoughtlessness moreover, the thoughtlessness of that position is to embody it in a character. Right. You were playing a dramatic game, essentially, which is a form of thought. In doing so, I’ve actually come to understand the people I’m satirizing a whole lot more. Let’s face it, every now and then they’ll hit on a point that is actually right. Even when I read White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, which I think is a terrible book and is so flawed throughout, every now and then she’ll hit on something and you think for a moment, oh, there’s something in that and then she’ll undercut it by saying, well, everyone’s a racist and all the rest of it. It just goes back to being absurd. That book in and of itself is a very good example of this setting up a reality that cannot be penetrated because she will say that any kind of critical questioning of her position is evidence of the very pervasiveness of white supremacy that she’s identified. You can’t win because even engaging in a discussion is proof of your malevolence according to her theory. It’s absolutely hopeless. I thought because the movement is so written with contradiction, actually the more effective way of tackling it isn’t through dialogue. Firstly, because the people I’m talking about seem impervious to reason, they mistrust dialogue, they see debate as a form of violence. You’re never going to get through to them that way. That’s actually an explicit part of the theory. It really is. Then in creating a satirical character- It’s not that they’re anti-free speech. There’s no such thing as free speech in that theoretical framework. It’s a misapprehension all the way down to the bottom. Which is why I get so frustrated. I’ve often been in debates where I’ve tried to invite these very people to participate in the debate, to hear them out. They would say that to even appear would be to dignify the position. It’s an absolute nightmare. It also protects themselves from potential criticism, which is of course the whole point. I thought by creating a satirical character that embodies those contradictions, that thoughtlessness, it might reflect back onto them that the- I suppose how they look to normal people. Because I don’t think they appreciate- I think they’re so caught up within their own little bubbles, with their own little groups. They never hear an alternative point of view. I used to work with academics like this who were so within their little groups and they’re constantly quoting each other and supporting each other and giving the illusion that their views cannot be disputed. But what if you’re suddenly confronted with how other people perceive you? Will that give you pause for thought? When you started Titania, you didn’t announce that she was a satirical character. You started playing on Twitter. Tell me the story. What exactly what happened? Because that Twitter account became extraordinarily well known and very rapidly. I’m curious about how you did that and how you responded once it started to amass some cultural significance. I was very surprised that it took on- it became so popular so quickly. I’d started it because more to entertain myself more than anything, I was so frustrated with this and I wanted to try and expose the absurdity of it. My background is a stand-up comic. As a stand-up comic, I’m not necessarily satirical. I will stand there on a stage and ridicule the thing that I perceive to be a problem with society. With satire, what you’re doing is you’re often embodying it with a kind of ironic detachment. You’re always going after what you perceive to be the vices and follies of society. I thought that was a good way of doing it. You had to stay on a kind of edge. You had to be believable enough as the character so that you could pass, but you had to push it just past the point of rationality or believability. It’s a funny edge. I was continually getting into arguments with people and staying in character. I’ve always stayed in character, even to today. If you go to the Titania account now, my pinned thread is a thread of conversations that I’ve had with people in character who are angry about the things I’ve tweeted. These can go on for pages and pages. It’s fascinating to me because it’s close enough to the truth. She says really ridiculous things, really absurd things like, speaking or writing in English is an act of colonial violence. She’ll say that. The only way to guard against fascism is if the state are allowed to arrest people for what they say and think. Stuff like this, which is so obviously absurd, and yet it’s close enough to what people actually say, that people believe it and get annoyed about it. What I’ve always liked to do is to stay in character and have those conversations with these people. Then I posted the screenshots of the conversation. Part of the point of that is not to humiliate the people who had fallen for it. Actually, the point I’m making is I understand why they would fall for it because it’s so close to what people actually say. By doing that, my hope is, I suppose, that it exposes the folly of this stuff. Sometimes even when I’m in those arguments, I will say something that is so out of the realm of possibility, so stupid. Things have become so absurd that they don’t twig. Even today, there was a story today in the UK, a Jane Austen museum is now going to interrogate Jane Austen’s use of sugar in her tea because it has connections to plantations and white supremacy and slavery. Something like that, which is just so absurd. Or the recent controversy over Bluey, the Australian cartoon dog, because it doesn’t have enough dogs of color and gender diverse dogs in the cartoon. Now, that sounds like something I would make up as a joke, but it’s real. It’s actually happening, and people are taking it seriously. Therefore, in a sense, it’s become harder with Titania because anything that I come up with is going to be topped by real life very, very quickly. What have you learned about the people that Titania annoys? She’s a hyper politically correct avatar, but she tangles up people who are opposed to that sort of thing. That must have also shed substantial light for you on people on the other side of the… It does. What have you learned? Well, one of the things is that the people on the other side, who might even be of my opinion about these things, a lot of people are very quick to anger and verbal abuse as an instant response. A lot of the people who get angry with her really go after her looks. A friend of mine, Lisa, created the image of the woman as she’s a composite of four different women. It’s not a parody. It’s not a parody of any particular person. It’s a type of person. The people who get angry with her and the people who are genuinely angry about the social justice movement are absolutely furious about the way it is impinging on every aspect of their lives. They are sick of it. When they see someone as extreme as Titania, they really let rip. I don’t think that’s healthy. It’s not in my nature to go and abuse someone online or to get angry online. What it shows, I suppose, is that that kind of instinct to immediately go for the abusive or the vicious or the attack or the ad hominem is present across the political spectrum. It’s everywhere. Or maybe that’s just a sign of Twitter. Maybe that’s just a symptom of social media. I’ve learned a lot about how social media works. I think that’s another thing about it. For one thing, the fact that she’s been banned a number of times and I’ve learned how to avoid the bans and about the way that big tech censors and how they censor and why. Will Barron So what does she be banned for? Will Barron So the tweets that she was banned for, a couple of times she’s had a number of one-day suspensions, a number of seven-day suspensions. Once or twice it’s been inexplicable to me why she would be banned. It seems a bit like someone at Silicon Valley has twigged that their precious ideology is being mocked and they don’t like it. That’s the only explanation I can think of. However, on a couple of instances, it’s when she’s, I suppose what they would say, incited violence. Of course, she hasn’t done anything of the kind. There was one tweet where she said she was going to go to a UKIP rally. UKIP is a right-wing nationalist political party in the UK. She said, I’m going to go to this UKIP rally to punch people in the name of compassion or love or something like that, which is the idea that a lot of these activists have. Whereas words are violence and awful, actual physical violence can be defended in their view. It’s so perverse. Of course, I was making a comment about the perversity of that idea, that you think microaggressions are actual violence, but you’re perfectly content to go out and set fire to cars and beat people up if they have the wrong opinion or pepper spray people in the face if they voted for Trump. There’s an obvious contradiction there that I was trying to expose. She had a ban there. I think that might have even been the one where she was permanently banned. I had an email from Twitter saying, this is a permanent ban, you’re not getting back on. Then there was a bit of an outcry from some prominent people who follow her and Twitter changed their minds and brought her back. As a result of that, inevitably, her follower count leapt because of course, when you try and censor something, you draw attention to it. You’re always treading a fine line. My friend Lisa, who I mentioned, Lisa Graves, used to have a Twitter account called Jarvis DuPont, who is one of my favorite accounts on Twitter. He was banned, completely permanently banned. They actually went on a bit of a purge of satire accounts. There was one afternoon where Twitter purged 12 or 13 satirical accounts and deleted them. Titania came back for some reason. I think it’s because she was the bigger account, but a lot of them just got ditched. That I think shows that the powers that be at Silicon Valley, they don’t like to be mocked. No one in authority likes to be mocked. It’s the best way to undermine authority, isn’t it? It’s why every despot in history has killed the clown. Will Barron Well, that’s why we have to be so careful when any of our laws start making comedians nervous. They’re the ultimate canary in the coal mine. Even more so than artists, I think. The artists are next, probably. Will Barron Absolutely. You all know in Canada, Mike Ward was fined, I think, $42,000 by the Quebec Human Rights Commission for a joke that he told. By the way, if you… Will Barron Yes, and Montreal, of course, has one of the world’s great comedy festivals. Some of that humour, I’ve been to the comedy festival a couple of times. At midnight, you can go and hear particularly outrageous comedic comedy, which I actually think it was in one of those where he said what he got fined for. Will Barron I don’t even know the context, because he said it in French, for one thing. I didn’t fully understand. I read the transcript and I spoke to him about it. What was interesting is that he’s not some open mic act who hasn’t been on the set. He’s an established, famous, successful comedian who was fined for a joke that if you actually break it down and analyse it, there’s nothing remotely offensive about it. I don’t think comedy can exist without the potential to cause offence. Will Barron No, neither can truth. Will Barron Right, quite. Comedy is almost always truth, almost always. That comedian says something funny and it’s true in a way that people didn’t expect and they know it. Will Barron It’s also that thing of teasing the boundaries of tolerance, of almost having that cathartic effect, the way that the ancient Greeks would watch a tragedy and hear about the dismemberment and all sorts of vile things philosophically to purge themselves of that evil that lay within. In a sense, when you hear a comedian say something utterly outrageous, it can have that effect on you and you laugh in spite of yourself and then you laugh again because you are saying to yourself, why did I laugh at that? I shouldn’t have done that. You’re almost laughing at your own response as well. It has a double effect. We are really losing that. I don’t know how it is in Canada, but in the UK, a lot of this mistrust of comedy and mistrust of jokes and the idea that certain jokes normalise hatred is coming from the comedians themselves. A lot of comedians take it on themselves to police other comedians’ material and they get very angry when people broach certain subjects. I consider it very, very unhealthy and not all comedians, by the way. I’m not saying that all comedians. I’m just saying certainly the more establishment comedians, absolutely, would fall into this category. It’s really shocked me. Since I started to Tanya, in particular, a lot of comedians have been very angry that I mocked the social justice movement or that I… Which to me is absurd because I spent years, three years, co-writing the Jonathan Pye character. Because that predominantly mocked Trump and the right and conservatives and it went to those with the targets, that was okay. I never got this kind of venom about that. But as soon as I was mocking social justice ideology, which I perceived to be an extremely powerful ideology, I don’t think I’m punching down. I think I’m punching up at these people who have captured these institutions and are ruthless, by the way, absolutely ruthless and bullying. I think the social justice movement utterly legitimises bullying and I don’t like bullies and I like to stand up to bullies. To Tanya, it’s my attempt to stand up against the bullies, but what they will do is misrepresent my intentions and will say, oh no, you just want to have a go at gay people or whatever, or have a go at minority groups. I’ve been very shocked by that because that kind of response has even come from comedians. My view is that if you’ve got half a brain, you know that’s not what I’m doing. You absolutely have to know that that’s not what I’m doing and yet maybe they do know, maybe this is a willful misinterpretation as a means to attack me because I’ve mocked the ideology I’m not meant to mock. But I tell you what, whenever there are consequences for mocking someone, then I think that’s the person you ought to be mocking, right? I think that’s a sign. What effect has producing Tanya had on your life and if you could go back and decide whether you were going to do it again, would you? I mean, it must be shocking. I would think it’s shocking to have seen what happened, to be at the centre of what happened when you created that character, but I’d like to know. I didn’t expect the reaction that I got. Also, you’ve got to remember that for a long time, the character, I was anonymous because part of the effects of the character was that people thought she was real. That was so integral to it. Then I was outed by a newspaper over here the week that her first book came out. Although that was very good for the book because it generated a lot of publicity because then the story became that I was the person behind the character, and in effect, it had an innovating impact on the character because now what happens, people know it’s me behind the character. However, what I will say is even to this day, there’s always some people who fall for it. Whenever I tweet something, there’s always some people who fall for it. So there’s that. But then there’s the impact on my personal life. Well, I would do it again because I feel very passionately that the movement that I’m mocking, the ideology that I’m mocking is a dangerous one. I feel very passionately that it is divisive and damaging to society, as damaging as any ideology can be. I think it has the potential to go to those lengths. I would almost be in dereliction if I didn’t mock it. I tell you what it would be. It would be an act of self-censorship if I didn’t go after these targets. That’s, by the way, how most comedians – I mean, a lot of comedians think this stuff is ridiculous. They won’t go near it because they know that if they do, they won’t get on the BBC and they won’t get booked by certain clubs. They just leave it well alone. But I think that’s not in my nature. I don’t regret that. The fact that so many friends of mine, former friends on the company circuit, no longer talk to me, that’s something which I suppose I could say is unfortunate. On the other hand… How many times has that happened to you? How many friends do you think you’ve lost? It’s in double figures. It’s certainly in double figures. It’s not just Tanya. It’s also partly, I suppose, my politics. It’s effectively being honest about what I think and saying opinions that might not be the establishment of fashionable opinions. It gets people very angry. I mean, particular incident I can think of is when I met for a drink with two friends, very old friends of mine, a married couple. He started screaming at me in the pub. I won’t swear on your podcast, but calling me an effing Nazi and then another word, which I probably shouldn’t say at this point. I thought he was joking at first. We had this conversation and it was true. He’d completely bought into this fantasy of who I was. There was no going back from that. And I know it was fuelled by alcohol, but no apology was forthcoming. Every now and then there’ll be… I mean, it happened to be a couple of months ago where a comedian I’ve known for many, many years from the circuit suddenly sent me this abusive message online on Twitter and started attacking me and saying I was… He said I was funded by dark foreign powers or something utterly absurd. And I thought, well, okay, so this is now my reputation. Of course, that is what you’d say if you were funded by dark foreign powers. Well, this is the problem. Like I said, I’ve said it before. If I am getting all this dark money, it must be very dark because I haven’t seen any of it. That’d be great. Fine. But I’m not. And this idea that I’m this sort of… It’s that going right back to what you said at the start, that I’m defending free speech because I’m an evil person who wants to say evil things. So there’s all of that. All that I’m mocking minority groups through Titania, which is absolutely not what I’m doing. It’s the opposite. I’m mocking those very affluent and powerful people who very patronizingly assume that they know what’s best for minorities. You know, it’s the opposite of what people say it is. But these kind of experiences, on the one hand, I think it’s a bit sad, isn’t it? Because there are people now… I’ve had to go through my phone and delete lots of numbers because I know we’ll never talk again. But on the other hand, were they my friends to begin with? I’m not so sure. If they can suddenly become so bigoted, and that is the word. Well, it’s an indication of how profound the divide has started to become in our culture. I mean, 20 years ago, I never lost any friends because of my hypothetical political opinions, but things have changed. You must have lost… Your case must be much more severe than mine, because you’re so much more famous and so much more known. Have lots of friends turned on you? No, actually, not a lot. There’s some outstanding exceptions, although even in those situations, I would say there was extenuating circumstances. No, I’ve been really fortunate in that regard that my close circle of intimates, my family and my close friends have been staggeringly loyal to me. Which is wonderful. That’s wonderful. Is it maybe the case? Does that tell us that actually, what it’s really about is the fact that I was working in an industry, which is the comedy industry, is so on board with the woke ideology to such an extent that in fact, so many comedians are now really just avatars for that ideology. Maybe. Maybe. I mean, my professional colleagues certainly haven’t leapt to my defense. Well, that’s what I was going to ask, actually. Yes. No, that’s pretty much done with. I mean, I would say my name, I’ve decided this recently, because of the slurs that have been associated with me, I can’t in good conscience accept graduate students anymore. Because if they go out… You talked at the beginning about this register that’s been set up in Britain, where if you are charged, accused of a non-crime hate act, it’s recorded without a trial. I mean, I’ve been on hiring committees many, many times and especially in academia, there’s an oversupply of highly qualified people, a radical oversupply. So if there’s anything in your record at all that’s the least bit contentious, it’s like, you’re done. And so being my student, that’s not a little bit contentious. That’s really, really contentious. And so it’s now become impossible for me to serve my proper function as a scientist and as a university professor. So it’s taking a lot of adjustment on my part to get accustomed to that. And I don’t practice clinically anymore as well. And there are a variety of reasons for that. But certainly, I’ve become very, very susceptible to attacks through the College of Psychologists, the governing board, they can make the life of a practitioner brutally miserable with a single letter. And that’s very, very punishing. And it’s also perhaps not necessarily good for my potential clients to be associated with someone who’s controversial, they already have enough trouble. So although I’ve been fortunate on the family and friends front, on the professional front, things have been, you know, more dismal. Isn’t that just suggestive of the power of this movement and the effectiveness of cancel culture? In fact, the way the ease with which people can become stigmatized, you know, all it takes is a few accusations of your far right or alt right or whatever. And it’s there, you know, any prospective employer can Google that and it comes up and who’s going to take the risk? You know, the accusation is sufficient to damn you. And that’s what… Well, there that you put the finger on the absolute catastrophe of the non-crime hate index. It’s like, well, it’s a permanent stain, especially in a technological universe where nothing is ever forgotten, no matter how long the lag. And it’s worse because the government here feels no compunction to address this or to… It’s staggering to me. Well, I suppose they are… Well, because the strategy is that if you oppose hate speech laws, you’re obviously a hateful person. Why else would you oppose hate speech? You know, it’s the old thing. And a politician doesn’t want to stand up in parliament to be the one who is seen to be siding with the evil guys, the bad guys. Well, you have to make a very, very subtle argument to stand up against hate speech laws because you’re faced with the problem that there is such a thing as hate speech. 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. I mean, I know in the book, I give a kind of very, very short history of free speech from the ancient Greeks to today. And the point of that is to accentuate this point that actually the fact that we have it is astonishing and unlikely, so 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 why it’s important nevertheless. Well, for one thing, like you say, hateful speech exists. Let’s start from that point. Let’s acknowledge that 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 the other key thing is that no one knows how to define hate speech. 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 perception. And 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 we talked about the SNP and their hate crime, 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, because you don’t know who’s going to be in charge in 10 years time. You don’t know who that judge is going to be. How can you possibly just- 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 certainly happen. Will Barron 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 against the future abuses of that. And as you say, it’s a certainty. So I think it’s actually one of the most important arguments that we should make and that free speech needs to be defended in every successive generation. It’s not something that you know this, you get it and then it’s there forever. No, that’s not true. 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. 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, 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. Yeah, well, they get identified one by one and taken out. That’s what happens. Well, you get put on a list. This is it. The identitarian left, if that’s what we’re going to call them. I don’t know what to call them. That’s the problem. They’re very clever about evading even a label. But they like making their lists. They like observing and saying, you are problematic. You have sinned. And now they have an electronic trail. These are the people that absolutely love going through all of your old tweets and messages and anything they can find. And of course, the point about that is you can do that to anyone. There is no one alive who, if you had complete unfettered access to everything they’ve ever written online or in their emails or text messages, that you couldn’t construct a case to damn someone. If you wanted to. That’s actually one of the things that’s more or less saved me. Is that right? Well, by the time I made my political statement, which was a philosophical statement or even a spiritual statement, not a political statement, I already had 200 hours of lectures online. And so essentially everything I’d ever said to students was recorded. And there wasn’t it. It wasn’t possible to pull out a smoking pistol. This was very smart. And also, I mean, this is why it’s also astonishing. I find it unendingly astonishing the way you are mischaracterized because it’s all there. Everything you think is out in the open. You’ve been very, very, very clear and explicit about your point of view. And so when they try and demonize you and turn you into this thing, people can check and they’ll realize that you’re… I think what they’re doing is they’re relying on the reputational damage being a kind of barrier to people even investigating who you really are. Yeah, well, to some degree that works, but it doesn’t really work because what genuinely generally happens is that, you know, for every person who wouldn’t open a lecture because of my reputation, there’s three or four who do because they’re curious. And then it has an even more perverse effect on, in some cases, on the true believers because they’re primed to find anything I said offensive, but that doesn’t happen. Or maybe they even find it useful and then that’s not good at all. It’s like, well, he’s demonized. Isn’t that interesting? When you meet the people, when you get into conversation with people and you can see that you’re not what they thought you were and they don’t know quite what to do with that. And that to me is why, another reason why we need more speech, not less. We need to have the conversation so that people can be disabused of the fantasies that they’ve been wallowing in. But I do very much enjoy that when people expect one thing and then they actually speak to me and they don’t see that there’s no evidence of it because it doesn’t exist. Yeah, well, it’s interesting to watch that unfold in the public domain, too. I mentioned those two interviews, the Channel 4 interview that’s been viral and the interview by Helen Lewis at GQ. And those interviews basically consist of nothing but the attempt by the interlocutor to have a conversation with the person that exists in their imagination. Right. But there’s almost no relationship to me at all. That was particularly the case with Kathy Newman. And yeah, it was less so with Helen Lewis, but it was still that was still essentially the issue. It’s quite reassuring, though, isn’t it, that once it’s out there, people can see through it? You know, it’s very reassuring. What saved me, and this has given me an endless supply of hope, I would say, is that all I’ve ever had to do is just show everything. It’s like, here’s the situation. No edits. This is what happened. And every time so far, so far, you know, I haven’t been fatally damaged. Yeah. I mean, one of the things I’ve learned most, I think, since Titania kicked off and it became a known thing is I’ve learned simply never to trust the perception of someone as constructed in the media or online. It’s never the same person. Coming from the background, I did. Most of my friends were always on the left. I didn’t really know conservative people. And now I have a lot of friends who are conservatives. And they’re just not this villain that they were made out to be. And even some famous conservatives who people have said they’re absolute monsters, they’re evil, they want to eat babies, basically, or the equivalent. And you get to know them and you realize, oh my goodness, the perception is so removed from the reality, so far removed from the reality, that even I once had bought into it myself, because everyone’s telling you this. Oh yeah, the same thing. I’ve certainly had that experience repeatedly, repeatedly. I never trust it now. Whenever I hear the way people talk about people online, I never trust it. Unless I know someone personally, I’m never going to trust that again. I think that’s an important lesson for me. So what’s next for you? And also, how do you make a living? You can’t make a living as D’Itanui McGrath. I mean, you’re locked down still, so it’s got to be hard being a comedian. Right. So, I mean, well, comedy came to an end. I mean, I did a stand-up comedy tour in early 2019. And that was really the last big thing I did, because as soon as I was about to do some more live performances, the lockdown came. And it’s the same, I’m not complaining, because absolutely every live performer has the identical experience. And we’ve all, I’m not in a position to complain. And yeah, it’s a very good question. I like it because it’s also very direct. How do I make my money? Well, I write articles for various publications. There’s the Titania books have kept me going. I obviously used to work on the Jonathan Pie character. We had a couple of television shows and live tours. Those were particularly lucrative. And for a long time, I did just make my money as a stand-up comic. So literally just the money I would make from the circuit. Now, I’ve just got a job with, well, I gave up being a full-time teacher for this. And I was on a regular wage. It was a good salary. And I left it at great risk, because I don’t come from a wealthy family. I don’t have the means to support myself without this kind of stuff. So I went, well, I actually went part-time first and was on the stand-up circuit. And then I started earning enough from stand-up to get by. And so I went full-time stand-up. But I was genuinely struggling financially for a long time. And then Jonathan Pie happened, which was very successful, particularly because we had a big viral hit around the time of the Donald Trump election, which actually went viral in America as well. And that really helped broaden the character. And then we did live tours and all the rest of it. We played the London Palladium and the Hammersmith Apollo. And so it was a big thing for me. And then Titania happened, and the book did very well. And the second book did well. And- How many copies do you want? You don’t have to tell me, obviously. But how many copies? I don’t know. Actually, the truth is, I don’t know. That’s something I should ask at some point. It’s the sort of thing I don’t look into. I got a royalty check the other day, and I thought it was done. And actually, this was quite a lot of money. I thought, well, okay, that’s good. This is something that can keep me going. But I’ve also just got a new job as a broadcaster on a new channel called GB News in the UK. And that will be a pretty full-time, full-on presenter job. But what’s good about that job is, I think we have a real problem with the news media in this country is that we don’t have enough diversity of thought and the conversations that we ought to be having. This gives me an opportunity to do that. So it’s very much related to the work I’ve been doing. But in addition, I’m going to continue with my comedy work and Titania. We’re doing some live shows with Titania, played by an actress. We did that just before the lockdown. We had to postpone the tour. Now we’re going to do another one. A lot of people get very scared by making a living as a creative person because you’re always on the line. As they should be. Jesus, it’s a tough way to make a living, man. You’re taking a massive risk. And most creatives I know are very, very poor. And most have other jobs. There’s a tiny fraction that are hyper rich and everyone else starves. Virtually no one. And I consider myself extremely fortunate to be able to do this stuff I love full time. Because for most of my adult career, I couldn’t. And I had to have a full time job as well as go out in the evenings and do all of this stuff. You have to really commit. And you also have to be aware in the back of your mind of the likelihood of failure. That’s the other thing that you have to be fully aware of. And I’m by no means take it for granted. The stuff I’ve done, comedy and Titania and the book I’ve just written, none of this stuff would make me rich. It would keep me going. The new job I’ve got is going to be a more regular income, which is something I miss. I haven’t had this since I was a teacher. I miss that. I miss routine and all the rest of it. Yeah. Well, that’s another complicating factor is not only if you’re trying to exist creatively, not only is it a very high risk proposition financially, but you lack that psychological comfort that comes from routine, which, you know, people, artistic people often are hypercritical of routine, but God alive, man. Routine keeps you sane and trying to invent yourself every day. That’s not for the faint hearted. I’ve seen very few people manage that successfully across decades. Absolutely. And I think particularly in comedy, you know, because you have to work for about three or four years on the circuit without getting paid anything. In fact, you’re losing money because you’re paying for your travel expenses and then you get somewhere and you don’t get paid for it. And this is why you’ll find a lot of comedians, particularly in the UK, are from quite wealthy backgrounds or privately educated because they have rich parents who can help them out, put them up in a flat and they don’t have to work during the day and they escalate much quicker through the ranks. But if you come from my sort of background, you can’t do that. You have to have the job and then you have to, it’s like having two jobs. And so you have to really care about it. I mean, my advice is always that I do believe, although it comes with that insecurity, if it is a vocation for you, you have to do it. I mean, for me, I couldn’t have done anything, it is a genuine vocation for me. Even if I were making no money whatsoever out of comedy or writing or the rest, I would still be doing it because I would feel unfulfilled if I were not doing it. I think there’s something also quite, I mean, I take your point about the practicalities of living and the business of living, but my God, I think depriving yourself of your vocation can be so soul destroying. I think. No, it is. Well, I’ve spent a lot of time studying creativity scientifically. And the first thing that’s useful to note is that creativity is not common. I mean, everyone isn’t creative. That’s wrong. Some people are very creative. A minority of people are very creative. And I mean, it’s a continuum, but you don’t get, you know, you don’t get creativity till you get out to the point where what you’re doing is original. And that’s very difficult. So it’s a minority proposition. And then of those original people, there’s only a tiny fraction that can make a successful financial go of it because it’s just, you have to be creative. Plus you have to have some sense for marketing and sales and business, and you have to be reasonably emotionally stable and et cetera, et cetera. It’s very, very difficult. But if you are creative by temperament, well, that’s you. And to not do that is to not be you. It’s like asking an extroverted person not to be around people or an agreeable person, not to engage in intimate relationships or a conscientious person, not to be driven by duty. It’s like, that’s what you’re like. And so yeah, you’re stuck with it. It’s a double edged sword creativity. It’s vital. It’s entrancing. It’s necessary. It’s transformative, disruptive, but it’s a high risk, high risk, high return game. And the probability of failure is overwhelmingly high. Even if you’re an entrepreneur and, you know, more practically oriented in your creativity, the probability that you’ll make money from your innovation or your invention rather than other people is very, very low. But you need to find a way. I mean, it’s also very difficult if you’re a creative person to, a lot of creative people don’t think in practical terms. They don’t think in terms of money. Actually, they’re hopeless. A lot of them, I know, are hopeless. No, they also tend to be casually contemptuous of that, to regard it as practical concerns as selling out. It’s like, you should be bloody happy if you have the opportunity to sell out. So I think that the ideal is to find a way to pursue your vocation, but have one eye on the reality that, you know, you will have to earn money somewhere. That’s why I think I’m lucky insofar as with Titania, I hit on something that had commercial viability, but it was very true to what I desperately wanted to do. And I think that’s so rare. I think some of the stuff I’ve written, some of the plays I’ve written, for instance, I don’t think would have any commercial success whatsoever, but I wrote them because I needed to write them. And some of them didn’t even get on. And maybe one day they will, and that would be great. But what if you were to kind of… Well, just think what you have to accomplish though, right? You have to have your creative endeavour aligned with market demand at exactly that time. Right. It’s impossible. It’s very, very unlikely. Actually, that’s why I always say don’t attempt to anticipate the zeitgeist, because you won’t. The best thing an artist can do is do what they believe and hope, because a lot of it is luck. I mean, there’s actually a technical literature on that too. Essentially, what you do is continue to produce ideas. And it’s a Darwinian competition, essentially. They’re like life forms, these ideas. And now and then one will find a niche that it can thrive in. But the best way to maximise your chances that that niche will manifest itself is to overproduce. Because look, for I’ll give you an example, I answered a bunch of questions on Quora. So that’s a website where anybody can ask any questions and anybody can answer. I answered about 50 when I was playing with Quora. And one of them was a list of things people should know in their life. And I derived my books out of that list. It was disproportionately successful. Most of the answers I generated got virtually no views, but it got, it must be hundreds of thousands now, but even before I wrote the books, it was tens of thousands. But had I not written 50, I wouldn’t have got that one. The other 49 failures, so to speak, were the answers weren’t necessarily worse. They just didn’t hit the zeitgeist like that answer did. I think that’s a great piece of advice overproduction, because it’s the same with the Beatles. They look like an overnight success. It’s because they’ve been playing endlessly in those dingy clubs in Europe before it happened. You produce as much as you can. It takes 10 years to become an overnight success. Most of the things I’ve written have done nothing and gone nowhere and had no success whatsoever. Occasionally when it hits, that’s what sustains all the rest of it. It’s also why creativity continues to be selected, let’s say from a biological perspective. That’s why I said it was a high-risk, high-return game. Almost everything you do creatively will fail, but now and then you’re disproportionately successful. That keeps the whole game going. You didn’t have any sense, did you, that when you put the lectures on YouTube that it would explode in this way? Not in this way. I’m still shocked constantly by my life. I’m shocked out of sanity by my life. This is why I asked you about Titania. You get at the center of a whirlwind like that and there’s something very surreal about it. I keep getting hit by surreal things and it’s very hard to wrap my head around it. This Red Skull episode was just one of many equally surreal occurrences. I had no idea. I knew I was working on something important back when I was in my 20s when I wrote my first book. It was out of that that all my lectures came. I spent 15 years working on that book and I worked on it about three hours a day. I thought about it all the time. I knew there was something to it. Not necessarily because they were my ideas but because of the people who I had read and delved into while I was writing the book. I knew the ideas were significant and I could see the effect of the ideas when I was lecturing on my students. I had some sense that there was something vital, that I was involved in something vital. But had you uploaded those videos a couple of years before or a couple of years later, you probably would have missed the zeitgeist and nothing would have happened. I always think with any kind of creative endeavor or intellectual endeavor, it doesn’t matter how good you are in a sense. It has to be good and the timing has to be right. Like you say, I think persistence is it. If you just keep doing it, not only does your craft get better and if it does hit, you’re in a position to be able to handle it. RL There’s no doubt. In scientific literature, the hallmark of impact is citations. If your work is cited, it means that someone who’s written another scientific article makes reference to something you wrote. That’s all tracked and it’s used for promotions and it’s used to judge scientific merit. It’s its own science, citation tracking. A very small number of your published papers accrue most of the citations. That’s the first thing. What that means is the more papers you publish, the more likely it is that one of them will become highly cited. My highly cited papers aren’t necessarily the ones that I thought would be most impactful. The other piece of information from literature on creativity is that the best predictor of quality, so you could index quality by impact, let’s say, or by citations, is quantity. It’s not a great predictor, but it’s the best one. This is good advice for everyone out there who’s a musician or an artist. It’s like, produce, produce, produce, produce as much as you can because you do get better at it. CA You absolutely do. There’s that, but there’s also, I think, the other important thing is to actually be true to yourself in your artistic endeavors. Don’t be trying to anticipate the design guys. Don’t be trying to anticipate what other people are doing. My big concern in the current climate that we live in is that a lot of artists are choosing to self-censor because the penalty for risk taking has got too high. You can be completely… I mean, if I think about… ST Well, think about what kind of catastrophe that is because we’ve already discussed the fact that the impediments to creativity are almost insurmountable. Then you add an additional one, which is self-censorship because of social pressure. It’s like you just decimate the creative enterprise by doing that. CA You wouldn’t have anything. The Western canon would be decimated. It’s ridiculous. An example I often think of is one of my favorite playwrights is Edward Albee. When he came to write his play The Goat, which was a very controversial play because it was about a man having a sexual affair with a goat behind his wife’s back. Obviously, that doesn’t sound palatable. ST Well, at least he went behind his wife’s back. CA Exactly. At least it wasn’t an open paganistic thing. Absolutely. It’s a shocking play and it’s meant to be. It’s about where our lines of tolerance are, where they lie and why. All of his friends told him, don’t do this. You’ve got a valuable career, an incredible reputation. You’re turning 80. He was roughly 80 years old when this play came out. They said, you’re just going to scupper everything. He said that when he got that response, that’s the reason he did it. He went out there and he put the play on. It turned out to be a huge success. It won, I think, the Tony Award for Best Play. It was critically and commercially successful. It was absolutely massive. It just goes to show, I think, to an extent, I’m not saying disregard feedback from other creative people or people who have suggestions. What I’m saying is if you’re true to your muse, whatever that is, the rewards will come, actually, or they are more likely to come. ST Okay. That brings us back to free speech too, because the problem with laws that abridge free speech is they abridge creative endeavour. That’s a terrible thing because it’s the source of endless renewal. It’s the thing that fixes corrupt structures. To take aim at that is to take aim at the very process that would rescue you from the conundrum you are pretending to be obsessed by. I mean, has there been any innovation, not just in artistic terms, but in scientific terms, without the risk of offence? I mentioned the example of Galileo in the book, because he caused a great deal of offence by it. ST Oh hell, Darwin offended himself so badly that he was sick for like a decade because of the implications of what he’d thought up, which were thoroughly offensive to himself. ST Exactly. As they would be with his belief system at the time. We can see in hindsight what we would have lost if people weren’t willing to risk offending others. In fact, even what you said to Cathy Newman in that interview about you’re risking being offensive by disagreeing with me now in this way. It’s important to risk offending people, because otherwise you just end up in this hive mind. For the arts, it becomes utterly stultified. It becomes so boring when everything is predictable and everything is in line with a viewpoint. The art is the best way that we interrogate the complexities of humanity. I love what the filmmaker Lars Von Trier said in an interview once that sometimes when he’s making a film, he will take an indefensible moral position and attempt to defend it through the film, which I think is such a fascinating idea. ST Dostoevsky did that all the time in his great novels and so brilliant. That’s what made Dostoevsky so staggeringly brilliant, was he would take positions that he despised with all his soul and make the people putting those beliefs forward the strongest characters in the book. He was so brave. Will Barron It’s the best thing to do. I wrote a play once where I completely tried to embody the kind of person I despise. It was someone who enjoyed relished watching acts of violence, and he would scour the internet for clips of real life violence. Whenever someone’s tried to show me a beheading or something, I know I never want to see that kind of thing. I know I never want that in my head. I wanted to write a character who relished it, but from a non-judgmental position. I’ve never put that play on. I’ve written it. It’s done. But the act of doing it was so incredibly liberating and interesting. The idea that you keep hearing this all the time whenever a new film or play comes out or a book, is this sending the right message? David Lynch’s last series, the latest Twin Peaks series, was criticized. I read a review saying, well, there’s violence against women in this and he needs to be called out for this. Well, representing violence against women isn’t an endorsement of violence against women. Maybe that’s what the character does and maybe we’re supposed to hate him for it or whatever. Or if you read an autobiography of a complete reprobate, there can be something really interesting about that. Imagine all of this gone, all of this potential. That’s why I believe that this current social justice ideology is anti-art. I think it’s opposed to the artistic spirit, quite fundamentally opposed to it, which is why I feel we must push back against it. That’s a great place to end. No, no, that’s great. That’s great. Well, thanks a lot. Much appreciated. It was a pleasure and the time flew by, which is a good marker of an engaging exchange of free speech, let’s say. Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, Jordan. My pleasure. Good luck, eh? Thank you.