https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ST6kj9OEYf0
. I’m sorry. Brilliant minds, even mediocre minds, operate better under stimulus. A Canadian is a Canadian and you can’t take away… Barack Obama has systematically rebuilt the trust of the world in our willingness to work through the Security Council and other institutions. You must not talk to anybody in the world, any of our allies. Whatever you want to call this system, a mafia state, a feudal empire, it’s a disaster for ordinary Russians. You must not talk to anybody in the world, any of our allies. Whatever you want to call this system, a mafia state, a feudal empire, it’s a disaster for ordinary Russians. Whatever you want to call this system, a mafia state, a feudal empire, it’s a disaster for ordinary Russians. Whatever you want to call this system, a mafia state, a feudal empire, it’s a disaster for ordinary Russians. Whatever you want to call this system, a mafia state, a feudal empire, it’s a disaster for ordinary Russians. Whatever you want to call this system, a mafia state, a feudal empire, it’s a disaster for ordinary Russians. Whatever you want to call this system, a mafia state, a feudal empire, it’s a disaster for ordinary Russians. Whatever you want to call this system, a mafia state, a feudal empire, it’s a disaster for ordinary Russians. Barack Obama has systematically rebuilt the trust of the world in our willingness to work through the Security Council and other institutions. Barack Obama has systematically rebuilt the trust of the world in our willingness to work through the Security Council and other institutions. Barack Obama has systematically rebuilt the trust of the world in our willingness to work through the Security Council and other institutions. Barack Obama has systematically rebuilt the trust of the world in our willingness to work through the Security Council and other institutions. Barack Obama has systematically rebuilt the trust of the world in our willingness to work through the Security Council and other institutions. Barack Obama has systematically rebuilt the trust of the world in our willingness to work through the Security Council and other institutions. Barack Obama has systematically rebuilt the trust of the world in our willingness to work through the Security Council and other institutions. Whatever you want to call this system, a mafia state, a feudal empire, it’s a disaster for ordinary Russians. I think that’s the kind of hypocritical argument that if I were Chinese, I’d find quite annoying. I think that’s the kind of hypocritical argument that if I were Chinese, I’d find quite annoying. I think that’s the kind of hypocritical argument that if I were Chinese, I’d find quite annoying. I think that’s the kind of hypocritical argument that if I were Chinese, I’d find quite annoying. I think that’s the kind of hypocritical argument that if I were Chinese, I’d find quite annoying. I think that’s the kind of hypocritical argument that if I were Chinese, I’d find quite annoying. I think that’s the kind of hypocritical argument that if I were Chinese, I’d find quite annoying. I think that’s the kind of hypocritical argument that if I were Chinese, I’d find quite annoying. Religion forces nice people to do unkind things. Religion forces nice people to do unkind things. Religion forces nice people to do unkind things. Are men obsolete? And my conclusion to this question is no, I won’t let you be, you f… Are men obsolete? And my conclusion to this question is no, I won’t let you be, you f… Show me the word pretext. I quoted them saying that the program… Show me the word pretext. You can keep screaming that and it doesn’t change the point. We do not want sympathy, we do not want pity, we want opportunities. We do not want sympathy, we do not want pity, we want opportunities. It’s an appalling slander to me to the Muslim religion. It’s an appalling slander to me to the Muslim religion. It’s an appalling slander to me to the Muslim religion. I never said the word Muslim in my fulmination. It was a muslim free fulmination. It is that kind of restraint. It is that kind of sober-minded sensible intelligent foreign policy that Obama represents. I guess what I’m telling you is he’s sort of a closet Canadian, vote for him, for god’s sake. Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome. My name is Rudyard Griffiths. It’s my privilege to have the opportunity to moderate tonight’s debate and to act as your organizer. I want to start by welcoming the North American wide television audience tuning in right now across Canada on CPAC, Canada’s public affairs channel, C-SPAN across the continental United States and on CBC Radio Ideas. A warm hello also to our online audience watching this debate. Over 6,000 streams active at this moment on Facebook Live, Bloomberg.com and MonkDebates.com. It’s great to have you as virtual participants in tonight’s proceedings. And hello to you, the over 3,000 people who filled Roy Thompson Hall for yet another Monk Debate. Thank you for your support for more and better debate on the big issues of the day. This debate marks the start of our 10th season and we begin this season missing someone who was vital to this debate series in every aspect. It was his passion for ideas, his love for debate that inspired our creation in 2008 and it was his energy, his generosity and his drive that was so important in allowing us to really win international acclaim as one of the world’s great debating series. His philanthropy, its legacy, wow it’s incredible. Last fall we all remember that $100 million donation to cardiac health here in Toronto transforming the lives of tens of thousands of millions of Canadians to come. Bravo. We are all big fans and supporters of a terrific school for global affairs on the UFT campus represented here tonight by many students who are in its master’s program. Congratulations to you. And also a generous endowment last spring to this series that will allow us to organize many evenings like this for many more years to come. Now knowing our benefactor as we do, the last thing he’d want is for us to mark his absence with a moment of silence. That wasn’t his style. So let’s instead celebrate a great Canadian, a great life and a great legacy of the late Peter Monk. Bravo Peter. Thank you everybody. Way to go Peter. I know he would have enjoyed that and I want to just thank Melanie, Anthony, Cheney for being here tonight to be part of Peter’s continuing positive impact on public debate in Canada. Thank you guys for being here tonight. Now knowing Peter as I did, the first thing on his mind at this point in the debate would be right here, stop talking, get this debate underway, get our debaters out here, come on, get the show on the road. So we’re going to do that right now because we have a terrific debate lined up for you this evening. So let’s introduce first our pro team arguing for tonight’s motion. Be it resolved, what you call political correctness, I call progress. Please welcome to the stage, he’s an award winning writer, scholar, broadcaster on NPR and sports networks across America, Michael Eric Dyson. Michael, come on up. Michael’s debating partner is also award winning author, she’s a columnist at the New York Times and someone who is going to bring a very distinct and powerful perspective tonight, Michelle Goldberg. Michelle, come on out. So one great team of debaters deserves another and arguing against our resolution, be it what you call political correctness, I call progress, is the Emmy award winning actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet and tonight’s debater, Stephen Fry. Thank you, Stephen. Stephen’s teammate is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, a YouTube sensation and the author of the big new international best seller, 12 Rules for Life, ladies and gentlemen, Toronto’s Jordan Peterson. Okay, we’re going to get our debate underway momentarily, but first a quick checklist to go through. We’ve got a hashtag tonight, hash at monk debate. Those of you in the hall and those of you watching online, please weigh in, let’s get your opinions going. Also for those of you watching online right now, we have a running poll, www.monkdebates.com forward slash vote, reflect, input, react to this debate as it unfolds over the next hour and a half. My favorite part, aspect of this show that was Peter’s brilliance and creation, we have our countdown clock. What this does is it keeps our debaters on their toes and our debate on time. So when you see these clocks on the screen go down to zero, I wanted you to join me in a warm round of applause and we’ll have a debate that ends when it’s supposed to end. Now let’s see, we had our resolution tonight. On the way in, we had this audience of roughly 3,000 people here in downtown Toronto vote on, be it resolved, what you call political correctness, I call progress. Let’s see the agree, disagree on that number. 36% agree, 64% disagree. So a room in play. Now we asked you how many of you were open to changing your vote over the course of debate? Are you fixed agree, disagree or could you potentially be convinced by one or other of these two teams to move your vote over the next hour and a half? Let’s see those numbers now. Wow. Okay, a pretty open-minded crowd. This debate is very much in play and as per the agreed upon order of speakers, I’m going to call on Michelle Goldberg first. Michelle, would you like a sip of water? You can have a sip of water before you start. Call on Michelle Goldberg first for her six minutes of opening remarks. Michelle. Okay, well thank you for having me. As read your notes, I initially balked a little bit at the resolution that we’re debating because there are a lot of things that fall under the rubric of political correctness that I don’t call progress. I don’t like no platforming or Twitter or trigger warnings. Like a lot of middle-aged liberals, there are many aspects of student social justice culture that I find off-putting, although I’m not sure that that particular generation gap is anything new on the record about the toxicity of social media call-out culture. And I think it’s good to debate people whose ideas I don’t like, which is why I’m here. So if there are social justice warriors in the audience, I feel like I should apologize to you because you’re probably going to feel like I’m not adequately defending your ideas. But the reason I’m on this side of the stage is that political correctness isn’t just a term for left-wing excesses on college campuses or people being terrible on Twitter, especially as deployed by Mr. Peterson, I think it can be a way to delegitimize any attempt for women and racial and sexual minorities to overcome discrimination or even to argue that such discrimination is real. In the New York Times today, Mr. Peterson says, quote, the people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence. That sounds particularly insane to me because I’m an American and our president is Donald Trump. But it’s an assumption that I think underlies a worldview in which any challenges to the current hierarchy are written off as political correctness. I also think we should be clear that this isn’t really a debate about free speech. Mr. Peterson once referred to what he called, quote, the evil trinity of equity, diversity, and inclusivity and said those three words. If you hear people mouth those three words, equity, diversity, and inclusivity, you know who you’re dealing with and you should step away from that because it is not acceptable. He argues that the movie Frozen is politically correct propaganda. At one point he floated the idea of creating a database of university course content so students could avoid postmodern critical theory. In the criticism of political correctness, I sometimes hear an urge or an attempt to purge our thought of certain analytical categories that mirrors, I think, the worst caricatures of the social justice left that want to get rid of anything that smacks of colonialism or patriarchy or white supremacy. I also don’t really think we’re debating the value of the Enlightenment, at least not in the way that somebody like Mr. Fry, who I think is a champion of Enlightenment values, frames it. The efforts to expand rights and privileges once granted just to landowning white heterosexual men is the Enlightenment or is very much in keeping with the Enlightenment. To quote a dead white man, John Stuart Mill, the despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement. I think that some of our opponents, by contrast, frame challenges to the despotism of custom as politically correct attacks on a transcendent natural order. To quote Mr. Peterson again, each gender, each sex has its own unfairness to deal with. But to think of it as a consequence of the social structure, it’s like, come on, really, what about nature itself? But there is an exception to this because he does believe in social interventions to remedy some kinds of unfairness, which is why in the New York Times he calls for, quote, forced monogamy to remedy the woes of men who don’t get their equal distribution of sex. When it comes to the political correctness debate, we’ve been exactly here before. Alan Bloom, the author of The Closing of the American Mind, compared the tyranny of feminism in academia to the Khmer Rouge, and he was writing at a time when women accounted for 10% of all college tenured faculty. It’s worth looking back at what was considered annoyingly, outrageously politically correct in the 1980s, the last time we had this debate, you know, having to call, or not being able to call indigenous people, quote, Indians, or having to use hyphenated terms, at least in the United States, of terms like African Americans, you know, adding women or people of color to the Western civ curriculum, not making gay jokes or using retard as an epithet. And I kind of get it, right? New concepts, new words sort of stick in your throat. The way we’re used to talking and thinking seem natural and normal, you know, by definition. And then the new terms, new concepts that have social utility stick, and those that don’t fall away. So if you go back to the 1970s, Ms., you know, Ms. as an alternative to Mr. and Mrs. stuck around, and women with a Y didn’t. And I think that someday, or I hope that someday we’ll look back and marvel at the idea that gender neutral pronouns ever seemed like an existential threat to anyone. But I also don’t think it’s clear that, you know, that might not happen because if you look around the world right now, there are plenty of places that have indeed dialed back cosmopolitanism and reinstated patriarchy in the name of staving off chaos. And they seem like terrible places to live. You know, I come to you from the United States, which is currently undergoing a monumental attempt to roll back social progress in the name of overcoming political correctness. And as someone who lives there, I assure you, it feels nothing like progress. Thank you. Great start to the debate, Michelle. Thank you. I’m now going to ask Jordan Peterson to speak for the con team. Hello. So we should first decide what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about my views of political correctness, despite what you might have inferred from the last speaker’s comments. This is how it looks to me. We essentially need something approximating a low resolution grand narrative to unite us. And we need a narrative to unite us because otherwise we don’t have peace. What’s playing out in the universities and in broader society right now is a debate between two fundamental low resolution narratives, neither of which can be completely accurate because they can’t encompass all the details. Obviously, human beings have an individual element and a collective element, a group element, let’s say. The question is, what story should be paramount? And this is how it looks to me. In the West, we have reasonably functional, reasonably free, remarkably productive, stable hierarchies that are open to consideration of the dispossessed that hierarchies generally create. Our societies are freer and functioning more effectively than any societies anywhere else in the world and that and then any societies ever have. And as far as I’m concerned, and I think there’s a lot of people out there who are concerned about this, and I think there’s good reason to assume this, it’s because the fundamental low resolution grand narrative that we’ve oriented ourselves around in the West is one of the sovereignty of the individual. And it’s predicated on the idea that all things considered, the best way for me to interact with someone else is individual to individual and to react to that person as if they’re both part of the process, because that’s the right way of thinking about it, the psychological process by which things we don’t understand can yet be explored and by things that aren’t properly organized in our society can be yet set right. The reason we’re valuable as individuals, both with regards to our rights and responsibilities, is because that’s our essential purpose and that’s our nobility and that’s our function. What’s happening as far as I’m concerned in the universities in particular and spreading very rapidly out into the broader world, including the corporate world, much to what should be its chagrin, is a collectivist narrative. And of course there’s some utility in a collectivist narrative, because we’re all part of groups in different ways, but the collectivist narrative that I regard as politically correct is a strange pastiche of postmodernism and neo-Marxism. And its fundamental claim is that, no, you’re not essentially an individual, you’re essentially a member of a group. And that group might be your ethnicity and it might be your sex and it might be your race, it might be any of the endless numbers of other potential groups that you belong to, because you belong to many of them, and that you should be essentially categorized along with those who are like you on that dimension in that group. That’s proposition number one. Proposition number two is that the proper way to view the world is as a battleground between groups of different power. So you define the groups first and then you assume that you view the individual from the group context, you view the battle between groups from the group context, and you view history itself as a consequence of nothing but the power maneuvers between different groups. That eliminates any consideration of the individual at a very fundamental level. And also any idea, for example, of free speech, because if you’re collectivist at heart in this manner, there is no such thing as free speech. It isn’t that it’s debated by those on the radical left and let’s say the rest of us, so to speak, it’s that in that formulation there’s no such thing as free speech, because for an individualist free speech is how you make sense of the world and reorganize society in a proper manner. But for the radical left type collectivist that’s associated with this viewpoint of political correctness, when you speak all you’re doing is playing a power game on behalf of your group and there’s nothing else that you can do because that’s all there is. And not only is that all there is in terms of who you are as an individual now and how society should be viewed, it’s also the fundamental narrative of history. For example, it’s widely assumed in our universities now that the best way to conceptualize Western civilization is as an oppressive male-dominated patriarchy and that the best way to construe relationships between men and women across the centuries is one of oppression of women by men. It’s like, well, look, no hierarchy is without its tyranny. That’s an axiomatic truth. People have recognized that literally for thousands of years. And hierarchies do tend towards tyranny and they tend towards the usurpation by people with power. But that only happens when they become corrupt. We have mechanisms in our society to stop hierarchies from becoming intolerably corrupt and they actually work pretty well. And so I would also point this out. Don’t be thinking that this is a debate about whether empathy is useful or not or that the people on the con side of the argument are not empathetic. I know perfectly well, as I’m sure Mr. Fry does, that hierarchies tend to produce situations where people stack up at the bottom and that the dispossessed in hierarchies need a political voice, which is the proper voice of the left, by the way, the necessary voice of the left. But that is not the same as proclaiming that the right level of analysis for our grand unifying narrative is that all of us are fundamentally to be identified by the groups that we belong to and to construe the entire world as the battleground between different forms of tyranny in consequence of that group affiliation. And to the degree that we play out that narrative, that won’t be progress, believe me, and we certainly haven’t seen that progress in the universities. We’ve seen situations like what happened at Wilfrid Laurier University instead. We won’t see progress. What we’ll return to is exactly the same kind of tribalism that characterized the left. Thank you. Thank you, Jordan. Michael Eric Dyson, your six minutes starts now. Thank you very kindly. Wonderful opportunity to be here in Canada. Thank you so much. I’m going to stand here at the podium. I’m a preacher. And I will ask for an offering at the end of my presentation. This is the swimsuit competition of the intellectual beauty pageant. So let me show you the curves of my thoughts. Oh, my God, was that a politically incorrect statement I just made? How did we get to the point where the hijacking of the discourse on political correctness has become a kind of manikin distinction between us and them? The abortive fantasy just presented is remarkable for both its clarity and yet the muddiness of the context from which it has emerged. What’s interesting to me is that when we look at the radical left, I’m saying, where they at? I want to join them. They ain’t running nothing. I’m from a country where a man stands up every day to tweet the moral mendacity of his viciousness into a nation he has turned into his psychic commode. Y’all got Justin, we got Donald. So what’s interesting then is that political correctness has transmogrified into a caricature of the left. The left came up with the term political correctness. Shall I remind you? We were tired of our excuses and our excesses and our exaggerations. We were willing to be self-critical in a way that I fear my confrères, my compatriots, are not. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Smile. Take yourself not seriously at all, but what you do with deadly seriousness. Now it is transmogrified into an attempt to characterize the radical left. The radical left is a metaphor, it’s a symbol, it’s an articulation. They don’t exist, their numbers are too small. I’m on college campuses, I don’t see much of them coming. When I hear about identity politics, it amazes me. The collectivist identity politics? Last time I checked, white folk invented race. That was an invention from a dominant culture that wanted groups at their behest. The invention of race was driven by the demand of a dominant culture to subordinate others. Patriot, right? Patriarchy. Patriarchy was the demand of men to have their exclusive vision presented. The beauty of feminism is it’s not going to resolve differences between men and women. It just says men don’t automatically get the last word. Of course in my crib they never did. And so identity politics has been generated as a bettenoir of the right, and yet the right doesn’t understand the degree to which identity has been foisted upon black people and brown people and people of color from the very beginning on women and trans people. You think that I want to be part of a group that is constantly abhorred by people at Starbucks? I’m minding my own black business. Walking down the street, I have group identity thrust upon me. They don’t say, ah, ha ha, there goes a negro. Highly intelligent, articulate verbose. Capable of rhetorical fury at the drop of a hat. We should not interrogate him as to the bona fides of his legal status. No, they treat me as part of a group. And the problem is that our friends don’t want to acknowledge is that the hegemony, the dominance of that group has been so vicious that it has denied us the opportunity to exist as individuals. Individualism is the characteristic moment in modernity. Mr. Peterson is right. The development of the individual, however, is predicated upon notions of intelligence. Immanuel Kant and David Hume and others philosophically Descartes comes along introducing knowledge into the phrase saying that knowledge is based upon a kind of reference to the golden intelligence, the reflective glass that one possesses, and yet it got rooted in the very ground of our existence. So knowledge has fleshly basis. And what I’m saying to you, the knowledge that I bring as a person of color makes a difference in my body because I know what people think of me and I know how they respond to me. And that ain’t no theory. Am I mad at trigger warnings? The only trigger warning I want is from a cop. Are you about to shoot me? Not funny. In America, where young black people die repeatedly, unarmed, without provocation. And so for me, identity politics is something very serious. And what’s interesting about safe spaces, I hear about the university, I teach there. Look, if you’re in a safe space in your body, you don’t need a safe space. Some of that is overblown. Some of it is ridiculous. I understand. I believe that the classroom is a robust place for serious learning. I believe in the interrogation of knowledge based upon our understanding mutually of the edifying proposition of enlightenment. At the same time, some people ain’t as equal as others. So we have to understand the conditions under which they have emerged and in which they have been benighted and attacked by their own culture. And I ain’t seen nobody be a bigger snowflake than white men who complain. Mommy, mommy, they won’t let us play and have everything we used to have under the old regime where we were right, racist and supremacist and dominated and patriarchs and hated gays and lesbians and transsexuals that, yeah, you gotta share. This ain’t your world. This is everybody’s world. And let me end by saying this. You remember that story from David Foster Wallace? Fish are going down, two fish are going and an older fish comes in the opposite direction. He said, hello, boys, how’s the water? They swim on, they turn to each other. What the hell is water? Because when you’re in it, you don’t know it. When you’re dominant, you don’t know it. Nothing, Kaiser Sozi said, is more interesting that the devil did than to make people believe he didn’t exist. That’s what white supremacy is. Thank you, Michael. Stephen, you’re up, but we’re going to put six minutes on the clock and please start. God, yes, I’ll try and be as quick as possible because if I miss that plane to London, I won’t half hear the end of it from the bridegroom’s mother. Now, in agreeing to participate in this debate and stand on this side of the argument, I’m fully aware that many people who choose incorrectly, in my view, to see this issue in terms of left and right, devalued and exploded terms as I think they are, will believe that I am betraying myself and such causes and values that I have espoused over the years. I’ve been given a huge grief already simply because I’m standing here next to Professor Peterson, which is the very reason that I am standing here in the first place. I’m standing next to someone with whom I have, you know, differences, shall we say, in terms of politics and all kinds of other things, precisely because I think all this has got to stop. This rage, resentment, hostility, intolerance, above all this with us or against us, certainty. A grand canyon has opened up in our world. The fissure, the crack grows wider every day. Neither on each side can hear a word that the other shrieks and nor do they want to. While these armies and propagandists in the culture wars clash down below in the enormous space between the two sides, the people of the world try to get on with their lives alternately baffled, bored and betrayed by the horrible noises and explosions that echo all around. I think it’s time for this toxic binary zero-sum madness to stop before we destroy ourselves. I’d better nail my colors to the mast before I get any further in this. It’s only polite to give you a sense of where I come from. All my adult life I have been what you might call a lefty, a soft lefty, a liberal of the most hand-wringing milk-sop, milk-toast variety. Not a burning man, the barricade socialist, not even really a progressive worth the name. I’ve been on marches, but I’ve never quite dared wave placards or banners. Am I a loathed member of that band, an SJW, a social justice warrior? I don’t think highly of social injustice, I have to say, but I character myself mostly as a social justice warrior. My intellectual heroes growing up were Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, liberal thinkers, people like that, writers like E.M. Forster. I believed, and I think I still do believe, in the sanctity of human relations, of the primacy of the heart and friendship and love and common interest. These are more personal interior beliefs than they are political exterior convictions, more a humanistic version of a religious impulse, I suppose. I trust in humanity, I believe in humanity, I think I do, despite all that has happened in the 40 years of my adulthood. I am soft and I can easily be swept away by harder hearts and harder intellects. I’m sometimes surprised to be described as an activist, but over time I have energetically involved myself with what you might call causes. I grew up knowing that I was gay, well in fact from the very first I knew I was gay. I remember when I was born looking up and saying, that’s the last time I’m going out one of those. I’m Jewish, I’m Jewish, so I have a natural obviously horror of racism. Naturally I want racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, bullying, bigotry, intolerance of all humankind to end. That’s surely a given amongst all of us. The question is how such a golden aim is to be achieved. My ultimate objection to political correctness is not that it combines so much of what I have spent a lifetime loathing and opposing, preachiness with great respect, piety, self-righteousness, heresy, hunting, denunciation, shaming, assertion without evidence, accusation, inquisition, censoring. That’s not why I’m incurring the wrath of my fellow liberals by standing on this side of the house. My real objection is that I don’t think political correctness works. I want to achieve, I want to get to the golden hill, but I don’t think that’s the way to get there. I believe one of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right than to be effective. And political correctness is always obsessed with how right it is without thinking of how effective it might be. I wouldn’t class myself as a classical libertarian, but I do relish transgression, and I deeply and instinctively distrust conformity and orthodoxy. Progress is not achieved by preachers and guardians of morality, but to paraphrase Yevgeny Zemlyatin, by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics. I may be wrong. I hope to learn this evening. I really do think I may be wrong, but I am prepared to entertain the possibility that political correctness will bring us more tolerance. And a better world. But I’m not sure. And I would like this quotation from my hero Bertrand Russell to hover over the evening. One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision. Let doubt prevail. So, great set of opening statements to set the scene. We’re now going to go into a round of rebuttals to allow each of our presenters three minutes to reflect on what they’ve heard and to make some additional points. We’re going to do that in the same order that we had the opening statements. So, Michelle, you’re up first. We’ll put three minutes on the clock for you. So, first, I would say that I think that the attempt to draw a dichotomy between individual rights and group rights is a little bit misleading. Traditionally, there have been large groups of people who have not been able to exercise their individual rights. And I think that a lot of the claims that are being made on behalf of what we politically correct types call marginalized groups are claims that people who have identities that have not traditionally been at the center of our culture or been at the top of our hierarchies have as much right to exercise their individual talents and realize their individual ambitions. Right. When we say that we want more women in power or more people of color’s voices in the canon or in the curriculum or directing movies, all of these things are not because, at least on my part, I’m interested in some sort of very crude equity, but because there are a lot of people who have not traditionally been able to realize themselves as individuals. That’s what the women’s movement was. That’s what the civil rights movement was. That’s what the gay rights movement was. That’s in some ways what the trans rights movement was. I mean, far from a collectivist movement, this is kind of liberalism, classical liberalism pushed to its extreme. Right. These are people saying, I have the right to define my identity against the one that was collectively assigned to me. Finally, I would say, you know, a lot of the things that Stephen Fry said, you know, and particularly his temperament, were probably in agreement. But this inquisition, this censoriousness, on the one hand, I’m sort of, I see where he’s coming from, but I think it’s a little bit virtual. Right. I mean, who’s really censoring you? I understand what it feels like to feel censored. I understand what it feels like to be on the wrong side of a Twitter mob or get a lot of nasty comments. But, and that’s a bad feeling, you know, and it’s a counterproductive tactic, but that’s not censorship. You know, and again, it’s a little, it’s especially strange coming from a country where, you know, the president of the United States is trying to levy additional postal rates on the owner of the Washington Post, you know, in revenge for its reporting. And people who have kneeled to protest police brutality at football games have seen their careers explode. You know, or people who have, you know, women who have challenged Mr. Peterson have been hounded by threats and trolls and misogynists invective. So thank you. Jordan, we’re going to have three minutes up on the screen there. Please respond to what you’ve heard. Well, I guess I would like to set out a challenge in somewhat the same format as Mr. Fry did to people on the moderate left. I mean, I’ve studied totalitarianism for a very long time, both on the left and on the right in various forms. And I think we’ve done a pretty decent job of determining when right wing beliefs become dangerous. I think that they become dangerous when they and the people who stand on the right evoke notions of racial superiority or superiority or ethnic superiority, something like that. It’s fairly easy to draw a box around them and place them to one side and necessary. And I think we’ve done a pretty good job of that. What I failed to see happening on the left, and this is with regards to the sensible left because such a thing exists, is for the same thing to happen with regards to the radical leftists. Okay, so here’s an open question. If it’s not diversity, inclusivity and equity as a triumvirate that mark out the two excessive left and with equity defined, by the way, not as equality of opportunity, which is an absolutely laudable goal, but as equality of outcome, which is how it’s defined, then exactly how do we demarcate the two extreme left? What do we do? We say, well, there’s no such thing as the two extreme left. Well, that’s certainly something that characterized much of intellectual thinking for the 20th century as our high order intellectuals, especially in places like France, did everything they could to bend over backwards to ignore absolutely everything that was happening in the catastrophic left world in the Soviet Union and in Maoist China. And so it’s perfectly okay for someone to criticize my attempts to identify something like a boundary. We could say diversity, inclusivity and equity, especially equity, which is in fact equality of outcome, which is an absolutely abhorrent notion. If you know anything about history, you know that. And I’m perfectly willing to hear some reasonable alternatives. But what I hear continually from people on the left, first of all, as my opponents did to construe every argument that is possibly able to be construed on the axis of group identification and to fail to different to fail to help the rest of us differentiate the reasonable left, which stands for the oppressed, necessarily from the pathological left that’s capable of being a reasonable left. And what I see happening in the university campuses in particular, where the left is absolutely predominate, and that’s certainly not my imagination. That’s that’s well documented by perfectly reasonable people like Jonathan Haidt is an absolute failure to make precisely that distinction. And I see the same thing echoed tonight. Thank you. Michael, give us your rebuttal. Let me step out here in Peterson land. I feel free to arm myself with a little bit of a I feel free already. I don’t know what mythological collective. Mr. Peterson refers to I’m part of the left. They’re cantankerous. When they have a firing squad is usually in a semi circle. Part of the skepticism of rationality was predicated upon the Enlightenment project, which says we’re no longer going to be subordinate to skepticism to superstition. We’re going to think and we’re going to think well. Thomas Jefferson was one of the great arbiters of rationality, but he was also a man who was a slave owner. How do you reconcile that? That’s the complication I’m speaking about. That’s not either or. That’s not a collective identity. Thomas Jefferson believed in a collective identity that is during the day. At night, he got some Luther Vandross songs, went out to the slave quarter and engaged in sexual relations and had many children with Sally Hemings. His loins trumped his logic. And when he talks about postmodernism, I don’t know who he’s talking about. I teach postmodernism. It’s kind of fun. Jacques Derrida, just to say his name is beautiful. Michel Foucault. Michel Foucault talked about the insurrection of subjugated knowledges, people who had been marginalized now begin to speak. The subaltern, as Gayatri Spivak talks about it in Postcolonial Theory. The reason these people grew up and grew into existence and had a voice is because they were denied. As Miss Goldberg said, our group identity was foisted upon us. We were not seen as individuals. Babe Ruth, when he broke the home run record, he didn’t bat against all best ballplayers. He batted against the best white ballplayers. When it’s been rigged in your favor from the very beginning, it’s hard for you to understand how much you’ve been rigged. You’re born on third base, think you hit a triple. At the Toronto Blue Jays game. And here we are deriving our sense of identity from the very culture that we ignore. Look at the indigenous names and the First Nation names. Toronto, Saskatchewan, Winnipeg, Tim Hortons. But I’ll tell you, there’s an envy of the kind of freedom and liberty that people of color and other minorities bring because we bring the depth of knowledge in our body. There’s a kind of jealousy of that. And I think that’s a good point. I think that as the greatest living Canadian philosopher Aubrey Drake Graham says, jealousy is just love and hate at the same time. And so for me, I think it’s necessary. I agree with Mr. Frye. We shouldn’t be nasty and combative. And yet I don’t see nastiness and combativeness from people. I see them making a desire to have their individual identities respected. When I get shot down for no other reason than I’m black, when I get categorized for no other reason than my color, I am living in a culture that refuses to see me as a great individual. Well, I’m going to go here. It’s interesting to hear that there really doesn’t seem to be a problem. But yet I think we all instinctively know that there is some kind of problem. There isn’t censorship. Of course not in the way that there is in Russia. I’ve been to Russia. I faced off with a deeply homophobic and unpleasant man. And there’s political correctness in Russia. It’s just political correctness on the right. And that’s what I grew up with, political correctness, which meant that you couldn’t say certain things on television. You couldn’t say fuck, for example, on television because it was incorrect to do so. And as always, the same reason was that someone would appear and say, I’m not shocked. Oh, of course, no, I’m not shocked. I’m not offended. I’m offended on behalf of others, young, impressionable, plastic minds, the vulnerable. And that’s not good enough. It’s so often people are saying, you see, I don’t mind being called a faggot or a kike or a mad person because I’ve got mental health issues. I don’t mind people insulting me. And people say, well, that’s all right for you, Stephen, because you’re strong. I don’t feel particularly strong. And I don’t know that I like being called a faggot and a kite particularly. But I don’t believe that the advances in my culture that have allowed me to marry, as I have now been for three years to someone of my gender, I don’t believe they are a result of political correctness. And maybe political correctness is actually just some sort of live trout that the harder we squeeze it, the further it goes away. And you will be saying, I’m not talking about political correctness. You’re talking about social justice, with which I agree, with whether you want to call it identity politics or the history of your people, the history of my people. My people were slaves as well. Both the British were slaves of Romans and the Jews were slaves of the Egyptians. All human beings have been slaves at some point. And we all, in that sense, share that knowledge of how important it is to speak up. But Russell Means, who was a friend of mine, who was the end who founded the American Indian Movement, he said, oh, for God’s sake, call me an Indian or a Lakota Sioux or Russell. I don’t care what you call me. It’s how we’re treated that matters. And so I’m really addressing a more popular idea. Also, actually, in Barrow, Alaska, an Inupiat said, call me an Eskimo. It’s obviously easier for you because you keep mispronouncing Inupia. You know, words do matter. I’ll just end with a quick story. Gay rights came about in England because we slowly and persistently knocked on the door of people in power. We didn’t shout. We didn’t scream. People like Ian McKellen eventually got to see the prime minister. And when the Queen signed in the royal assent, as she has to, for the bill allowing equality of marriage, she said, Lord, you know, I couldn’t imagine this in 1953. Really is extraordinary, isn’t it? Just wonderful. And handed it over. Now, that’s a nice story, and I hope it’s true. But it’s nothing to do with political correctness. It’s to do with human decency. It’s that simple. So some some great rebuttals there. Strong opening statements. Let’s move now into the the moderated cross examination portion of this debate and get both sides engaging on some of the key issues here. And I think what we’ve heard here is a bit of a tension. Let’s draw it out a bit more between the rights of groups to feel included, to have, in your words, Michelle, the opportunity for individuality and a belief on the other side that there’s something at threat here when these groups are overly privileged through affirmative action or other outcome oriented processes. So, Michael, to start with you, why why isn’t there just harm that’s done to groups by privileging their group identity, whether it be a group identity of race or gender, and not immediately treating them as individuals in the way that Jordan and Stephen would like to see you see them first? Well, a couple of things. First of all, there was no arbitrary and random distinction that people of color and other minority groups made when I talked about the invention of race, the invention of gender, the invention of group think that was not done by those groups that have been so named as Ms. Goldberg said. So first of all, you’ve got to acknowledge the historical evolution of that reality and the concept of group identity did not begin with them. It began with a group that didn’t have to announce its identity. When you are in control, you don’t have to announce who you are so that many white brothers and sisters don’t see themselves as one among many other ethnicities or groups. What they see themselves as. I’m just American. I’m Canadian. Can’t you be like us? Can’t you transcend those narrow group identifications? And yet those group identifications have been imprinted upon them by the very people who now because their their group power has been challenged. Let’s make no mistake about it. There’s a challenge. I agree with Mr. Fry in a kind of Netherland of how sweet it would be to have a kingly and queenly metaphor about how it got resolved. That ain’t the real deal, homie. And in the real world and in the real world, there’s stuff at stake. What’s at stake? Our bodies. What’s at stake? Our people’s lives. What’s at stake? People are still being lynched, killed. What’s at stake? People because of their sexuality and their racial identity are still being harmed. So I’m suggesting to you it’s not that we are against being treated as individuals. That’s what we’re crying for. Please don’t see me as a member of a group that you think is a thug, a nigger, a nihilist, a pathological person. See me as an individual who embodies the realities of what I’m about. And by saying this, what Michelle said is extremely important. The people who have individual rights did not have to fight for them in the same manner that people of color and others have had to. When Mr. Fry talked about enslavement, he named them. Read Orlando Patterson’s comparative history of race and slavery over 28 civilizations. The Greeks did not have the same kind of slavery that Americans did. It was chattel slavery. In Greece, you could buy back your freedom. You could teach the children of the people who enslaved you, and because of your display of prodigious intellect, you could secure your freedom. That was not the case. You were punished and killed for literacy in America. So my point simply is this, is that I am all for the celebration of broader identities. And I think that often those who are minorities and others are not celebrated for the degree that we are. I’ll end by saying this. In America, we have the Confederate flag. I don’t know if y’all are familiar with that. We have a Confederate flag. We have white guys, mostly, in the South, but others as well, flying those Confederate flags that are printed. We have Confederate flags that are part of the South that refused to see its legitimate conquest at the hands of the North. There has been a politics of resentment. You talk about politics of identity. Wearing that flag, not the American flag. They are not American. They are celebrating a secession, a move away from America. And a man named Colin Kaepernick, who is a football player, saying, I want to bring beauty to that flag, has been denied opportunity. And I think that’s why we really set the terms of debate in order before we proceed. Thank you, Ben. Good point. Jordan, let’s have you jump in on this idea of what you see as the pernicious danger of group think when it comes to ethnicity, when it comes to gender. Why do you think that’s one of the primal sins in your view of political correctness? Well, I think it’s one of the primal sins of identity politics players on the left and the right, just to be clear about that. Personally, since this has got personal at times, I’m no fan of the identitarian right. I think that anybody who plays a game, a conceptual game where group identity comes first and foremost risks an exacerbation of tribalism. It doesn’t matter whether it’s on the left or the right. With regards to the idea of group rights, well, there’s a fundamental and this is something we’ve fallen into terribly in Canada, not least because we had to contend with the threat of Quebec separatism. But the idea of group rights is extraordinarily problematic because the obverse of the coin of individual rights is individual responsibilities. And you can hold an individual responsible and an individual can be responsible. And so that’s partly why individuals have rights. But groups, how do you hold a group responsible? I mean, the whole idea is not it’s not a good idea to hold a group responsible. First of all, it flies in the face of the idea of the sort of justice systems that we’ve laid out in the West that are essentially predicated first on the assumption of individual innocence, but also on the possibility of individual guilt, not group guilt. We saw what happened in the 20th century many, many times when the idea of group guilt was it was it was enabled to get a foothold, let’s say in the polity and in the justice system was absolutely catastrophic. And so, OK, fine group rights. Well, what are you going to how are you going to contend with the alternative to that? The opposite of that, that where’s the group responsibility? And how are you going to keep? How are you going to hold your groups responsible? Well, we don’t have to talk about that because we’re too concerned with rectifying hypothetical rectifying historical injustices, hypothetical and otherwise. And that’s certainly not to say that there weren’t any shortage of absolutely catastrophic historical injustices. That’s not the point. The point is how you view the situation at the most fundamental level and group rights are an absolute catastrophe in my opinion. But let’s Michelle, come in on that point. This is something you’ve written about. The idea that, you know, in identity politics, the identity of the group is is absolutely a valid part of the discourse and individuals could and should be seen and participate in groups as they enter into the civic space. I’m not sure that we necessarily have to analogize from individual the opposite of individual rights is individual responsibility. I’m not sure that that analogy necessarily holds for the groups. I mean, in in the United States, one of the things that I think is complicated about this discussion is that we’re talking about three very different cultural contexts, three different histories, three different kind of legal regimes. But in the United States, a great, a huge part of our politics has been groups struggling for rights for their individual members. Right. I mean, so women in the United States seeking the right to reproductive control of their body. You know, African Americans in the United States seeking redress from police brutality or discrimination or simply the kind of tendency in America of white people to call the police whenever they see an African American in a place where they don’t think that they’re supposed to be. And you simply I don’t see how you can contend with any of those social problems if you see society as just an ocean of atomized individuals. And I just again, I I don’t I don’t think there’s anything pernicious about people banding together on the basis of their common identity to seek redress for discrimination and exclusion. I mean, I think that that is everything that’s best about our democracy. And that is the definition of progress. And so, again, I just I keep stumbling with the idea that this is somehow tyrannical or that way lies Stalinism. You know, a lot of times people who are opposed to political correctness talk about the concept of category creep. Or is it? No, no. Yeah. Category creep, which is a concept that was originated by I believe an Australian academic. And it’s basically the kind of a failure to draw distinctions right so that you kind of can’t see the difference between, say, a KKK grand wizard and a conservative like say Ben Shapiro. Or, you know, that you kind of see everybody to your right as, you know, fascist, sexist, totalitarian, intolerable. And I think that that is a real thing that happens in part because, you know, undergraduates often think in broad and slightly overwrought categories. I know I did when I was when I was a kid. Yeah, maybe still do. But but I hear a lot of category creep in again the argument against political correctness or against seeking group redress. The idea that kind of that way lies dehumanization or, you know, that you’re kind of one minute you’re asking. Steven come in on this part of your opening remarks. You’re a category creep, Steven. It’s a nice I’m still very lost about why we aren’t talking about political correctness. We’re talking about politics and that’s fine. And I share, you know, I share exactly what you think about it. I’m not an enemy of identity politics per se. I obviously see where it goes wrong and where it’s annoying. Let’s be empirical about this. How well is it working for you in America at the moment? Not well at all. Really isn’t. You can ask me in a moment. The reason the reason that Trump and Brexit in Britain and all kinds of nativists all over Europe is succeeding is not the triumph of the right. It’s the catastrophic failure of the left. It’s our fault. We absolutely. My point is not that I’ve turned to the right or anything like that, or that I’m nice and fluffy and want everybody to be decent. I’m saying fuck political correctness. Resist. Fight. If you have a point of view, fight it in the proper manner using democracy. It should be not channels of education, not language. You know, it’s so silly. But there’s a chess rule, you know, in chess, the best move to play in chess is not the best chess move. It’s the move your opponent least wants you to play. At the moment you’re being recruiting sergeants for the right by annoying and upsetting and instead of fighting either fighting or persuading. But political correctness is a middle course that simply doesn’t work. Well, first of all, please, you said be empirical. Now, empirical, as far as I know, the word means that which can be verified or falsified through the census. Exactly. So if we look at it in an objective way, the reality is that people don’t have equal access to the means to articulate the very moment you’re talking about. I’m talking about the empirical results of this political attitude. I understand that. But my point is simply this. I’m suggesting to you that people use the weapons at hand. Now, it was Abraham Joshua Heschel, the rabbi, who said everybody’s not guilty, but everybody’s responsible. Right. That’s a distinction there. Everybody clearly is not guilty. But what’s interesting, look at the flip side. If you have benefited from 300 years of holding people in servitude, thinking that you did it all on your own, why can’t these people work harder? Let me see. For 300 years, you ain’t had no job. So the reality is for 300 years, you hold people in the bands, you hold them in subordination, you refuse to give them rights. Then all of a sudden you free them and say you’re now individuals not having the skills. Who’s this to you? Take your reflection. Not having the skills. I’m talking about America, first of all. I’m talking about the American society, first of all. I’m talking about the Northern Hemisphere. I’m talking about every society where enslavement has existed. But I’m speaking specifically of the repudiation of individual rights among people of color in America who were denied the opportunity to be individuals. So I see I obviously and ideally, and I think Michelle Goldberg does too, agree with the emphasis on individuals. What we’re saying to you is that we have not been permitted to be individuals. We have not been permitted to exercise our individual autonomy and authority. And the refusal to do so, to recognize me as an individual means when you roll up on me and I’m a 12-year-old boy in a park and you shoot first in ways you do to black kids that you don’t do to white kids, you are not treating that person as an individual. If we’re living in a society where women are subject to aberrant forms of horrid, patriarchal, sexist, and misogynist behavior, you are not acknowledging the centrality of the individuality of women. You are treating them according to a group dynamic. And if we get beyond the ability of people on the right to understand the degree to which they have operated from the basis of benefit from group identity, without having said our end by saying that we are not. The great American philosopher, Beyonce knows, said that it has been said that racism is so American that if you challenge racism, you look like you’re challenging America. We are challenging inequality. We are challenging the refusal to see me as an individual. When we overcome that, have at it, we’re all on equal play. So let’s assume for a moment that I’ve benefited from my white privilege. Okay. So let’s assume that. That’s fine. Yeah, well, that’s what you would say. So let’s say, here, let’s get precise about this, okay? Was that very individual of you? Let’s get precise about this. Okay. To what degree is my white privilege? And I don’t mean sort of. I mean, do you mean 5%? Do you mean 15%? Do you mean 25%? Do you mean 75%? And what do you propose I do about it? How about a tax? How about a tax that’s like specialized for me so that I can account for my damn privilege? You’re talking great shit right now. So that I can stop hearing about it. Now, let’s get precise about one other thing, okay? We’ll get precise about one other thing. Precise? Yeah, precise. Yes. And so if we can agree, and we haven’t, that the left can go too far, which it clearly can’t, then how would my worthy opponents precisely define my white privilege? And I’m going to ask you this question. If I can’t go too far, which it clearly can’t, then how would my worthy opponents precisely define when the left that they stand for has gone too far? You didn’t like equity, equality of outcome. I think that’s a great marker. But if you have a better suggestion and won’t sidestep the question, so let’s figure out how I can dispense with my white privilege so that you can tell me when the left has gone too far, since they clearly can. And that’s what this debate is about, about political correctness. It’s about the left going too far. And I think it’s gone too far in many ways. And I’d like to figure out exactly how and when so the reasonable left could make its ascendance again and we could quit all this nonsense. Okay, Michelle. Do you mind if I answer, Stephen, I will answer you, but I just want to answer Stephen if I first, because you talked about, you know, this is how we got Trump and this is the failure of the left. And so I, you know, I’m a journalist. I went to a ton of Trump rallies during the campaign in different parts of the country. And you’re right. Everywhere I went, I heard complaints about political correctness, you know, far more than I heard complaints about, say, NAFTA. But when you asked people what they meant by political correctness, you know, they called a woman they worked with girl and she got mad at them. And, you know, they could, you know, you couldn’t in public wonder aloud whether the president of the United States was really a Muslim. You know, they didn’t like that they couldn’t make gay jokes anymore. And so on the one hand, you’re right. And I’ve written about this. I think that when you try to, you know, that when people have these prejudices and you try to suppress them, it can create a kind of dangerous counter reaction. But I also think that, you know, what they were reacting to, again, to go back to the title of this debate, what they called political correctness, you know, the fact that they had to have this urbane black president who they felt talked down to that, which is really what they meant. I don’t see a way around that because that is, like I said, that’s progress. So to go to the question of when the left goes too far, I mean, to me, it’s pretty easy. Violence and censorship, right? I’m against violence and I’m against censorship. I’m against it. But I also looking around the world right now, when the idea that there is this, I understand again, there is like a problem of kind of left wing annoyance, right? There’s a lot of things that kind of people, random people on the Internet in particular, are able to swarm individuals and turn kind of stray remarks into social media campaigns. And this is often, you know, conflated with political correctness and it’s a bad phenomenon. I wish there was a way to put an end to it. I don’t think there is no way to put an end to it simply by having kind of reasonable liberals or reasonable socialists denounce it because it’s just a kind of awful phenomenon of modern life. And if you want to have a debate about whether social media is terrible for democracy, I will be on the gay side. But right now, where I really disagree, well, a couple of places I really disagree. But the idea that the radical left poses a greater threat than the radical right, when you see actual fascism ascendant all over the world, strikes me as something that you can literally only believe if you spend your life on college campuses. So, Mike, I want to come to you on those great Michelle. I want to come to Jordan’s point about how does he, in a sense, get an equal voice in this debate back if it is implied that his participation brings with it this baggage of white privilege that doesn’t allow him to see clearly the issues that are before us. But that is to be complicit in the very problem itself, terminologically. You’re beginning at a point that’s already productive and controversial. You’re saying how can he get his equality back? What are you talking about? Jordan Peterson, trending number one on Twitter? Jordan Peterson, international bestseller? I want him to tweet something out about me in my book. Jordan Peterson, right? This is what I’m saying to you. Why the rage, bruh? You’re doing well, but you’re a mean, mad white man. And you’re going to get us right. And I have never seen so much wine and snowflaking. There’s enough wine in here to start a vineyard. And what I’m saying to you empirically and precisely, when you ask the question about white privilege, the fact that you ask it in the way you did, dismissive, pseudoscientific, non-empirical, and without justification, A, the truth is that white privilege doesn’t act according to quantifiable segments. It’s about the degree to which we are willing as a society to grapple with the ideals of freedom, justice, and equality upon which it’s based. Number two, what’s interesting to me, you’re talking about not having a collective identity. What do you call a nation? Are you Canadian? Are you Canadian by yourself? Are you an individual? Are you part of a group? When America formed its union, it did so in opposition to another group. So the reality is that those who are part of group identities and politics deny the legitimacy and validity of those groups and the fact that they have been created thusly and then have resentment against others. All I’m asking for is the opportunity. The quotation you talk about, the difference between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity, that’s a state and retried argument, heck, neat phrase, derived from the halcyon days of the debate over affirmative action. Are you looking for outcomes that can be determined equally or are you looking for opportunity? If you free a person after a whole long time of oppression and say now you are free to survive, if you have no skills, if you have no quantifiable means of existence, what you have done is liberated them into oppression. And all I’m suggesting to you, Lyndon Baines Johnson, one of our great presidents said, if you start a man in a race 100 years behind, it is awfully difficult to catch up. So I don’t think Jordan Peterson is suffering from anything except an exaggerated sense of entitlement and resentment and his own privilege is invisible to him and it’s manifest with lethal intensity and ferocity right here on stage. Jordan, I’m going to have to let you respond to that a few minutes. Well, what I derived from that series of rebuttals, let’s say, is twofold. The first is that saying that the radical left goes too far when they engage in violence is not a sufficient response by any stretch of the imagination because there are sets of ideas in radical leftist thinking that led to the catastrophes of the 20th century and that was at the level of idea, not at the level of violent action. It’s a very straightforward thing to say you’re against violence. It’s like being against poverty. It’s like, you know, generically speaking, decent people are against poverty and violence. It doesn’t address the issue in the least. And with regards to my privilege or lack thereof, I mean, I’m not making the case that I haven’t had advantages in my life and disadvantages in my life like most people. You don’t know anything about my background or where I came from, and it doesn’t matter to you because fundamentally I’m a mean white man. That’s a hell of a thing to say in a debate. Let me just say… Very brief because I want to move on to men and women. Good topic next. The mean man white comment was not predicated upon my historical excavation of your past. It’s based upon the evident vitriol with which you speak and the denial of a sense of equanimity among combatants in an argument. So I’m saying again, you’re a mean, mad white man and the viciousness is evident. Okay. Okay. Okay. Let’s reset. Change the decks here. Let’s talk about another big factor of the so-called politically correct movement right now, which is the Me Too movement and the extent to which we’ve seen this resurgence, this awakening around what have been a horrible series of systemic abuses and injustices towards women. Some people though, Michelle, would say that we’re in a cultural panic now, that the pendulum has swung too far and that there is a dangerous overreaction going on where people’s rights, reputations, due process has been thrown to the wind. How do you respond to that? Well, first of all, people started saying that within like two weeks of the first Harvey Weinstein story is breaking, right? The minute Harvey Weinstein and people actually men started actually losing their jobs over this, right? Which was something quite new that men with histories of really serious predatory behavior were suddenly losing their jobs. Everybody had known about it for a long time and there had been a sort of implicit impunity and suddenly that was taken away and it created this cultural earthquake. And as soon as it did, it created a lot of anxiety. Like what if this goes too far? You know, I mean, the Me Too movement was only a couple of months old when my newspaper started running columns from people saying, why can’t I criticize Me Too, which they were doing in my newspaper? So on the one hand, yes, of course, is due process important? Obviously, I think that when you look at who has actually lost their jobs, who’s actually lost their livelihoods, I mean, look around. It’s people. It’s not people in general on a, you know, McCarthyist rumor. It’s people who took their dicks out at work. It’s people who, you know, they’re it’s people who there was, you know, tens of millions of dollars of settlements and they lost their job for four months and now they’re staging comebacks. You know, Bill Riley is about to get a TV show on a new network. So the idea that again, this idea that kind of like men everywhere feel like they can’t talk anymore and everybody’s walking on eggshells and I don’t know. Maybe that’s true in in your offices. It’s it’s not true where where I live, you know, and the Me Too movement has been particularly active in media. You know, there was this this thing. I don’t know how many of you guys read about the shitty media. A woman wrote about she started this sort of open source document where women could list men in media that everybody knew about, but nobody had ever done anything about. And it very quickly went public and there was something sort of disturbing in it, right? You don’t like these anonymous accusations floating around. Most feminists I know, including myself, were kind of freaked out by it and thought it was unfair to have people’s reputations held up like this. But if you look at what happened to the men on the list, nothing, you know, they still have their jobs. I know men on that list. I work with men on that list. The people who actually people have only by and large, as far as I can think, in media, the people who have lost their jobs and lost their careers. It’s been for extremely serious misbehavior documented by multiple women who had cooperating witnesses. And so, again, I understand this anxiety that relations between men and women are changing. Of course, that causes a lot of cultural anxiety, but I don’t know that it’s rooted in anything real. I get his view on this. Are we in a cultural panic is the response. Michelle says commensurate with the moment. I’m very confused by this. Of course, I, you know, I recognize the bestiality of Weinstein and the monstrosity of his behavior. And it was shocking to me. I actually worked for him script, doctrine, as it’s called. I never had the bathroom towel. But for pretty obvious reasons. But it’s, you know, grotesque. And I can’t imagine how violent must be for such a powerful man. And he was. I used to play a game at the Cannes Film Festival where in his years of power, we’re walking from one hotel at the end there all the way up to the Palais de Festival. You would get 10 points every time you heard the word Harvey. And usually a 10-minute walk, you’d have 300 points because it was, yeah, Harvey’s got the script. Harvey’s got it. Yeah, I’ve got a meeting with Harvey at the Majestic in the afternoon. He was immensely powerful. And I think that’s obvious that someone in that position, abusing and threatening and hindering the livelihood of women is grotesque in the extreme. But I have to tell you, there is genuine feeling amongst many people I know that we can’t speak our minds. We can’t actually speak to the true nuance, the true depth of sexual romantic feeling between men and women. It’s not a subject I’m absolutely expert on, but it counts between men and men as well. Though I know when it’s men and men, you might say, well, that’s different because women have had a different experience in history. And I don’t want to enter that particular field. But I would say that there is real fear in my business, which is where this all started, show business, acting and so on. Yeah, people are rather afraid to speak about a piece of publicity that’s come out or a statement that’s been made. You just go, yeah, absolutely, and wait for the people to leave the room before you can speak honestly with your friends. And that’s I’ve never experienced that in my entire 60 years on this planet. This this feeling that and I’m not characterizing feminists as East German, but it’s like that the stars you’re listening. You better be careful that listening and that’s a genuine feeling. I’m saying that my hand of my heart. I’m not saying it to make a point other than the fact that it’s true and it’s worrying. But the sexual misadventures and horror experience is worrying, too. So the two worries and they’re not solved. Let’s bring Jordan in on this because you’ve written and commented about a lot. Thank you. Well, I think I’m going to point out two things again. The first is that my question about when the when the left goes too far still hasn’t been answered. And then the second thing I’m going to point out is that, you know, it’s conceivable that I am a mean man. You know, I mean, maybe I’m meaner than some people and not as mean as others. I think that’s probably more the case. But I would say the fact that race got dragged into that particular comment is a better exemplar of what the hell I think is wrong with the politically correct left and anything else that could have possibly happened. Imagine the heart, the anxiety, the insult that you might genuinely feel according to what I felt was an appropriate comment of description. At the moment of its expression. the insult that you might genuinely feel according to what I felt was an appropriate comment of description at the moment of its expression. But imagine now those hurt feelings and… You’re not hurt. What the… What the… Okay. I’m appalled. You feel great. You feel great about it. That’s really different. I’m not a victim. I’m not hurt. I’m appalled. You’re not hurt, okay. So what’s interesting is that whatever non-traditional feelings of empathy you endure at this particular point, the point is imagine then the horrors that so many other others have had to put up with for so long when they are refused to acknowledge their humanity. Now, I take your point seriously. So your group of friends justifies your racist insult to me. Let me finish, sir. You’re not my inquisitioner, okay. What I’m saying to you is that when you said you were upset that I added the element of race there, right? When I said mean, mad, white man. Well, what’s interesting is that you may have felt that you were being ascribed a group identity to which you do not subscribe. You may have felt that you were being unfairly judged according to your particular race. You may have felt that your individual identity was being besmirched by my rather careless characterization of you. All of which qualifies for a legitimate response to me, but also the point we’ve been trying to make about the refusal to see our individual existence as women, as people of color, as First Nation people and the like. My point simply has been the reason I talked about race and that particular characterization because there’s a particular way in which I have come to a city. I don’t know if there are a lot of black people out here. Not sure, but I constantly come to places and spaces that are not my natural habitat other than intellectual engagement and the love and the fury of rhetorical engagement, yes. But I often go into hostile spaces where people will not vote in favor from my particular viewpoint because I’m interested as an individual of breaking down barriers so that people can understand just how complicated it is. So what I’m saying to you is that I would invite you in terms of the surrender of your privilege to give you a specific response, come with me to a black Baptist church. Come with me to a historically black college. Come to me to an indigenous or First Nations community where we’re able to engage in some of the lovely conversation but also to listen and hear. And when I added race to that, I was talking about the historically evinced inability to acknowledge others’ pains equally to the one that they are presently enduring. So as a human being, I love you with my brother but I stand by my comments. Well, I’ve seen the sorts of things that you’re talking about. I happen to be an honorary member of an indigenous family so don’t tell me about what I should go see with regards to oppression. You don’t know anything about me. You asked me a question, I gave you a response. Yeah, you gave me a generic response, a generic race-based response. Jordan Peterson, I would like for you to come with me, Michael Eric Dyson to a Black Baptist church. You’ve been to one of those? I would be happy to do that by the way. All right, I’m gonna hook you up. I’m gonna hook you up. Okay, good. Let me make sure that happens. One more quick round and then we’re gonna go to closing statements and Stephen Furrow, I wanna get your response to why a generation from now, looking back on this debate, we’re not gonna see this quote, so-called politically correct movement in the same way, let’s say, that we now understand the positive contributions of the civil rights movement. That that was a movement that advanced a series of ideas about human dignity to people who previously didn’t have that dignity. We’re now having another debate, another social debate about different groups and communities that we’re trying to convey a sense of new dignity to them. Why won’t this be, in a sense, looked back upon as something positive a generation from now? I think people will look back on this debate and wonder why political correctness wasn’t discussed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, I said it was, I said it was slippery. I mean, it’s interesting to hear talk about race and about gender and about equality and it’s something that I’ve thought about a lot and I can learn a great deal about, but that’s not why I came to this debate. I was interested in, what I’ve always been interested in the suppression of language and thought, the closing down, the rationalist idea that seems beguiling that if you limit people’s language, it may somehow teach them a different way of thinking, something that would have delighted the inventors of George Orwell’s Newspeak, for example. And it seems to me it’s just implausible. It doesn’t work. And that’s what I mean by empirical. It doesn’t stand an empirical test. It isn’t experientially validated as we see from the political landscape now. And I worry that we may in the future. So I’m sort of disappointed that the subject has just revolved around academia, which was predictable because that’s the sort of crucible in which these elements are mixed. But even more disappointed that really, I haven’t heard from Michelle Orr or from Professor Dyson as to what they think political correctness is. Because what they’ve talked about is basically saying, progress in our view is progress. Well, I agree. That’s, you know, yeah. So it is too. And good on progress. But how is it that you’re saying political, what we call political correctness, you call progress. That’s what you’re supposed to be arguing. I want to know what you mean by political correctness. Well, like I said, okay. Thank you. Yeah. So like I said, you know, the reason a few months ago, you contacted me, asked if I wanted to do a debate about identity politics, and then you presented me with this resolution. And I said, well, there’s like a lot of things that people call political correctness that I’m not going to defend. But then I realized who I was debating and saw that there was a lot of things that you, Jordan Peterson, call political correctness that I call progress. And to some extent, you too, Stephen Fry, you know, when you talk about it being outrageous to tear, or not outrageous, I won’t pour it in your mouth, but that we shouldn’t be tearing down statues of kind of notorious racists that we should just instead be throwing eggs at them. You know, so those sorts of things, if you call them political correctness, like call them progress. Now this feeling of being silenced, which I understand, although it seems very vague, right? You kind of are not quite putting your finger on who is silencing you, except for a vague fear that if you say something untoward, you’re going to be the subject of, I’m not sure. I’m not shaming, but by who? But by what, by the internet? I’m not going to tell you the names. No, but I mean. I’m scared. You’re scared. If I missed it, that’s the point. You’re scared. It is a culture of fear. I understand there’s that element of fear. What I’m saying is that it’s a feeling. It’s a feeling that is this sort of intangible result of on, I think, primarily. We’ve all seen the sort of show trial thing where the person then apologizes, I have so much to learn about sexual politics. I am really sorry. Signed a lawyer, crossed out the name of the person. It’s, it’s, you think the real mistake of our left is that we underestimate the right. The right isn’t as stupid as we’d like them to be. If only they were. If only they weren’t so cunning, so sly, so smart, so aware of our shortcomings. And I just fear that political correctness is a weapon that they value. That the more, the more we tell the world how people should be treated, how language should be treated, what words are acceptable, what attitudes are acceptable, what HR meeting is gonna tell you in a long bullet pointed list about how you look at people. All of this is meat and drink to bad people, to malefactors, to bad actors. I’m not calling myself as one of those bad actors. In that sense, I mean bad actors in the other sense. So, so I, so it’s. So there are, like I said, there are a lot of ways in which I agree with you, although I kind of, I would like to hear, I mean to turn it back on you, I would like to hear you say, you know, what are the words that have fallen into disrepute that you think we should be resurrecting, right? I mean, to me, this is this area of like hotly contested social change right now where a lot of people feel. I have to say, it’s about words that have gone into disuse. It’s very often phrases, jargonistic slogans, heteronormative, cisgendered, those kind of things. They’re just an insult. You know, imagine you’re a young student arriving at university and someone’s bombarded you with this preposterous, hermeneutical nonsense from misread textbooks, misread Foucault, if I may say, and misread Derrida and so on. Because yeah, you know, I was at Cambridge, England, doing literature, we had our French phase and there’s value in that. It’s an interesting game and it is, it’s a place to, I think I’d just really say that the ghost hovering over for me is, it’s a letter Oscar Wildrose and he said to Bozies, love, he said, the fact that you didn’t get a degree is nothing, but you never acquired what is sometimes called the Oxford Manor and I’ll say for that, the university manor. He said, Oscar said, I take that to mean the ability to play gracefully with ideas. I think that’s disappearing from our culture and I think it’s a terrible thing. Can I say this, can I say this? It’s not a bad thing about an entire show. It’s, it’s hard to be the self-deprecating Englishman. It’s, you have no idea. But no, no, I got a pretty good idea here today. But what’s interesting, I don’t recall, and all of you, all of us have studied history, I don’t recall these debates about political correctness happening when people who were in power were in absolute power, unquestioned power. Political correctness, right? Let me, political correctness becomes an issue and what I mean by that is people who used to have power who still have power but think they don’t, who get challenged on just a little bit of what they have and don’t wanna share toys in the sandlot of life. So all of a sudden it becomes a kind of exaggerated grievance. Now the things you named, the bullet points and the cisgender and the heteronormativity and the heteropatriarchy and the capitalist resurgence and the insurrection of subjugated knowledge is to give Foucault some more love or the De Ridian deconstruction, all that stuff. The French phase is still going on with the French fries in America. What’s interesting is that I didn’t hear many complaints of political correctness at the height of the dominance of one group or another but when Martin Luther King Jr. who argued for group identity as a black person to provide an opportunity for individual black people to come to the fore, they began to make that claim. Oh, now they didn’t call it political correctness. You’re siding with those who are against free speech. You’re siding with those who don’t want me as a white person to be recognized in my humanity. And what I mean by political correctness is the kind of politics of Résultat Monde that are articulated by various holders of power at certain levels, at various levels that one of the beautiful things about Foucault that I take as opposed to Max Weber is that Foucault said power breaks out everywhere. I would think a person who’s critical political correctness like you would appreciate this. As opposed to Max Weber who said power is over there in a hierarchical structure where subordination is the demand, Foucault said no, power breaks out even among people who are disempowered. So you can hurt somebody in your own community. What’s more politically incorrect than a black Baptist preacher identifying with a first century Palestinian Jew and still loving atheist? What’s more politically incorrect than a black intellectual going on Bill Maher and defending his ability to continue to have his show despite using the N-word? I, sir, believe in a politically incorrect version. When I go as a black Baptist preacher to chastise my fellow believers about their homophobia, that goes over like a brick cloud. When I come into arenas like this, I understand that my back is up against the wall. But I think- Sit over here. I wanna sit on your lap. I wanna sit on your lap for a while. But what I’m saying to you, don’t get excited. But what I’m saying to you- Don’t flatter yourself. Oh, that’s all right. I see how you’ve been looking at me. So what’s interesting is that when we look at the way in which we as societies in a free Canadian society, in a free American society, when I look at what is seen as political correctness, it to me has been a mass of jumble that has been carved together out of the politics of resentment that powers once held no longer are held. Freedoms once exercised absolutely must now be shared. So I am in agreeance with both of my gentlemen to my right who believe that political correctness has been escouraged but not necessarily the way you think so. I think it’s been a scourge because those who have been the deployers of power and the beneficiaries of privilege have failed to recognize their particular way. And at the end of the day, I think that those of us who are free citizens of this country and of America should figure out ways to respect the humanity of the other, to respect the individual existence of the other, but also respect the fact that there have been barriers placed upon particular groups that have prevented them from flourishing. That’s all I mean by political correctness. I’m gonna, well said. I’m gonna give, before we get to closing statements, the final words on this topic to Michelle and then you, Jordan. So I think part of the frustration here is that I think that both of you have radically different ideas of what we’re talking about when we talk about political correctness. It seems to me that you’re talking about politically correctness. You mean this kind of feeling of anxiety that a lot of people feel because we all live now in this terrible crowd source panopticon when you worry that any stray phrase that you use will be, any stray phrase you utter might be used to defame you. And I think that a lot of people feel that anxiety. I disagree that that is something that is being solely kind of perpetrated against insucian, kind of Oscar Wildean figures by a sensorian, sensorius left-wing horde because it’s coming from all directions. This phenomenon, which sucks, is all over the place. I mean, I get it when I write something critical of the way that the IDF behaved in Gaza. It’s coming at everyone and I think that there is, there’s a way in which when it comes at a certain sort of figure and there’s a certain set of complaints and you feel unjustly criticized and you feel silenced, which again, I think is really different than being silenced. You call it political correctness. And I would like the culture also to be more freewheeling. I think one solution, you’re not gonna kind of get the left to, I don’t know, they can’t kind of put an end to this because it is much more of a mob social media phenomenon than it is kind of some Dictac coming up from on high. And so one, really the only way to break through it is to say what you are, what you say that you’re afraid to say, right? I mean, that’s the only way to sort of pop this bubble or kind of end this anxiety or at least diffuse it a little bit. Whereas again, what I hear Mr. Peterson talking about as political correctness is something much more broad and much more kind of, much more fundamental to social change. And you’re talking about, you want me to define or one of us to talk about when the left goes too far. And if I’m, I certainly don’t wanna be a woman putting words in your mouth, but if I hear you correctly, what you’re saying is that you want me to kind of renounce Marxist categories or to- It’s up to you. Well- I just want you to do it. I want you to define when the left goes too far. You can do it any way you want. Like I said, I think that the left goes too far into when it is violent or censorious, when it tries to shut people down or no platform them, or when it acts violently. I’m not sure what you expect beyond that. Something deeper, how? Oh, I’d like you to contend with the set of left-wing ideas that produced all the left-wing pathologies of the 20th century and to define how you think standard left-wing thinking, which has a value in place, goes too far since it obviously does. Has the right gone too far? Of course the right has gone too far. Well, how about Auschwitz? I mean, what else? Well, I was talking about 20th century politics. What else? More recently, what has gone wrong with the right? Look, I don’t like identity politics players at all. I don’t care whether they’re on the left or the right. I’ve been lecturing about right-wing extremism for 30 years. I’m no fan of the right, despite the fact that the left would like to paint me that way because it’s more convenient for them. How has the right gone too far recently? Well, where? It’s threatening to go too far in identitarian Europe, that’s for sure. It’s gone too far in Charlottesville. It went too far in Norway. Like, how long a list do you want and why am I required to produce that? To show you that I don’t like the identitarian right? I just thought I’d ask you. I was actually asking you a question. So your assumption is somehow that I must be on the side of the right. It’s like, look, the right hasn’t occupied the humanities and the social sciences. It’s as simple as that for me. If they had, I’d be objecting to them. Say that again, I didn’t hear you. The right has not occupied the social sciences and the humanities, and the left clearly has. The statistical evidence for that is overwhelming. Sir, what about IQ testing in terms of genetic inheritance? I’m just saying. Sir, we’re here to talk about political correctness and we’ve done a damn poor job of it. Oh, I see, I gave you an example. No, you can’t answer it. Okay, let’s all then redeem ourselves with our closing statements. I’m gonna put three minutes on the clock. We’re gonna go on the reverse order of the opening. So Stephen, you’re up first. Oh, lordy, lordy. Yes, yes, up, up, up. There we are, I’ll hide behind the lectern in that case. Well, I’ve been fascinated by this conversation. There’s been an enormous clash of cultures in the conversation. We’ve had, you know, classic, if I can call it, huckstring snake oil pulpit talk, which is… It’s a mode of discourse. It’s a rhetorical style that I find endlessly refreshing and vivifying, but I’m not sure that we actually focused on the point in question. And my objection has always been towards orthodoxies. I’m a heterodox and a contrarian and I can’t help myself and I think there’s been an underestimation of the fact that language does affect people. It does make the young in particular, as they’re starting out on their educational or their work careers, it makes them very anxious. It makes them very angry, very upset, very alienated to feel that they don’t know anymore how to operate in the world, how to engage in relationships, how to think honestly. So they accrete more and more to their own mini groups. And I think that’s dangerous and unhappy for society. I think it’s reflected in a paucity of cinema and literature and art and the culture generally is that there’s a fear that’s pervading it. And while people can talk to academia and say, you should come see our lessons, our lectures are open and free and ideas are exchanged. I’m sure that’s true. I’m sure it’s true, but I don’t think we should underestimate how much this feeling is prevalent in the culture of this strange paradox that the liberals are illiberal in their demand for liberality. They are exclusive in their demand for inclusivity. They are homogenous in their demand for heterogeneity. They are somehow undiverse in their call for diversity. You can be diverse, but not diverse in your opinions and in your language and in your behavior. And that’s a terrible pity. So I would say that I’m sorry that it got a bit heated in places because I was hoping it wouldn’t. I was hoping it would be a shining example of how people of all different kinds of political outlooks can speak with humor and wit and a lightness of touch. As GK Chesterton said, angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. And I think it’s very important for us who are privileged, all four of us privileged to be here, to be asked to be here, to take ourselves a little bit more lightly, not to be too earnest, to pompous, too serious, and not to be too certain. It’s a time I think for really engaging, emotionally fulfilling, passionate, and positive doubt. That’s what I would urge. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Michael, we’re gonna put three minutes on the clock for you. Please, you’re closing. Thank you so much for that compliment, brother Frank. I’m used to, not exclusively white men, who see black intelligence articulated at a certain level, feeling a kind of condescension. If I came up here, Mr. I was saying the other day, but a kind of verbal facility automatically assumed to be a kind of hucksterism and snake oil salesman, I’ve seen that. I get it, I get hate letters every day from white brothers and sisters who are mad I’m teaching their children, you’re just trying to co-opt our children. You’re trying to corrupt them. Yes, I’m trying to corrupt them so they will be uncorrupted by the corrupt ability that they’ve inherited from a society that refuses to see all people as human beings. The death threats I have received constantly for simply trying to speak my mind, it’s not about a politically correct society that is open-minded and that has some consternation about my ability to speak. I’m getting real live. You want empirical death threats that talk about killing me, setting up to hurt me and harm me simply because I choose to speak my mind. I agree with my confreras and my compatriots that we should argue against the vicious limitation and recursions against speech. I believe that everybody has the right to be able to articulate themselves and the enormous privilege we have to come to a spot in a space like this means that we have that privilege and we should be responsible for it. No matter where we go from here, me and Brother Peterson will go to a Black Baptist church. I’ma hold him to that. He said it on national TV, we’re gonna go to a Black Baptist church and have an enlightening conversation about the need for us to engage in not only reciprocal and mutual edification, but criticism, even hard and tough criticism, but in a way that speaks to the needs and interests of those who don’t usually get on TV, whose voices are not usually amplified, whose ideas are not usually taken seriously. When they get to the upper echelons of the ability of a society to express themselves, they are equally subject to vicious recrimination and hurtful resistance. There’s an old story about the pig and the chicken going down the street and said, let’s have breakfast. The chicken just has to give up an egg. The pig has to give up his ass in order to make breakfast. We have often been the pigs giving up our asses to make breakfast. Let’s start sharing them asses with everybody else. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So I’m not here to claim that there’s no such thing as oppression, unfairness, brutality, discrimination, unfair use of power, all of those. Anyone with any sense knows that hierarchical structures tilt towards tyranny and that we have to be constantly wakeful to ensure that all they are isn’t power and tyranny. It’s interesting to hear Foucault referred to. It’s unfortunate, but it’s interesting. You know, because Foucault, like his French intellectual confers, essentially believed that the only basis upon which hierarchies were established is power. And that’s part of this pernicious politically correct doctrine that I’ve been speaking about. When a hierarchy becomes corrupt, then the only way to ascend it is to exercise power. That’s essentially the definition of a tyranny. But that doesn’t mean that the imperfect hierarchies that we have constructed in our relatively free countries, which at least tilt somewhat towards competence and ability as evidenced by the staggering achievements of civilization that we’ve managed to produce, it doesn’t mean that the appropriate way of diagnosing them is to assume without reservation, unidimensionally, that they’re all about power. And as a consequence, everyone who occupies any position within them is a tyrant or a tyrant in the making. And that is certainly the fundamental claim of someone like Foucault. And it’s part and parcel of this, what would you call it, this ideological catastrophe that’s political correctness. I’m not here to argue against progress. I’m not here to argue against equality of opportunity. Anyone with any sense understands that even if you’re selfish, you’re best served by allowing yourself access to the multiplicitous talents of everyone and to discriminate against them for arbitrary reasons unrelated to their competences. It’s abhorrent. That has nothing to do with the issue at hand. It isn’t that good things haven’t happened in the past and should continue to happen. That’s not the point. The point is the point my compatriot Frye made, which is, well, we can agree on the catastrophe. And we can agree on the historic inequity. But there’s no way I’m going to agree that political correctness is the way to address any of that. And there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, some of which I would say was displayed quite clearly tonight. So I think one of the irresolvable issues that we’re all coming up against is the role of feelings. Stephen Frye has kind of asked us to recognize and empathize with this feeling of being silenced, of being threatened. And I do. And I do. And I do. And I do. And I do. And I do. And I do. And I do. And I do. And I do. And I do. And I do. And I do. And I get it. I feel it sometimes, too, in my columns. I hate it when I write something that then gets a kind of irate Twitter mob after me. But if, say, I stood up here and said, recognize how threatened so many women feel when, for example, one of the bestselling and most prominent intellectuals in the world right now says in an interview that maybe the Me Too movement has shown that this whole experiment of men and women working together is just not working. Or maybe if women don’t want the workplace to be sexualized, they shouldn’t be allowed to wear makeup. I didn’t say that. Well, Google it. I didn’t say that. It was a vice interview. Google it. Yeah, well. So if I say, I feel threatened, then I’m being kind of politically correct and hysterical. So much of the debate about political correctness. But there’s one group that really does think its feelings should be accommodated. And that is what we keep coming up against, is that there’s a group of people, and to some extent, I’m part of it, that feels uniquely that our feelings of being silenced, marginalized, censored, that those feelings need to take primacy, that we can kind of sneer when these other groups ask for us to take seriously their feelings of being threatened or their feelings of being marginalized. Then we call that, we call those demands political correctness. And I would finally say that I think there is a fair amount of research that people become more close-minded, more tribal, when they feel threatened, when they feel that their group identity is at stake. And so as much as you want to blame the left for the rise of the right, I think that when you kind of, that the rise of the right, the rise of people who are questioning the fundamental ideals of pluralistic liberal democracy, the more those views are mainstreamed, the more people, I think, are going to shut down in response because people are really scared. Thank you. Thank you. Well, first of all, I think on behalf of all the debaters, I think we want to thank the audience. You were engaged, you were mostly civil, and not so civil in ways, I think, that we enjoyed. So I think on behalf of the debaters, everybody, I want to thank you, audience. This was a challenging topic, and you did a great job. You were great. Also, a big thank you to our debaters. You know, it’s one thing, all of these four give regular speeches, but it’s a very different thing to come on in the stage in front of a live audience, a large television audience, and have your ideas contested in real time. And again, to all four of you, thank you for accepting our invitation to come here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So a few final notes. First, thank you to the Oria Foundation, the Munk Family, for, once again, convening us here at Roy Thompson Hall. We’re going to do it all again this coming autumn. All of you have a ballot here in the hall. You can vote on your way out. We’ll have those results for you just probably after 9.15. And let’s just quickly review where your opinions stood at the beginning of tonight’s contest. On the motion, be it resolved, what I call political correctness, what you call political correctness, I call progress. 36% agree, 64% disagree. And again, we saw a large percentage of you willing to change your mind, 87%. So let’s see how tonight’s cut and thrust affected your voting here. You’ve got your ballots. And again, to those of you who are watching online, we are going to have all these results for you on our social media feeds around 9.15. So enjoy the long weekend. Happy Victoria Day, everyone. Thanks for coming out to the Munk debates. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you. And Stephen Fry right now to get their reactions to tonight’s debate. Some hotly contested moments here, so we’ll be curious to see what happens with the audience vote over the course of the next few minutes. And also for those of you watching online, we have at our running poll. That poll, again, was www.munkdebates.com forward slash vote. So go there, check out, see how each of these debaters did in terms of their opening statements, their rebuttals, the moderated section, and the closing statements. Did we see any changes there? So again, we’re going to go right now to Stephen Fry and Jordan Peterson, get their thoughts on how the evening played out. Gentlemen, thank you. Thank you both. We’re just going to do a quick discussion with the online audience who’s watching right now just to get your reactions to the debate. And maybe just start with you, Jordan. There were some heated moments here. Did that surprise you, the exchanges that you had with Michael Eric Dyson? Well, I wouldn’t say it surprised me. Well, I suppose it probably did. It just didn’t seem like a very good tactical move. And I stand by what I said. I don’t see any reason at all that my racial identity needed to be dragged into the discussion independent of my personality proclivity. I would say what I just said to Mr. Fry here is that it was a pleasure sharing the stage with him. I’ve rarely heard anyone ever deliver their convictions with such a remarkable sense of passion and wit and forbearance and erudition. It was really something. Yeah. And Stephen, a challenging debate because in a sense we’re trying to mesh two different views here, two different worldviews, one very focused more on identity politics, group identity, you in a sense having an argument really more about the larger culture itself and the tenor and tone of the conversation. I wanted that I was being a little kind of scattergun really, and that but scattergun and too specific that I had just taken very literally the popular idea of political correctness as being a kind of control of language and shutting down certain phrases or an introduction of others. And the kind of day to day, as I say, human resource departments and corporations and that sort of thing. And so I was slightly disappointed that it just became a debate about race and about gender and so on. But that was, I guess, natural. And I still, you know, the fact is I am still a lefty but a soft one. I just don’t have… You’re not too soft. I’m flabby, squashy in every sense. And I realize that that’s not a political point of view. It is a personal one. Right. And the gap between the personal and the political, which is a space you obviously are very interested in as a psychologist, is one that is rarely explored. People are either so personal that it has no application in the outside world and the organization of human affairs or they’re so political and so much to do with structure and distinction between hierarchies and networks and so on that they forget the individual. And that’s the space in which the impassioned liberal lives. And it’s not easy to do it because you often do sound rather wet. And I’m aware that I do. But I enjoyed it. Thank you for coming. Thank you for coming. Just finally before I free you two both to a well-earned drink, anything left unsaid, Jordan, any point that you wanted to make that you didn’t feel you had the time or the opportunity? No, I don’t think so. I said my piece. Great. Same question to you, Stephen. I know. I think I got across… I mean, there’s so much you can talk about in that field. And I just wanted to leave at the point that I do want, like everybody, it’s a no-brainer. We want the world to be fairer, juster, sweeter, kinder. But it’s how you get there. And I felt that wasn’t really addressed. Okay. Well, gentlemen, thank you both very much from our online audience. A big thank you also, I know, to Jordan Peterson and Stephen Fry for participating in, yeah, a debate with some steaks on the table, for sure. Thank you, gentlemen. I’ll see you in the reception. Thank you. You bet. Again, online viewers, we now have Michael Eric Dyson coming into the camera range here with Michelle Goldberg to get their reactions to the debate. So, guys, thank you for being part of this. Thank you. You know, it’s a complicated subject. It’s got a lot of different moving pieces and elements. I think we addressed some of the constituent parts. Maybe start with you, Michelle. Was there something on stage that you wanted to say that maybe we didn’t have the time or you didn’t have the opportunity? You know, now’s your chance. Well, you know, I guess the only thing I can think of is that maybe I wish that we could have drilled down a little bit more into the gender piece of this and, again, to, you know, what we’re really arguing about, particularly with Mr. Peterson and the kind of range of progress, the range of feminist progress that he considers political correctness. I think part of the frustration is that him and Stephen Fry are talking about and defending, I think, a fairly discrete set of ideas with some overlap. You know, and one of the difficult things about political correctness is it’s a slippery term that’s deployed to talk about a whole range of phenomenon. Yeah. And close down conversation and open up conversation. How did you feel, Michael? There were some points there, some, you know, points of sharp exchange. We appreciate that at the Munk debates. I mean, this is not a place for, you know, shrinking wallflowers. Right, right. But any unsaid thoughts, anything that you want to put a point on now? I think you have to hold people intellectually accountable. And to deny some of the things to Michelle that he said and to present himself, Mr. Peterson, in a certain way without seeing some of the abhorrent things he said about women and other minorities, I think, demands an engaged response to him. And I think that the idea itself, as Michelle stated repeatedly, and Mr. Fry talked about his frustration. He said, we talk about everything but political correctness. Well, the reality is political correctness resides, I mean, rests upon some serious political work in this culture, in Canada and in America that needs to be done. And what I tried to, in terms of giving a brief genealogy, we didn’t have political correctness as long as white straight men were in charge. There was no argument about let’s get this right. But when people who exercise power no longer exercise absolute power, still predominant power, then there’s an argument. And I think, to Michelle’s point, about gender, about the workplace, about race, about sexuality and the like, I just think that it was unnecessarily vigorous and sometimes sharply worded debate between us all. Michelle, final word to you. Well, if you are curious about the quote that I mentioned about, you know, maybe this experiment with women and men working together, maybe it’s not working, I mean, please do Google it. It’s an interview with Vice. Did you put it in your columns? Did you put it in your own columns? I don’t know. And I guess, again, you know, me and Stephen Fry probably could have sat on the same side of another debate. But again, I feel like the phrase political correctness has expanded to cover a whole range of challenges to, I thought it was really interesting how much people were talking about their feelings. Because when women talk about their feelings, right, that is politically correct excess. And when men talk about this feeling that they can’t empirically define, we should all, I guess, I don’t know, change in deference to that. Okay, guys, great thoughts. Let’s go get a drink in the reception. Thank you. I’m buying, okay? Thanks. Thanks again. Hey, online viewers, thank you for being part of this Munk Debate. As I mentioned, these debates are semiannual. We’ll have another one this fall. We’ve got a whole archive of past debates on our website on a whole range of topics going back over a decade now. You can access those free by simply becoming a member at www.munkdebates.com. Go to the basic membership. It’s free. And we have a rock solid privacy policy there. We respect your privacy. So finally, check us out on Facebook. Thank you for the 26,000 new follows in the last 10 days. We appreciate it. This debate will be archived on our website for the next while, again, for free. So share it with friends and family. I’m Rudyard Griffiths from downtown Toronto, Canada, at the Munk Debate on Political Correctness. See you again in the autumn. Take care. Good night. Thank you.