Defending wokeness, while opposing cancel culture

A.C. Grayling and the battle for liberalism’s soul

The philosopher A.C. Grayling has just published Discriminations: Making Peace in the Culture Wars

At first glance his work appears unremarkable. Grayling believes that there is nothing particularly difficult or strange about the “woke” movements that came out of US universities to dominate much of progressive thought.

To be woke, he asserts, is to be against discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, sexuality, age, disability, gender identity, caste and class.

Who but a privileged bigot could object to that?

And yet, and yet. I have seen friends and colleagues driven from their jobs in the liberal arts, publishing and journalism for raising legitimate arguments against the effective sterilising of children and in favour of women-only spaces. They weren’t bigots. They were the victims of injustice rather than oppressors.

When I interviewed Anthony for the Lowdown podcast, I was therefore far less confident than he was that woke ideology was a continuation of older traditions of radical thought.

But I was also pleased talk to him. What makes Grayling stand out from average left-wing writers, and the reason why I wanted to interview him, is that, although he defends wokeness, he makes a strong philosophical case against the cancel culture that has come with it.

It is not an argument you hear often – to put it mildly.

You can hear the first part of our conversation on Apple

On Spotify

On Amazon, or on every other app via this link

Grayling sees much “anti-woke” politics as a simple and brutish defence of racial, class and sexual privilege.

“The very success of woke causes explains the ferocity of the resistance to them – the angry and anxious defence of the privilege-interests of those who historically enacted discrimination against the claimant groups.”

No one who has watched Trump in action can deny that.

But better than any writer I have read on the subject Grayling understands that the left’s reply: social shaming for your sins (real or imaginary) can often be a far more fearsome punishment than most sentences delivered by judges. Ninety percent or more of punishments from the courts are fines or orders for community service – not prison terms.

They don’t destroy a defendant’s life.

Cancel culture, by contrast, can lead to the personal destruction of the mob’s enemies. Heresy hunters drive people from their jobs. And once the target has lost their job, their prosecutors want to ensure that they never work again.

A fine or community service is a soft sentence in comparison.

I remembered being stunned by the case of Jenny Lindsay, a gender-critical Scottish performance poet. She protested about a writer at an arts site justifying violent action against lesbians at Pride marches. (“Get in their faces, make them afraid. Debate never works, so fuck them up.”) Rather than being applauded, she was ostracised as a transphobe. Friends abandoned her. Work vanished. She could not make a living.

If you sat her accusers in a court and cross-examined them, they would never have been able to justify themselves. But, of course, there are no court hearings.

This lack of due process is a further tightening of the screw.

In a court, a defendant is innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. But no court presides over the destruction of the career of Lindsay and the careers of so many like her.

As Grayling says, social media is “prosecutor, judge and jury rolled into one. The questions of audi alteram partem (hear the other side), reform and reparation go by the board: a cancellation can be a life-sentence, raising questions of proportionality in the punishment.”

Grayling quotes the Catholic theologian David M. Knight: “The plain truth is, it is the right and duty of the Church to determine what is a sin. It is the right and duty of the government to determine what is a crime.”

You might think that the disapproval of the church is easier to bear than the courtrooms of the state. But in our age, the punishments for sins against secular religions can be more severe than for crimes against the law of the land.

As seriously in my view, the courts do not attack your integrity. They do not demand that you deny your true beliefs and lie. The state does not force a republican to sing “God Save the King,” for instance. It allows for freedom of conscience as long as you do not incite crime.

And yet across the liberal professions, the public sector and many businesses, people must pretend to agree with ideas they believe to be false to keep their jobs.

To go back to Grayling’s comparison with religion, it is as if we are living with a modern version of the Test Acts of the 17^th and 18th centuries.