Professor David Peimer
Origins and Ramifications of Woke and Cancel Culture

Professor David Peimer | Origins and Ramifications of Woke and Cancel Culture

- Okay, so, hi, everybody, and hope everyone is well. In conversation with Trudy last night, we thought we would focus on this topic, woke and cancel, some of the origins and ramifications of these words and how they have captured the minds of a generation, in a way. I do just want to say a couple of things before diving into this, which is, as we all know, we are a community for education, in the best spirit of a Socratic debate and discussion. To quote Churchill, one of my favourites, all about “jaw jaw and not war war.” These discussions, I know, especially these words can become fraught with temperature, and the temperature can rise quite quickly with the word woke and cancel, of whatever generation, whatever culture anybody’s in. But in the spirit of community, in the spirit of educational debate and discussion, I want to enter these topics, not from the perspective of sort of newspaper political, polemic, or simplistic political debate in that way, or just politics, really. So it’s in that overall spirit that I want to engage with this. And I guess my overall phrase is not to throw the baby out with the bath water. There are obviously seriously positive things in terms of social justice and social equity and equality that have arisen from the origins of woke and the origins of awaken, coming from Marcus Garvey and others, which I’ll be speaking about. But then there’s the question of the origins of the idea of awaken, of wake up or consciousness awaken in many cultures, and in many peoples, including, you know, many notions that you know of black, of civil rights, et cetera, and many other areas of rights for individuals in terms of gender, sexuality, race, and religion.

There’s been a whole forward movement from the origins going way, way back to the origins of the word woke, and awaken, which is where it comes from. And then the question is, what are the ramifications today? Has it gone way so far that it’s ironically almost boomeranging back on itself and become something of a, to quote a student, “a self-censorship of the self today?” Or has it not gone too far? Has it still got further to go and to run? And that’s part of the debate. Has it become an Orwellian notion of groupthink and self-censorship? Or does it still have the intended ramification, which was a movement towards further justice in a democratic, secular, Western context or society of democracy? Which way does it go? Or does it have elements of both? So it’s in the context of that nuanced debate that I really want to engage with these phrases. Pardon me. So that’s why I’ve opened with the image of, which is perhaps idealistic, that one can reach a point of Socratic holding hands in terms of debate, argue, disagree, agree, discussion. Or not. Is it possible or is it not? I don’t believe it’s gone too far, but I believe it has gone pretty far. And there’s a real serious need to understand what on earth do we mean by woke and cancel, and what do we mean when it happens to individuals, whether we know some of them or we don’t. Working on a piece with Ollie Anisfeld, and in conjunction with the foundation’s fantastic support on J.K. Rowling and what happened to her in terms of a couple of tweets around the notion of trans.

And that will become a short, an animation inspired video for YouTube around the J.K. Rowling phenomenon. And, you know, so many, you know, billions or millions and millions have read, of course, Harry Potter, and then a couple of tweets, and what’s that done? That’s just one example that I give in terms of woke and cancel culture, where the actors who actually were cast in, you know, have, in a sense, subtly, but cancelled her. So anyway, that gives a whole context overall, in terms of the discussion, because I know this can become heated very quickly, and I want to maintain an ironic but aware perspective on the subject from, again, I’m going to say it again, from an educational point of view, not from a political, polemic point of view, hopefully. Okay, if we go on to the next slide, please? Thanks, Judy. So what I’ve been inspired by, and if anybody wants to read, are two, a couple of very recent books. And I’m not talking about these writers’ political ideologies, but the research they have done and the in-depth quality of the research and notions as opposed to just perhaps the podcast image or image people may have of them one way or the other. “The War on the West” by Douglas Murray, a very recent book, “How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason.”

I think he goes too far in some respects, but he’s done so much qualitative research that is quite extraordinary when you actually look into the real detail of how he’s combined research of examples together with actual ideas that he’s arguing in “The War on the West”, which is essentially a war from within, that has come from within, not only that perhaps Islam is the poster boy of the 21st century in the West, but much more in depth than that, that what has been going on for decades in the West in this context. The other book is a very recent book, which has just come out by the person who, Greg Lukianoff, this book here, “The Cancelling of the American Mind”, which has literally just come out. And he wrote a book together with another really interesting and really important contemporary thinker, Jonathan Haidt, called “The Coddling of the American Mind.” These books are, I think, crucial, these three, to understanding the notion of woke and cancel from a theoretical and practical example point of view. And they’re very readable and very, you know, digestible in terms of language and putting together concept and practical examples. But I think they give a sense of a very contemporary approach to understanding these words. Just one example that I want to give to kick off this discussion is, a while ago I was asked to be an external supervisor for a PhD for a postgraduate person and as the external. And so I went to the university in question and sat there and at the beginning said, well, okay, hello, you know, external examiner, da dah, dah, dah.

And everybody around the panel and the student, et cetera introduced themselves. And then I was told, no, that’s not the way to introduce myself. So I said, “Well, then what is?” They said, “You have to state your identity persona.” And I said, “Identity persona?” I said, “I don’t understand.” This is about a year and a half ago. And so the person chairing the panel said, “Well, your identity, you know, your colour of your skin and your gender, and that.” I said, “But what does that have to do with the merit of, my job here is to be external examiner of a PhD. If I’m short or tall or wearing an orange shirt or a green shirt, does that matter?” And I was told, “Yes, I must declare my identity persona.” So I said, “Well, in terms of Britain and the Equality Act of 2010, I’m a disabled person, because I had multiple sclerosis for nearly four decades.” And the person was stunned into silence and shock, expecting me to say, “I’m a middle aged or elderly aged, whatever, alta kaker, okay, whatever. I’m a white man.” But I chose to give the legal definition as opposed to identity politics definition. And the panel and the chair of the panel was stunned into silence. And it was at least a 30 second silence, which is a long time, as we all know, if we’re sitting in a work professional panel. And I said, “Well, that’s according to the law. What other definition?” So instead of giving a subjective perception, which is obviously driven by the binary and by stereotype, I gave a legal definition, which I didn’t intend to, you know, be bolshy and things like that.

I just thought, well, that sort of, it’s obvious why I’m here. So I’ll give whatever else, there’s a legal definition as well. But what it did was it made me much more awoke, aware of woke and cancel culture. And it made me aware from a personal, and I’m sure others all over the world have experienced variations of all of this. But I share this, just, it’s a very personal anecdote. It doesn’t have bearing on the overall picture of what we’re trying to do today, but it gave me a personal subjective way in to this discussion. Well, the binaries have really come to rule our way of thinking and how hard it is to break it, and especially in a higher education context of, where we are trying to deal with nuance, and again, Socratic debate, discussion, challenge, question, you know, which is all about, you know, nuanced detail of a PhD, in this case anyway, and other things. So in that spirit, if we can look at the next slide, please, Judy. Thank you. This is the other book I mentioned by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, two really interesting and really important contemporary American thinkers, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” And they talk about it as a coddling, which I think is a good word. It’s building on Bloom’s, you know, “The Closure of the American Mind”, but this is the coddling of the American mind, which I don’t want to go into detail about it here because that’s not the focus today. This goes into a slightly different tangent, but it’s more or less on a similar topic. It’s all about, you know, how woke works and what it has done to the mind of education today.

Go on to the next slide, please. And this is the other one, “The Cancelling of the American Mind”, a book, which has just come out very recent, by Greg Lukianoff and an ex-student, Rikki Schlott. Now, she came to Greg Lukianoff, who is a lawyer and works in the First Amendment, human rights legal field, and she was a much younger student at NYU who came to him and said, “I feel, can I talk to you?” And anyway, they made a conversation, they met up, and Rikki Schlott, she said to him, “I feel I have to self-censor myself in my studies at my university.” And this phrase, he quotes in the beginning of the book and throughout the book, the sense that not only is the educator possibly engaging in self-censorship, but the students is engaging in self-censorship. Now, I don’t want to get into, I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not a jurist, so I’m not going to get into a legal side of what is hate speech, what is free speech, what is the distinction, incitement, or the legal definitions from the courts, whether in America or Britain or elsewhere. I’d rather leave that to a legal expert, not trying to duck it, but it’s not my area of expertise, specifically. Mine is looking at the culture of woke and cancel culture, and why I think it might have come about, and where it stands in today’s world for so many people everywhere. If we can go to the next slide, please. Okay, I’m going to look much more at Douglas Murray’s book, “The War on the West”, because he goes into it in a more conceptual detail. Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott, it’s fantastic, this book, “The Cancelling of the American Mind”, but it gives many, many examples, and I don’t, we’ve only got a short time today, I don’t want to give you endless examples, you know.

And it builds on his previous book with Jonathan Haidt and this book as well. So I’m primarily going to give some ideas from here and some of my own ideas, which I, last night I spent quite a bit of time on the phone to a very good friend of mine who I want to acknowledge. Geoff Cohen in Sydney, Australia, who has been in high school education in Cape Town. He was head of Herzlia. And then he works at a school in Sydney, Australia. And very close friend, old friend, going back to Durban days. And anyway, we had the whole conversation around woke and cancel last night. I want to really honour and credit Geoff for some of the ideas that are going to come out today in what we share. It’s important to say that. Thanks. Can we go on to the next slide, please. Okay. So originally the word woke came from the idea of being awake, which was actually started by Marcus Garvey, the African American theorist, thinker, philosopher. He first used the term stay woke in the 1920s to encourage black people to get involved in politics. And I’m quoting from him, “Get involved in politics” and “Wake up Africa”, “Wake up Ethiopia.” The origin of the word woke was coming from Garvey, one of the most interesting and important American thinkers and writers, predating James Baldwin, who took up some of the ideas, and I’ve given a talk on him as well, who’s brilliant. James Baldwin’s books. And Marcus Garvey, in other words, the intention was social justice, human rights, the right to vote, democracy, freedom, the rights which were championed by the Enlightenment of a secular state, separating church, state, and executive, the Enlightenment of freedom.

What does that mean, of individual human rights for the first time? Humans, individuals have rights, beyond a feudal society with king and all the rest of it, obviously coming out of the history of slavery for Marcus Garvey and others of his times in the twenties. So celebrating the rights, which we of course take for granted today, but which many died and fought for in the Second World War. Okay, if we can go on to the next slide, please. So this was taken up by the great blues musician Lead Belly. And in 1938, he wrote a song. It was a song, “Scottsboro Boys”, which he sang, and I’m going to play it in a minute. It’s an old recording on vinyl, so it’s scratchy, and he sings very fast. So I’m going to show the words. But he actually was the first to use the word woke. And the phrase stay woke appears in the spoken afterward. In the song, Lead Belly tells a story of nine black men and teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. The case became an international symbol of racial injustice, and rightly so, of course, absolutely, and a key part of the American Civil Rights Movement. In the afterword, Lead Belly warns his listeners, “Be a little careful when they go along through there. Best stay woke. keep their eyes open.” So it was Lead Belly, the great, brilliant, blues musician who actually was the first to use this word. And again, the origins are so important, because the origins of religions, the origins of words, of phrases, which are bandied around today, of woke and cancel, and other words, are important because not only do they give context, but they give historical meaning. They give real meaning to, and of such an important social justice movement and development in the evolution, in this case, of America. Okay, if we can show the next slide, please.

This is just a couple of the words from the song because it’s very hard to follow, ‘cause he sings it so fast. “I’m going to talk to Joe Louis And it all angered me”, I’m not even going to try the accent, okay? “And don’t even try and think about it Alabama ree Go to Alabama and you better watch out The landlord’ll get ya, going to jump and shout Scottsboro, Scottsboro, Scottsboro boys Tell you all about Go to Alabama and you better watch out”, et cetera, et cetera. So next one, those are the lyrics, but he used the word woke on the sleeve. Okay? If we can play it, please. This is Lead Belly playing it, playing the song, where the word woke came from. Go ahead and beat it out.

♪ Go to Alabama and ya better watch out ♪ ♪ The landlord’ll get ya, going to jump and shout ♪ ♪ Scottsboro, Scottsboro boys ♪ ♪ Tell ya what it’s all about ♪ ♪ 'Cause them landlords ♪ ♪ If they get you, boy, they’re going to hang you ♪ ♪ Go to Alabama and ya better watch out ♪ ♪ The landlord’ll get ya, going to jump and shout ♪ ♪ Scottsboro, Scottsboro boys ♪ ♪ Tell ya what it all about ♪ ♪ I’m going to talk to Joe Louis ♪ ♪ And it all angered me ♪ ♪ Don’t even try to think about it ♪ ♪ Alabama ree ♪ ♪ Go to Alabama and ya better watch out ♪ ♪ The landlord’ll get ya, going to jump and shout ♪ ♪ Scottsboro, Scottsboro boys ♪ ♪ Tell ya what it’s all about ♪ ♪ Go to Alabama and ya better watch out ♪ ♪ The landlord’ll get ya, going to jump and shout ♪ ♪ Scottsboro, Scottsboro boys ♪ ♪ Tell ya what it’s all about ♪ ♪ I’m going to tell all the coloured people ♪ ♪ Even old here ♪ ♪ Don’t ya never go to Alabama ♪ ♪ To try to live ♪ ♪ Go to Alabama and ya better watch out ♪ ♪ The landlord’ll get ya, going to jump and shout ♪ ♪ Scottsboro, Scottsboro boys ♪ ♪ Tell ya all about ♪ ♪ Go to Alabama and ya better watch out ♪

• Thanks, Judy. If we can hold it there, please. ♪ Scottsboro ♪

• Great. So this song is the origin of the word, the actual word woke, coming out of Marcus Garvey’s piece of work. Okay. We can go on to the next slide, please. Thanks. So, woke and cancel culture. First, I think that everything comes down to, and this comes from post-colonial theory, as well as a lot of thinking around these words, it comes out of the human nature need, the human nature culture, whether it’s nature, nurture, whether it’s culture, human nature, or a mixture of both. In the end that will be a debate decided by geneticists and by chemists of the future. But the binaries and the need to make binaries, of superior, inferior, right, wrong, civilised, primitives. I’m right, you’re wrong. I’m superior, you’re inferior. Whether it’s because I’m taller and you’re shorter, or I’m wearing a blue shirt and you’re wearing a yellow shirt, or whether I’m right-handed or left-handed, or whether I’m this religion or that religion, or I’m of this race, or I’m of this ethnicity, or I belong to, I’m a French person and I’m not a Slovakian. And we can go on and on and on. And even within cultures, there’s class, everything, et cetera. But it’s the human endeavour, the human need, in a way, to simplify things into binaries and therefore stereotypes. And therefore all South Africans are this, all Americans are that, all French are something.

Now, of course, Friday night dinners and jokes and talking with friends and family, of course we play with all of this, and it’s part of humour and it’s part of telling stories. But in an educational context, it’s our professional responsibility to point out that binary is a very simplistic way of looking and understanding the world and how to see nuance and variations and gradations of what may be called right or wrong, or what is civilised, what is primitive? The binary negates the question. It negates the challenge. It negates the need for Socratic dialogue around the issue. It simply is an identity position. And I can say I’m superior. In the 19th century, I’m British, and I’m conquering what became known as Kenya or Nigeria or wherever, and I am superior. I have arrived. And you are inferior. I am more civilised. You are more primitive. And as I’ve said before, David Livingston’s three C’s of colonisation, colonise, Christianize, and civilise. You know, but therefore, those, the three C’s are word phrases, a phrase, for colonisation, to show that I’m actually superior and you’re inferior. It can be within our own culture. Hang on a second, I’m upper class. You’re working class, you’re a cab driver, ah, and I’m a bakery, I don’t know, well, anything. We see how the gradations can go through every aspect of society, of superior and inferior. Such a deep need in humans, whether culturally induced or nature or both, who knows? But for this kind of, and I think this is at the core of it, because that’s where the stereotype comes from. What woke has done, it has taken what Marcus Garvey called awaken, you know, to wake up, in a kind of, what Steve Biko in South Africa wrote the book, you know, “Black Consciousness”, brilliant book, you know, “I say what I like”, “I write what I like”, is, you know, about black consciousness becoming conscious of being black and conscious of being individual and free and so on and so on and so on.

The detail is there. Now, these are so important. They represent advances in social justice against injustice and development. What does it mean, justice? Equal rights to the law, equal rights to the vote, equal rights, et cetera, et cetera, and so we go on. In terms of a society structuring itself, in terms of a family, you know, between man and woman, or man and man, woman and woman, whoever, all of those things, we can go on into the detail. So, we come into this idea of the binaries, for me, at the centre. The problem is that it fixes identity. It doesn’t allow us to argue, debate nuance. All the bad goes into one side of the balance sheet, and all the good goes into the other side. And it sets up all of those who are goodies and baddies. When I gave the talk on settler, colonial, and apartheid, it’s a similar kind of thing. Everything bad is lumped into that one three word phrase, settler, colonial, apartheid. Everything good is in the opposite. And I spoke about where it came from, ironically, Hamilton Hall, where I studied in the early eighties then in the mid eighties, you know, but that was for a separate talk, but it bandies together. And what it does in woke, the danger is intersectionality, which is at the bottom here, where everything is put under the banner of oppression. So everything on race, on gender, on age, on ability, disabilities, on ethnic origin, whatever. Everything can be put together under one banner heading, like settler, colonial, apartheid, or other things. And that’s what happens with the binary. We can put one camp literally versus the other camp. “We’re the goodies. They’re the baddies. It’s a cowboy and Indian Hollywood B grade movie, and we are going to fight it out.” And that’s what, so much of it has, unfortunately, and I think tragically, become today.

And you are determined, then, by one or the other to then be cancelled, because of A, B, C. So you are cancelled because of your position as an identity. You are not disagreed with in an intellectual debate about an idea the earth is flat or the earth is round or space and time are curved and not, or whether light is a particle or a wave, or whether Shakespeare, Macbeth is about an insecure guy who’s so ambitious and his wife who’s pushing him. You know, “Come on, you know, become the king. Not just a general.” It’s not a debate about the meaning. It positions identity, and through the lens of identity, of race, religion, gender, whatever, through that lens, everything is interpreted. And that’s the danger. That’s where it starts to become Orwellian. Because everything is seen through one lens. And that’s the problem with the binary, as opposed to being able to nuance proper educational conversation. The last, what Oscar Wilde called, “the graceful art of graceful debate.” Intersectionality is that word, everything lumped together under the one phrase, we are all oppressed. Everybody under this banner is oppressed, and therefore everybody else is the oppressor. And not only dead white men. It could be a whole lot of other people or other groups. It’s group versus group. The individual doesn’t really matter. The problem is the groupthink, in the Orwellian sense. Intersectionality, that’s the meaning of that word. Everything intersects under the banner of oppressor or oppressed.

There are workshops that the FBI have to do in intersectionality in many other places around the world. I want to link this to the idea of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was, you know, nearly two centuries of enormous struggle and battle against the power of the church and the king. And who had more power? The church ultimately. Who could rule over who? And the boundaries being blurred, constant conflict between the two. And where’s the ordinary individual? Where’s the ordinary person? Whether they’re Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, whatever. Where’s the ordinary guy and woman? Where’s the person? The Enlightenment, one of the great achievements, Rousseau, Voltaire and the others, Diderot, the encyclopaedia, one of the great achievements was to say, let’s have a rational look at the world. Not that we humans are all rational, but let’s see if we can rationally understand how to improve a society. Let’s go secular. Separate state and religion and executive power as a first step. Now that’s enormous. And of course it inspires the American Revolution, as we all know, the Enlightenment. The first great step is the separation to those three. And it’s only a couple of hundred years ago. It’s not that far. Then there’s the idea of human rights. What? Human rights? Didn’t exist before. An individual has human rights, not just perhaps the right to vote and other things, but the right not to be punched in the face if the neighbour disagrees or agrees. The right not to have, you know, when our two horses clash on this narrow path and the stronger, bigger one gets up and you know, is able to bash the other one.

Human rights, which have become entrenched in a legal system. Then democracy, what does that mean? The rule by the majority, the right to vote, of the ordinary person? And after the suffragette movement, women, of course, I mean, all these things come out of the Enlightenment movement, which is a struggle and a battle. And what some woke people call, by dead white men. But the irony is that freedom of speech also comes out of this. It’s the freedoms, of movement, the freedoms of speech, the freedom to say what I want to say without fear of being imprisoned or killed. So it’s an extraordinary achievement. And whether we are on the coattails of the Enlightenment now, whether the Enlightenment was a blip of a couple of two centuries in human history and actually was toast many, many decades or a long time ago, or there was a couple of good ideas from a few good people, it nevertheless influenced Western culture hugely, enormously. Now, of course, we had to deal with a question of history. And when we eulogise ancient Greece, the birth of democracy and all that, we’ve got to remember, did Aristotle have slaves? did Plato have slaves? How many people were slaves in ancient Rome? Okay? It was under an emperor most of the time. But that great period or Pericles and Aristotle, et cetera, et cetera, who built it all? Who were the slaves? Of course there were. And of course they all did. So slavery is a horrific, terrible, atrocious thing.

But as Murray says in his book, “It’s not a Western invention.” It happened with Genghis Khan, obviously. It’s in the Mongolian Empire, in China, in Africa, everywhere. It doesn’t mean it’s right. It’s horrific. And it’s a total, one of the worst injustices imaginable. But, it’s not only Western. And woke focuses on the Western, it doesn’t look at other cultures and other histories. It is an internal phenomenon, in that sense. The groomed ignorance. This is a phrase from Paul Gilroy, a post-colonial theorist who is brilliant, talks about contemporary education as a groomed ignorance. And he means it in a sense of, well, you know, how much of slavery is taught and how much of injustice is taught, and how much of justice is taught, but also how much of all these ideas are taught, these ideas of what we’ve been going into right now, and their reliance on the Enlightenment and what it really meant and means, and whether it’s disappeared forever, or whether it still hangs around or it’s trying to make a comeback, whatever. It’s how education can be used, by any society, democratic or dictatorship, to groom ignorance. Whether from the right or from the left, or a mixture of both, how our ignorance can be groomed, moulded, shaped. Obviously there are extreme examples of dictatorships that do it. Less extreme, but under democracies, even. And a terrifying fact, which Lukianoff and Schlott talk about it in their book here, is that more professors in American academia have been cancelled because of opinions than people who were, in inverted commas, “persecuted” under the McCarthy era.

That’s quite an astonishing thought. It shows, when we look back at the McCarthy era and plays by Arthur Miller, “The Crucible” and others, and we think of witch hunts and what a witch hunt really means, and why he uses the image of the witch hunt of Salem, and how the mass crowds get caught up in mass hysteria. Well, let’s look at today, through the internet, which has got brilliant potential and brilliant things that it offers us, but it also has the flip side, like everything, I guess, in human nature and society. It has the flip side, which is that the mob comes from the internet now. The mob place is the internet. Of course, it goes into the streets, but it doesn’t start necessarily only in the streets, it comes from the internet, which means it can be so fast and so speedy globally, and it can change things very much more quickly perhaps than before. We can groom ignorance through a certain use of the internet. Moral superiority. And in this, I’m indebted to my friend Geoff for his phrase, the moral arms race. And I think it’s really important. Everybody, we all, including myself, and be really honest, we all think of ourselves as a little bit morally superior to others. I don’t think I’ve really met somebody who said, “I’m morally inferior.” Very, you know, easy to say or easy to think of. There’s a certain sense of superiority, of morality, of the group I belong to.

I’m not talking about me personally now, I’m just saying generally, the group one belongs to, whether it’s race, religion, nationality, whatever, a certain desire in humans to live in a world in their, as Harari would say, “collective imaginations and fictions of moral superiority.” In other words, I’m better, I’m right. I’m the cowboy. You the Indian. My identity is a little higher than yours, for whatever reason, whether it’s because of my race, my religion, my class, my gender preference, whatever, you know, I’m a little, just a little above you maybe, you’re a little below me maybe. It’s a kind of a moral arms race. What this sets up is the notion of the victim. Who is more the victim and more the victim, and keep going deeper and deeper, until ultimately, again, going back to intersectionality, all the victims come together. Victims of the world unite! Not proletariat of the world unite, you know, to play with Karl Marx’s phrase. But, it’s a victim culture. And it’s got fantastic positive aspects. Again, I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water. When it comes to people, you know, who fought for, obviously suffragettes, for women to get the votes and equal rights, and in many countries still don’t have anything vaguely like equal rights. In Saudi with the Middle East and elsewhere. To homosexuality, to trust, whatever. In terms of identity politics, there are so many aspects. In terms of society, access to health, education, knowledge, many things.

Of course, there’s always a battle to be had. So there are always people who are born into something they didn’t ask for, they didn’t deserve. So there is always going to be victims, not out of choice, but out of undeserved misfortune. And because of that, there is a sense of victimhood. But to stay in that identity position plays exactly into woke and identity politics. And it ignores economic realities, class realities, health realities, and maybe other things as well. It ignores the role of women in other societies. You know? Douglas Murray gives the example of, you know, well, if a woman committed adultery, you know, Jesus Christ would say, well, what’s the phrase? Show me the first man who has not committed a sin, let him cast a first stone. That’s very different to adultery in Islam. Kill her. You know? So Murray gives the examples, and many, many others. There’s a kind of moral working happening here. But going deeper, it’s about where is the victim located and how do they cope with being, seeing themselves and positioning the identity as, I’m more victim than you. Because I have MS, am I entitled to say I’m more of a victim than you are? You grew up with no money, or you grew up as a woman in Saudi Arabia, or you grew up in, as a person in Syria, whose whole family got wiped out. Or Ukrainian, whatever. We can go on and on and on and on. Okay? I don’t have the right to say I’m more of a victim. Or if I do, I’m stuck in identity politics, persona, which goes way back to the binary. It also gives a sense of ironic power, because if I claim that I am the victim, I can say, hang on, I’ve got the power.

I can challenge you, because I am part of the oppressed. You are the oppressor. And everything you do, whether you teach me, you know, the great dead white men of the Enlightenment, of Voltaire, Rousseau, who suffered, by the way, and were kicked out of France, for their ideas, and other things, and Diderot and many others, of Locke and Hume, whether it’s all of that, I dismiss it, because it’s, you know, because it’s dead, white, and the colour of his skin. It gives a sense of power to actually be a victim, ironically. And that’s a terrible irony of human nature. There is also a sense of identity of self and a sense of belonging to a larger group. 'Cause now I’m part of a bigger group, you know, and we are all part of woke in the sense. Okay. And the need to belong, of course, is very, very important. Going back to the idea of education. What is the role of education in all of this? Well, it shouldn’t be to simply repeat binaries. 'Cause this all feeds back to the binary idea. Teach us about the Enlightenment. Teach us about what it means to be a victim, what it means to be superior. What is a moral? What isn’t a moral? What is morality itself? What is identity, for that matter? And when an argument becomes positioned in the beginning by the identity of the person, not just the content of whether they argue the earth is flat or the earth is round, that starts to set up a fascinating distinction between a Socratic dream, ideal, of education, challenge, debate, question, argue, and the self-censorship that Rikki Schlott talks about, that she talks about in the book, “The Cancelling of the American Mind.” Okay, if we can go on to the next slide, please.

So, the moral arms race. And I love this phrase, 'cause I think it is partly true, not entirely. Again, I never want to forget the Marcus Garvey origins, which point to social justice and human rights, not only coming out of the Enlightenment, but coming out of the horrors of slavery in America, and elsewhere. But I want to, you know, again, not baby with the bathwater. When I talk about the moral arms race, H.G. Wells, “Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.” It’s an extraordinary image. And one of the great phrases. Because when we feel indignation, it’s actually jealousy. We are envious of something somebody has that we don’t have. It’s envy, it’s so powerful as a drive in human nature. Erich Fromm, the fascinating German sociologist/psychologist who got out of Germany in the early part of the Nazi period, “Moral indignation permits envy to be acted out under the skies of virtue.” It could have been a phrase from Robespierre, you know, in the French revolution, “Virtue”, was the great phrase. Well, moral indignation permits envy to be acted out. “Self-interest often masquerade as righteous indignation.” There’s a variation of an Oscar Wilde phrase at the bottom there, because we can’t forget, that it’s also about getting power. It’s a way of a person getting power through their identity politics as opposed to merit or how good they do the job, or how well they fix my car, the mechanic, or how well they bake the bread, or how well they sell buildings, or how well they run a hotel, or how well they’re the coach of a football team. You know, the professionalism and merit of doing the job well, it’s masked when identity politics and identity persona comes to the fore.

If we can go on to the next slide, please. So this is, also, well, he goes into a hell of a lot, in his book, Murray, “The War on the West.” I spoke a lot about identity politics. Critical race theory. And what’s interesting about critical race theory is that it creates that lens where the world is interpreted through one lens. So again, the identity politic, it’s the identity, my identity is perceived only through being disabled. I am only a disabled person, because I have MS. So, everybody sees me through that lens. And more importantly, I see myself through that lens. So I’m not a human being or a man or an individual or anything else. I’m seen through one lens. And that can relate to gender, as happened to J.K. Rowling, and the debate, you know, I don’t want to get into it now, you know, around trans and male and female, et cetera. It can relate to race, obviously, to class, where a person is only seen through their race. I’m Indian, I’m Hindu, I’m Muslim, or religion, you know, where the person is primarily seen through that, in critical race theory, that is the lens. It’s not how good or bad they are at mathematics or studying literature or writing literature or anything else, or fixing a car. That’s the problem. It comes back to the binary of a singular lens. Not only how the society will see an individual, but how the individual sees themselves and defines themselves.

Of course, it goes through, and that’s part of the woke idea, and it’s linked with a political idea and activism and in an educational context, is my problem. When this idea of woke is put into an educational context, it means that the world is seen through that lens and that lens only. It would be equal if I could only see the world through Einstein’s lens of, and nothing else was allowed, I had to see it through the curvature of space and time, and whether light is a particle or a wave, I cannot see light in any other way. No metaphor is allowed, no poetry, no other thing would be allowed. I would have to see it through only the scientific way and no other way. That’s the logical extension. So, this links to a kind of a witch hunt, like Arthur Miller shows in “The Crucible.” It becomes a witch hunt. It becomes a hunt for anyone who disagrees with me is wrong, is bad. I am right and I am righteous. I’m the righteous person. My religion is right. My race is right. I’m taller and you’re shorter, therefore, I’m good, you’re bad, whatever it might be. Okay? And he goes into all of this. That’s the problem. It’s the lens through which the society sees the person and the person sees themselves. When you apply for a job. When you meet somebody. When we have conversations out of an educational context. And when that, it’s one thing out of an educational context. It can be personal and jokes and laugh and tease and play with stereotypes, do whatever we want.

But in an educational context, it becomes tricky, because it means that that lens dictates knowledge and learning. It means I can’t think another way. I can only think in one way. As Rikki Schlott says in the book, “The Cancelling of the American Mind”, “I had to self-censor myself at university.” Okay, a couple of things around, that I want to give you, of groomed ignorance, for example, which relates a little bit to religion here, because I can say also, you know, my religion’s perfect and your religion’s, whatever, we can go on and on about it. In 2016, 50% of all Brits had said they hadn’t heard of Vladimir Lenin. 70%, 2016. 70% said they hadn’t heard of Mao Tse-Tung. This is in Britain. In America, in 2020, two-thirds of Americans aged between 18 and 39, quote, “Had no idea that six million Jews were murdered or killed in the Holocaust.” Nearly 50% of the same age, 18 to 39, nearly 50% could not give the name of one concentration camp in the Second World War. So what education are we doing? What are we doing? Who are we? That we are educating people to see the world in one lens of the binary, not only critical race theory, it can be other things as well. We are not giving them other things. And I know obviously many people watching are Jewish, but I’m using this as an example, so am I, obviously, as one example of one of the most horrific acts, not only of the 20th century, not only of Judaism, but in human history.

One of the most evil, criminal acts. So many young people don’t know, it’s not their fault. They’re being groomed to be ignorant, under the name of righteous education. So, if we go on, we can say, you know, the debates in England at the moment around Churchill, well, was Churchill, because he was pro-empire and because he believed in, you know, an empire and what the British empire would bring to the world, et cetera, et cetera. So the defacement of his statutes in London, in Westminster, one of my great, great idols, and I’m going to use that word thoughtfully, one of the greatest individuals who ever lived, I think. Not only a great writer, but a great leader, but a great thinker. Everything, he understood, history, yeah, everything. Churchill. Because he believed in empire, I have the right to deface his statue? Okay, he believed in the empire, but he also happened to be the leader who helped to save the world from living under the swastika. The swastika would be flying on top of, you know, the Library of Congress, on top of Westminster Parliament, on top of the Arc de Triomphe, on top of so many places around the world, the swastika would be flying, if it hadn’t been for an individual like that.

So let’s get a little balanced and a little nuanced, which is what I’m saying, as opposed to seeing Churchill through one lens. Cecil John Rhodes, the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, you know, and I don’t want to get into too much detail, I don’t want to get into the politics of it, but Mandela put his name to it, The Mandela-Rhodes Scholarship. I have ex-students from Wits who got that scholarship. Rhodes Must Fall. So everything Rhodes did, and he did terrible things, there’s no question. Churchill did some terrible things. Churchill ordered the killing of certain people in England itself, of the working class, Gallipoli, Churchill, nightmare, not only responsible, but part of a terrible decision and badly planned attack, which killed thousands in the First World War. But, let’s, in an educational way, explore the whole picture, baby and the bathwater. And the same with Rhodes and Rhodes Must Fall. Of course, he’s an empire builder. Of course, he’s one of the great empire, one of the richest, yeah, et cetera, et cetera, all of that. But he also donated huge amounts to university, didn’t have to, could have kept the money in his own pocket. And Mandela putting his name to it, so so many others can benefit post-apartheid. Now we’ve got to look at this in a little bit more of a complex way, in an educational lens, not just through the persona of one lens, which unfortunately is what woke has become. what Marcus Garvey intended to be, “Wake up black people, get out of slavery, get out of victimhood, all of that, demand, take your equal rights, get your vote”, everything, et cetera, et cetera, and Lead Belly in the song, et cetera, you know. What it has become, through this intersectionality, putting together of everybody who’s ever felt oppression under one thing.

And the last thing I want to just talk a little bit about here is the idea of gratitude and resentment. Now, this is fascinating, what Murray goes into in his book, “The War on the West.” And he gives the example in the beginning, of Dostoevsky, in the beginning of his book, Dostoevsky talks about gratitude as being the most, and I’m paraphrasing, being one of the hardest emotions, how hard it is to give gratitude, to simply say thank you. It may be a person has given us something unbelievably, just to say thank you. Or it may be a gesture of kindness to somebody who’s homeless on the street. It may be giving an extra couple of bucks to somebody who doesn’t have the money for a McDonald’s hamburger. Whatever it is. It can be helping somebody who’s lost, heaven forbid, a child, a parent, a spouse, who’s gone through terrible loss themselves, of health, of anything. A moment of compassion and kindness. Gratitudes. And it’s the subject, let’s not forget, of King Lear. We go back to Shakespeare. You know, the ungrateful children he talks about, he rages against the two daughters when he realises what Goneril and Regan have done. And Cordelia is the good one. She simply says, “I love you, it should be enough.” The others go on and on and flatter. She just shows very simple, and he realises and he learns gratitude at the end of King Lear.

And resentment, which I want to talk about here, very, very briefly, what Douglas Murray talks about, which is part of the woke culture in his argument in “The War on the West”, his argument here. Resentment comes from the idea of Nietzsche. Nietzche argues that resentment is one of the lowest and worst traits of human beings, whether it’s culture or human nature or a mixture. But the need to be resentful, to blame. I blame the Jews for losing the First World War. It was so powerful, that argument. I blame these people because they colonised me. I blame these people because I’m short. I blame these people because I got divorced. We can go on and on and on. Resentment, blaming, leads to shaming, become part of a group that are blamers and resenters. We’re never at fault. It’s always the other. Again, we go back to moral arms race, moral superiority. I’m better. I’m right. I’m fine. I blame you for my problem. I am resentful towards you because you caused me my downfall or whatever else. And Nietzsche puts that at the lowest rung of human nature. It’s interesting. And Douglas Murray talks about it quite a bit in the book, that resentment and blaming are so vicious, and successful, and so effective in human society and in human nature.

And unfortunately, it feeds, goes straight back to what I said in the beginning, the blaming and the shaming game that is played under the word woke. From its golden origin, from Marcus Garvey and Lead Belly and others, to a very tarnished way of seeing the world now. And this resentment and this blaming has led to so much of settler, colonial, apartheid, one phrase, has led to, no matter what, you know, Einstein said, “You’ll always be seen as a Jew. You know, whether you’re this or you’re that, a Swiss, a German, or whatever, you’re Jewish. Forget the, the rest is, you know, will come, is after. And Sartre, even, in the "Anti-Semite and the Jew”, you know, it’s what the world sees, the Jew, first, that’s it. It can be other people in a similar way. Short. That’s it. Tall. That’s it. You know, pretty, ugly, whatever. Back to the binary. Okay, the very last slide, if I can just have a quick look, please. Thank you. So are we in a return to what George Orwell feared, what he sensed was coming, groupthink, where freedom is slavery, where right is wrong. Where one word means the opposite of, you know, of the other. Are we moving into an Orwellian period? To quote James Joyce at the beginning of “Ulysses”, “History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.” Interesting he uses the word awake, same as Marcus Garvey all those years ago, and James Joyce living in a similar period, writing in a similar period in the twenties, thirties. “History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.”, the opening line of Joyce’s masterpiece, “Ulysses.” George Washington, “If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led like sheep to the slaughter.”

We have to have freedom of speech. If we don’t, we only see the world through one lens of one persona, and that’s the danger of what I’m talking about today. This is from Solzhenitsyn from “The Gulag Archipelago”, “The line separating good and evil passes right through every human heart.” Let’s never forget, I’m not right because I’m on this side of the woke argument and you’re on that side. Good and evil passes through every human heart. And Solzhenitsyn, certainly a writer I certainly utterly admire and adore. But, I think it’s in all. And it’s up to the role of education, in terms of woke and cancel culture, to show us the nuance of non-binary thinking, in order to free the mind, to think in new ways, different ways, invent, create, inspire, be poetic, write, do different things, follow a dream. All the origins of the Enlightenment. Follow whatever you can as a human being and achieve it. Try. The worst that can happen is you fail. So that dream of the Enlightenment, that dream of what a liberal, what an education is meant to be, could perhaps come back a little. And we don’t have to have an ending like all, could thought might happen. Okay, thanks very much. I’m going to hold it there. Sorry for going slightly over. And we can go into questions. Okay. Oh, there’s a lot of questions. That’s great.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Thanks. Myrna. Is woke and cancel peculiar to North America?

A: No, I don’t think so. I certainly think, certainly the English speaking countries, England, as much as I know of Australia, New Zealand, and many other countries around the world definitely have taken the phrase.

Q: Can you please define woke and cancel?

A: I think I’ve gone into woke a lot. It would take another whole lecture to go into cancel. But one thing I will say about cancel culture, 'cause you’ve asked me, this is Pony, is when we see the lens through one perspective, I no longer need to argue whether the, say the debate is, is the earth flat or round? I don’t need to argue that anymore because I just see your identity politics persona. You’re a short, green martian. That’s it. I don’t need to engage in the debate. I’ve already cancelled you because of your identity politics persona. That’s how cancel culture works.

Annette. Having also acted as external examiner in a number of universities and been put in the spot also to identify my status. We have been given the option. Okay, that’s great. Well that’s great. I was surprised that I was told I had to. I wasn’t given an option in that situation, Annette, but that’s great. Thanks for sharing that. Appreciate it.

Q: Arlene. Can you explain why some speech, which was considered inflammatory in the days of growing up are not exonerated as free speech. Why did screaming “Fire” in a crowded room become okay, even commendable?

A: I can’t, that I need to go back into the legal changes, because they would be legal definitions, Arlene, and I don’t want to pretend. So I need to get back to you on that. Thank you. It’s a great, great question. I think it has to do, incitement to violence and violent acts, as opposed to disagreement. But I need to find the legal understanding of that and how it’s changed. Polly, the musician, I know Lead Belly, that’s what I also thought. And I always thought that his name was just one word, Leadbelly. But after looking through the lens of the God of Google, Google kept informing me that it was two words. So I chose, under Orwellian groupthink, to go with the God of Google, and go with two words. But thanks.

Gerald. Read Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain”, absolutely. Superb book. On a true episode of Princeton, yeah. And superb movie that was made of the book, as you say, Gerald. To students who hadn’t attended the class, exactly. There’s books and ghosts in everything you say here. This was my brother-in-law. Oh, almost lost his job. That’s extraordinary. There’s an incredible community that’s been, that Wendy and Trudy have created here on Lockdown. I mean, you’re sharing a story. That was Philip Roth took the idea for his novel. That’s brilliant. Thanks for that, Gerald. Annette. When you say goodies and baddies or good and bad, can you please clarify? According to whom? For whom? And what we? Well, I just mean it in terms of the binary. You know, I think I went into quite a lot of detail of who’s superior, inferior, civilised, primitive, right, wrong, you know, would all fall under one category of goodie and the other seeing the other as baddie. Karen, underlying motivation for identity politics is exclusivity versus inclusivity. Yes. One group has to be in and the other out. Or in with the in crowd. Yeah, that’s a great point, Karen. Inclusivity, I mean diversity, inclusivity, absolutely, and equity. So it’s inclusivity. Exactly. And that sets up, you know, I’m in or I’m out, which goes back to the binary, which is really the origin of it all.

Thanks, Karen.

Q: Myrna. In a ways is this not how Hitler viewed the world?

A: Oh, absolutely. Without knowing the terms. Yeah. And this goes way back, that’s why, and it’s a great point you’re making, Mona, that’s why Socrates, Plato, we go way back to the ancient Greeks, they argued what is education? What is it to be in a symposia, you know, that in their word, you know? And it was to debate and argue and challenge and question. And out of that philosophy, the whole of Western civilization of education grew. They were the first to argue all of this stuff. It’s not evidenced. We don’t have it written down in any other culture. Maybe there were other cultures, I don’t know. But they were the first to put down and that’s why we refer back to them so often. And interestingly, we refer back to the philosophy of Athens and ancient Greeks, of these people. That’s what it means. Exactly. Which is very different to the terms today. I’m not sure who this is, Zen-zi, perhaps you’ll address my concern, but how did the current antisemitism Israel become worldwide leaving Jews, leaving Jews in Israel on the, I’m not sure of this. On the, okay. I’m not sure, if you could email me maybe, through Lockdown, the question, just not sure what you mean here. Thank you. Sue.

Q: What is your opinion of books such as “Woke Antisemitism” by David Bernstein, the progressive ideology harming Jews?

A: Well, absolutely. I mean, Douglas Murray points out, you know, you know, how many Syrian, over half a million Syrians have been killed, but does anybody walked in the streets, marched in the streets? How many, we can go on and on and on and on, the Rwandan, you know, we can go on and on and on, the Holocaust, you know? But have there been marches everywhere all the time? Tents put up again and again? Everything, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s because it all feeds into this one, you know, which I tried to link this with the settler, colonial apartheid discussion that I had, you know, some weeks ago.

Q: Okay, Janie. “The Identity Trap”, it’s a very intellectual, theoretical book. Insights?

A: Okay. I don’t his theory. That’s interesting. Thanks for that, Janie. I’ll have a look at the book. But thanks for alerting me to it. Michael. What do you think is the relationship between the size of an economy and the cost of providing all the freedoms, rights, benefits, privileges, democracies aspire to? Ah. Well, that’s a very important question. The size of an economy, the GDP, I would have to get much, I would need to do research on GDP of different countries, but I don’t know how I would link the GDP. It’s a fascinating question, Michael, thank you. How to link GDP to being able to afford all these rights and freedoms and privileges of democracies? But, even if they could do some, it’s a start.

Stan. Thank you. Very kind comment. Vaneer. One physician in Israel said at the beginning of corona, “Corona’s not a plague. The only plague is the social media.” Yeah, I mean, that’s the metaphor. And playing probably with Albert Camus’ book, called “The Plague”, which he used as a metaphor for, you know, what happens when society, functions of society break down and what happens? How do humans react and respond under such a situation? But it’s a metaphor of the book. And perhaps the person you mean implied it in that way

Q: Shelly. On the concept of victimhood, do away with any concept of free choice?

A: Yes. Great point, Shelly. Because if I only see myself through the lens of victim, I can’t have free choice, can I? My only option is to call you or my only option would be to call the other person my conqueror, my destroyer, my victim maker, whichever we want. Exactly. Binary again.

Q: Brian. Can I be jealous of not being a victim?

A: That’s a great question. That’ll make a fantastic satire, actually, being a lover of theatre and satire. You can be jealous of not being, that’d be a fantastic idea, to not be a victim. It’s a little bit, there’s a brilliant satire about Dario Fo, the Italian playwright who won the Nobel Prize, one of the very few playwrights to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Dario fo wrote a play, “Accidental Death of an Anarchist”, where the character portrays himself as the victim in a very satirical, comical way. And jealous of the police and everybody else who, you know, all the others that he creates in this fictional world of satire. It’s a great idea, though, Brian.

Brenda. To identify as a victim is actually the renouncing of personal power and self-determination. Exactly. You know, everything the Enlightenment thinkers tried to fight against, and they did suffer, Voltaire, Rousseau, I mean, they didn’t have an easy, you know, they like, I mean they were going against the king, divine rule of kings and against the church. I mean they, you know, they didn’t have an easy time of it, that’s for sure. Yes, and they were all about in the end, individual rights to determine at least to a degree, my life, my choices. Val. Thank you. It’s very helpful. Thank you. Very kind.

Myrna. CRT is taught only in law school in the US, somehow someone groom on the, glommed on to the phrase. There you go. Okay Well thanks very much. Okay. I just want to say again that, you know, it’s not that, again, we need to look at the origins with Marcus Garvey, which are brilliant, and Lead Belly. You know, it’s how the baby and the bathwater, how the thing can boomerang back on itself, as with anything. Yehuda. Decolonization is an aspect of the obsession with identity. Regarding education, that sits naturally in the humanities, but has entered STEM too. For example, the equitable math project incredibly tells teachers that expecting the correct answer is right, well, I didn’t know that, but that’s extraordinary. Yehuda, thanks for sharing that. Microaggressions. Well, that’s a point which I didn’t have time to go into, but I certainly have been exposed to it, not myself, but others have told me in university context, in Australia, America and Britain, of microaggression, a glance, a hint, a tone, and unconscious bias as well. So all of these things become part of the, can become part of the woke culture.

Q: Beverly. Will the mechanism of woke mature?

A: That’s a fascinating idea, Beverly. Could it mature to eventually exist without victimhood? That would be brilliant. That would be part of the original intention of Garvey and Lead Belly and so many others. Are woke and cancel culture serving as a means for America to deal with its unresolved history of slavery? Yeah, I think it is partly. Definitely. And Murray, again, in his book, goes into that in a lot of detail. But it’s not, it’s slavery not only in America, but slavery in colonisation of a couple of centuries throughout the world. I mean Europe, Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Britain, obviously, many countries colonising and having slavery, and in America obviously. So that’s where it began. But the question is where it’s now moved through and to. That’s what I was trying to get at today.

Rita, thank you. It was very kind comment. Richard. I believe Hunt’s introduction of critique of pure reason, yeah, opened the way for multiple identities. Yes. Which identity matters most at a PhD defence? Is your standing as an impartial academic, whether you belong to a category that prejudge you, who doesn’t, yeah, everybody does prejudge. But in a professional category, I would hope that I take my car to a guy who is, a man or a woman, who is a mechanic who is going to fix my car. I don’t particularly want to get bananas from him or her. I want him to fix my car. If I want to get bananas, I go somewhere else. So if I’m asked to be an external examiner on a PhD, I expect that persona of my identity, not others. Now, there is a fascinating post-colonial theorist, Stuart Hall, it’s a brilliant one. He just passed away fairly recently. And he talked about identity is constantly shifting and changing because history shifts and changes. And that’s one idea I was hoping to capture today, but didn’t have time. But it’s a fascinating variation in post-colonial theory, that identity is shifting, changing, because history itself is always changing. And so we’ve got to accommodate, and it’s such a nuanced, intelligent, educational way of thinking about the word identity. Oh yeah.

Thanks, Nadine. Marcia, thank you. Paula, thank you. If you want me to send the names of the books, if you’d like to, if you want, there will be on the website because the lecture will be on the website, or if you want to email me through Lockdown, then I can send you the titles and authors of the books. Pleasure. Ellen, thank you. Rod. The original intention of woke has morphed into a biassed, self-fulfilling notion. Yeah. That’s the way of putting it, Rod, absolutely. Okay, Robert, thank you. Lorna, thank you. You are very, very kind. Really appreciate. Resentment lives rent free in the mind. That’s a fantastic quote, Lorna. Thank you. Nietzche would certainly agree. Sansi. The worst thing that can happen is you can’t fail. In today’s world that can result in the individual, God forbid, God forbid, I agree. Toronto District School Board has adopted DEI at work. My son, a math high school teacher was told math is racist. His rebuttal was ignored. Dissent makes him a racist. Yep. You see, when it’s all seen through the lens of one persona identity, back to the binary, that’s the problem. The earth is flat, the earth is round. And we cannot discuss Robert. The Talmudic tradition. Yep. Which is so much more nuanced and debate and question and it’s fantastic, the Talmudic tradition, with so many ideas and so many rabbis and endless, thousands of years of debate and discussion. Does it mean this? does it mean that? And you know, did Moses, whatever, you know? It’s part of the fantastic tradition, I think, of Judaism. Robin. So is the movement for DEI alive in educational? Well, it’s alive in certain ways that academics are often told they’ve got to incorporate it into whatever, you know, for example, if I teach Richard III, I would have to give trigger warnings, and that’s the official phrase.

And I would have to be very hesitant before I use the word Richard III was what is known as a hunchback in those days, I would have to say he was disabled, probably with a problem with his back. If I was writing a play about myself, you know, you can get the point. We can go on and on and on and on. Okay. I’d have to think carefully how to talk about Macbeth. I’d have to give a trigger warning. Two children are killed, you know, Banquo’s sons, a couple of ghosts appear, and Macbeth kills five or six people, quite a few, before he can become king. I’d have to warn them, there’s murder. There’s murder of children. There’s, you know, a regicide. I’d have to warn in triggers before. Honey. A question, is it doing any good? Well I think as the point was made earlier, the origins are great. and let’s hope that it doesn’t turn more Orwellian, but that we can get it a bit back to what it was intended to be by Marcus Garvey and others.

Q: Isn’t it human nature to defend and prefer the same as you?

A: It is, but in an educational context is what I’m really talking about here. And that’s the difference. I think it’s not to necessarily defend, but to argue, debate, discuss, be creative, accept another opinion even if I don’t agree or question or another thought, whether I agree or not. Ralph. Jonathan Turley in his book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage”, provides a beautiful analysis. That’s great. Thank you.

Q: Michael. Would you say the Jews were the first to question and argue?

A: Yeah. Abraham to Moses, you know? Abraham , you know, why do I have to take my son and you know, come on? Why are you testing me God and challenging and testing and I’ve got to kill my son to prove how much I love you, God. I mean it’s right there at the beginning of Judaism. It’s a challenge. It’s a question to God. It’s not just accepting whatever. Thanks. Edmund. What about deconstructivists’ historian who really only influence? Oh that’s, sure. That’s interesting. But well I’m going to hold on that for the moment for, that’s for another time.

Q: Sharon. Could woke be associated with guilt?

A: Yes. I think Sharon, that’s an interesting point. Really fascinating. I would link it to guilt. Certainly this is the generation that never fought a war. Vietnam, yes. Terrible. Iraq, other wars. But I’m not arguing whether they were politically right or wrong choices or whether politically they were valid or invalid wars. But a war on the level of the Second World War has not happened. So the coddling of the American mind, where Jonathan Haidt and others speak about, I think maybe one, it’s a question if one can link it to, you know, when people face real hardship, what would happen to it, to the question of woke? Emmeline, thank you. It’s very kind. Rhonda, you’re very kind. Many of you here. Robert. Perhaps a healthy evolution is what Martin Luther King articulated. Yeah, definitely. Well he and others definitely, yep. Honey, thank you. Gerald. You’re very kind. He said only a disabled person should play Richard in the future. Yeah, well, as a legally defined person of disabled, the Equality Act of 2010 in Britain, I would disagree. An actor’s job professionally is to act. You don’t have to have murdered in order to act Macbeth. You don’t have to have been a 21-year-old philosophy student at the University of Wittenberg, who is then thrown into a dictatorship called Denmark to act Hamlet. You don’t have to have been a childless wife of a general to act Lady Macbeth.

So why do you have to only be disabled to only act Richard? It’s not the job description. The job is to act, in my personal opinion. Cecilia, I’d be able to teach Richard III. Well, with trigger warnings, I think, you can teach, yeah. Cecilia, Michael, thank you. So thank you very much, everybody, for your kind comments and thank you for all your questions. Fascinating. And Judy, thank you so much for all your help to get today ready and really appreciate. And Wendy, thanks so much. And Trudy.