Humans are a very disagreeable species.

Therefore, it is important when speaking about the ‘Marketplace of Ideas’ to separate these two things:

1. The material reality that any society formed of humans will be a society in which a variety of ideas will proliferate, humans will perpetually try to convince others of their ideas, disagreement about these ideas will nonetheless persist, factions will form around those disagreements, and conflict between these factions will ensue, resulting in constant cultural change and, often, bloodshed.
2. The liberal system for managing that conflict, minimising the bloodshed, and steering inevitable cultural change through pluralistic (live and let live) norms and democratic systems by protecting freedom of belief and speech, disallowing authoritarian coercion, and encouraging open debate with an expectation that arguments will be honest, civil, reasoned, and evidenced.

It is important to distinguish these two concepts because there are always some people who believe that, if they do away with the liberal system that protects the free exchange of ideas, they will also somehow do away with viewpoint diversity itself. This is utterly false. Unless homo sapiens somehow changes radically from the big-brained, combative, cooperative, tribal, territorial, social mammals that we are, we are stuck with the material reality of the Marketplace of Ideas. From school children negotiating the scope of an imaginary game to leaders of political parties trying to win voters, we will always be in the business of selling ideas and deciding which ideas to buy into. We cannot help ourselves. I’m doing it right now and so are you.

The liberal system of the Marketplace of Ideas can, of course, be changed. It has not been in operation at all for most of recorded history, is not in operation in many places even now, and has never been upheld perfectly anywhere. Liberal democracies that seek, in principle, to protect freedom of belief and speech, value viewpoint diversity, and actively encourage the free exchange and critique of ideas with an expectation of rationality and the use of evidence are relatively new developments of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) societies. WEIRD countries have always struggled to do this fully in practice, although their attempts have resulted in greater advances in knowledge and human rights than were known previously or that exist in countries that have not attempted any such system. It has been much more common for a dominant ruling power to decide what may or may not be said and by whom and to penalise disobedience under concepts like ‘treason’, ‘heresy’, ‘apostasy’, and ‘blasphemy’.

It may well be that it is fundamentally counterintuitive for us to allow other people to be morally or factually wrong or to see anything to be gained from having a variety of contradictory viewpoints or having these viewpoints do battle with each other when we think we know what is true and good. Even when well-established liberal democracies are doing comparatively well at remaining open to viewpoint diversity, we are always having to fight against people who want to make some things unspeakable and some truth claims unquestionable. They often do so with the best of intentions: to eradicate ideas that are hurtful or untrue and to stop them from being circulated in society and doing harm to people.

If you are a compassionate human being who is absolutely sure that God exists and that the consequences for being wrong about that are an eternity in Hell, why wouldn’t you do everything in your power to stop the contrary from being argued? You will be saving lives—more, you will be saving immortal souls. Alternatively, if you see absolutely no reason to consider the proposition that God exists as a serious one and much evidence of harm being done by people who think otherwise, why allow them to continue spreading that belief? Surely trying to stamp out the conviction that one knows the divine will of the creator of the universe is what will really save lives?

Or: ‘Why allow people to misgender a trans person when it is so easy to just use their stated pronouns and could make all the difference to the emotional wellbeing of a vulnerable minority group and even reduce suicide? It costs so little to the speaker to use certain words, while having one’s gender identity recognised means so much to the trans individual,’ a trans activist will argue. Alternatively, a gender critical feminist may ask, ‘Why let people use wrong sex pronouns when it is this very failure to consistently recognise biological sex classes that underlies very real threats to women’s spaces and sports and children’s mental and physical health? Protecting people’s right to choose their own words comes at the cost of protecting safety and fairness for women and obtaining evidence-based treatment for gender-confused kids.’

‘Fine’, some dogmatic materialists will argue, ‘but the whole God thing has never been definitively established and the sex/gender issue includes political disagreements about whether to acknowledge a self-professed gender identity or insist on identifying people by biological sex. To some extent these can be considered open questions or matters of opinion. What about when people are saying things that are just straightforwardly untrue? What is there to be gained from letting people deny the Holocaust? We know that happened and remembering it is essential to ensuring it never happens again. Why let people claim the world is 6,000 years old and humans were created as humans when we know it is far older and that we evolved from earlier species as surely as we can know anything? Vital fields of science rely on these basic realities about the physical world and biological organisms. Why let people claim that vaccines cause autism when the problems with that original study have been demonstrated so clearly and further evidence refutes this claim as decisively as it is possible to refute anything? Why should freedom of belief and speech include the freedom to misinform others in ways that put children’s lives at risk?’

There are three reasons to protect freedom of speech and belief and keep the liberal system known as the ‘Marketplace of Ideas’ open to ideas that are subversive, hurtful, and untrue.

Firstly, we can never be entirely certain that we know what is true. Even when something is supported by mountains of evidence so vast that it is incredibly unlikely that it will ever be falsified, we must always keep open the opportunity for someone to falsify it, because every so often, they do. In an example contributed to my and James Lindsay’s book Cynical Theories by Alan Sokal, we cite John Stuart Mill making the argument that we can only be so confident of the truth of Newtonian physics because it has withstood so many attempts to find flaws in it. Less than 50 years after Mill made this argument, Albert Einstein found flaws in Newtonianism and introduced us to special relativity (soon followed by general relativity). We must leave that door open, on principle.

Secondly, we can never know how the power to make exceptions to laws and social norms for freedom of belief and speech will be used in the future as different governments take power and different ideologies rise and fall. The only way you can protect yourself from censorship if a shift occurs in which your own ideas are considered appalling and deemed unspeakable by those with legal or social power is to consistently protect the right to express ideas that you find appalling. Atheists and religious and sexual minorities are among those whose expressions of views or attractions have been deemed most appalling and penalised most severely, so it is particularly disappointing when they justify censorship on the grounds of offence.

Thirdly, even if it were ethical to shut down freedom of belief and speech in this way (it isn’t) and even if wannabe censors could be trusted to identify, correctly and consistently, bad or false ideas (they can’t), this simply won’t work. No attempts to regulate free thought have ever been successful. That is why we have 45,000 denominations of Christianity even though Christian authorities have been among the most stringent in enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy. Having ideas and disagreeing about them is what humans do. I repeat: we cannot close down the material reality of the Marketplace of Ideas. We can only close down the liberal system for managing it in ways that make it maximally productive and minimally violent. When people attempt to shut down certain ideas by making them unspeakable, either socially or legally, we see the emergence of alternative marketplaces of ideas, including black markets where the ugliest and most hateful ideas can fester unchecked.

When attempts to ‘cancel’ certain ideas from mainstream society and make them unspeakable or ‘not up for debate’ are imposed socially rather than legally and there are enough people who hold them, we will see the growth of alternative media. We saw this with the Critical Social Justice ‘woke’ phenomenon. As those who held views that ran counter to Critical Social Justice were removed from mainstream institutions and platforms for airing opinions and debating ideas, a complex network of alternative media began to form and grow—an Alternative Marketplace of Ideas. Podcasts, talk shows, think tanks, magazines, and even an academic journal and a university all dedicated to airing the ideas that could not be discussed in mainstream outlets proliferated at an astonishing rate.

While some of these were and are very good and provide thoughtful and balanced coverage of issues and attempt to include a wide variety of ideas, including Critical Social Justice ones, the cultural problem that drove their formation resulted in serious limitations. Fear of being ‘cancelled’ or of ‘guilt by association’ limited the range of guests such alternative outlets could attract and consequently the conversations they could have. Critical Social Justice activists who took a ‘not up for debate’ stance would certainly not come. With the best will in the world, echo chambers formed as various clusters of alternative media could only attract certain ideological subsets of guests and had great difficulty in including enough viewpoint diversity to balance and challenge each others’ ideas effectively.

In addition to this problem, many platforms did not operate with the best will in the world but deliberately chose highly biased and partisan speakers who would reinforce and escalate each other’s ideas to new extremes. Much of this was exacerbated by the funding structure required to operate this kind of alternative media, which incentivised ‘audience capture’ as platforms needed to feed increasingly biased and partisan audiences what they wanted to hear so they could remain solvent. All the ideas that had existed in society still existed and were still accessible, but now they were siloed and people with different views were not speaking to each other. Without checks and balances, political polarisation, tribalism, paranoia, and extremism could only grow. (I recently discussed this problem in some detail with John Cleese.)

When attempts to silence ideas are imposed legally, so as to eradicate them from society, what will then form is a Black Market of Ideas. Historically, these have sometimes been very positive as when gay men, atheists, or religious minorities have used systems of codes and secret meeting places to connect and find solidarity, friendship, or romance. (Suppression was entirely useless at making any ideas or sexualities go away.) However, sometimes the ideas found on the Black Market can be genuinely dark and being forced underground can make them both more twisted and more enticing. The best description of this process, I would argue, is to be found in Greg Lukianoff and Nadine Strossen’s article asking whether censorship would have stopped the Nazis from gaining power. Lukianoff and Strossen track the effect of government censorship on the rise of Nazism, showing how crackdowns on publications and speech enabled the leaders of the fascist movement to use the (failed) attempts to censor them to their advantage:

‘[I]t is not surprising that the Nazis were able to spin government censorship into propaganda victories and seeming confirmation of their claims that they were speaking truth to power, and that power was aligned against them.’

We can see how this mentality manifests in the thinking of extremist groups that exist today, which can find each other much more easily via social media. Very Online conspiracy theorists who post that they are being silenced by global elites who do not want the people to know The Truth and who express radical suspicion of governments and expertise can take this paranoia into existential threat mode in the real world. There, they combine it with pre-existing prejudices to produce a volatile and violent mix of hatefulness, including anti-Semitism and ethnonationalism. Here is just one nasty example of this sort of thing, from a tweet: ‘Actually many Jews are behind the decline of western civilisation through their cultural marxist [sic] degeneracy like promoting Transgenderism [sic] etc. Jews love it when black [sic] & whites are at war with one another.’

We can also see how the least principled and balanced corners of the Alternative Marketplace of Ideas can tip into the Black Market of Ideas. This is a toxic brew of multiple, divided, and polarised marketplaces that is causing significant social dysfunction and escalating tribal tensions to a dangerous degree. It must be noted that attempts to remove ‘problematic’ ideas that run counter to those of Critical Social Justice from mainstream discourse have not caused any of them to go away. Instead, it has forced them into alternative forums where, in some cases, they have morphed into dark, extreme, and twisted variations of themselves due to the lack of productive, collaborative critique (as, in some ways, has happened to Critical Social Justice itself—see, for example, the embrace of Hamas terrorism by some of its advocates).

Those who believe we can somehow ever be without some form of a marketplace of ideas should look outside their ideological bubble and reacquaint themselves with our species. The only choice we have is how to manage the sheer range of different ideas and the need to argue about them that characterises homo sapiens. We could make the same mistake humans have made for most of history and allow a dominant moral orthodoxy to try to dictate an acceptable range of speaking points and socially or legally penalise all others out of existence. This will enable the proliferation of many mini-marketplaces of different groups speaking only among themselves, some proportion of which, without the benefit of counterviews and critiques, will surely go mad and generate highly biased, partisan, and polarising narratives. Meanwhile, extremist groups will be driven underground where they will paint themselves as the brave speakers of truth to oppressive power and attract increasing numbers of those who have gone mad due to being alienated from mainstream society. They will then become a danger to it.

Alternatively, we can decide to uphold the liberal system that protects the free exchange of ideas that has acted as the best system of conflict resolution and knowledge production that the world has ever known. We can keep a mainstream Marketplace of Ideas open to as many widely held views as possible to act as checks and balances to each other in a spirit of civil but robust debate. Society will benefit from the knowledge generated by this process, a process conducted with an expectation of evidenced and reasoned argument and through which institutions can be reformed via democratic processes and human rights and freedoms can be protected and advanced. Alternative media for special interests will still always exist but, without the pressure of cancel culture or guilt-by-association, it will also be able to attract and benefit from a wider range of views and thus be of additional value. At the same time, we can keep fringe and extreme views legally expressible where we can see them, get at them, counter them, and deny their advocates the glamour of claiming to be censored for speaking the truth that the powerful don’t want you to know. We can arrest those who threaten or commit violence and allow the rest to be clearly recognisable as pitiful fringe lunatics.

I strongly recommend we take the liberal route.

Further reading

Free speech at universities: where do we go from here? by Julius Weinberg

The Satanic Verses; free speech in the Freethinker, by Emma Park

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

Is all publicity good publicity? How the first editor of the Freethinker attracted the public’s attention, by Clare Stainthorp

On trial for blasphemy: the Freethinker’s first editor and offensive cartoons, by Bob Forder

‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie, by Emma Park

The return of blasphemy in Ireland and Is the spirit of liberty dead in Scotland? by Noel Yaxley

Race: the most difficult subject of all? Interview with Inaya Folarin Iman, by Emma Park

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

Milton’s ‘Areopagitica’: liberty and licensing, by Tony Howe

On sex, gender and their consequences: interview with Louise Antony, by Emma Park

The post The Marketplace of Ideas will always exist. The only choice we have is how to work with it. appeared first on The Freethinker.

In Why the Enlightenment Matters, Adam Wakeling sets himself the ambitious task of defining the shift in thinking known as the Enlightenment that occurred in northern and western Europe between 1600 and 1800, and explaining how it made much of the modern world what it is.

Prosperous nations now enjoy benefits unimaginable throughout most of history, such as advanced health care, respect for human rights, free speech, tolerance, democracy, material comfort, scientific knowledge, education, and a reduction in wars and barbaric punishments. The author’s central thesis is that this is due to the Enlightenment. Of course, things are far from perfect – famine, disease, poverty, and dictatorship are still widespread, and the Enlightenment has an ambivalent record when it comes to racism and slavery. But today’s world would have been unrecognisable to the people of sixteenth-century Europe, when the book’s story starts.

Wakeling begins his narrative in 1553, with the burning alive of the Spanish theologian Michael Servetus in Calvinist Geneva. Servetus had denied the Trinity, proclaiming to the very end that Jesus was ‘the Son of eternal God’ and not the ‘eternal Son of God’. John Calvin, who had once been Servetus’ friend, approved of the heretic’s execution. This was the pre-Enlightenment world. In the fourteen chapters that follow, the author takes us through the unfolding story of the extraordinary changes that took place in northern and western Europe between 1600 and 1800, and gives us his explanation of why and how they happened.

His account is admirably comprehensive in scope, rich in historical detail, and highly readable. This reviewer is not an historian, and other curious non-historians will learn much about the manifestations and effects of Enlightenment thinking. Their common themes are principally the challenges to spiritual and political authority, and the rise of science and innovation. They include the effect of the Protestant Reformation on the breakdown of centralised authority in northern and western Europe and its role in promoting literacy. From these came the growth of toleration in the Netherlands, despite the efforts of the Dutch Reformed Church. In seventeenth-century England there was the end of rule by ‘divine right’ of English monarchs after the Civil War, and the subsequent  growth of alternative justifications for government found in the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and especially John Locke. Scholastic natural law theory was modified to include rights to property and political rebellion. Developments in just war theory, especially by Hugo Grotius, had already been made urgent by the excesses of religious wars. The eighteenth century saw Adam Smith’s attempt to provide a ‘science of man’ and his role in the decline of mercantilism and the burgeoning of free trade.

Also discussed in learned detail is the history of the Enlightenment in France, where it arrived later than in the Netherlands, England and Scotland. We read of the eventual success of the Encyclopédie despite attempts to suppress or censor it, and the influence of Enlightenment ideas about the ‘Rights of Man’ on the French Revolution. Of course, the Revolution’s bloodthirsty descent into Terror, largely engineered by the fanatical Maximilien Robespierre, caused many to doubt the whole Enlightenment project.

Running parallel to these rich narratives of political changes and their attendant wars is an account of how the scientific method became established. Aristotle had already made patchy attempts at empirical enquiry into nature but had been hamstrung by his teleological theory. His ideas had become embedded in the Catholic Church’s teaching as doctrines, despite their originally provisional nature, and it was only when the Church’s authority began to fracture that Aristotelian science could be questioned. Francis Bacon exposed some ‘idols of the mind’: errors or cognitive biases such as the ‘gambler’s fallacy’, excessive reliance on personal experience, the miscommunication of correct ideas and the spread of false ideas through existing systems of philosophy. Such issues still make it hard to discern truth from prejudice in science. Yet it was only after the patient observations and hypotheses of Galileo, Kepler and Newton, in part while trying to explain the anomalous behaviour of planets, that the geocentric view of the universe was dislodged, and otherwise inexplicable celestial movements could eventually be explained in terms of a universal theory of gravitation.

Wakeling shows how religious authorities tried to obstruct scientific thinking, not only in Europe but further afield. In fifteenth century Samarkand, for instance, the Islamic authorities destroyed an observatory, and in sixteenth century Constantinople, a similarly impressive observatory was closed by the Sultan amid concerns that its founder, Taqi ad-Din, would be prosecuted for heresy. But for some reason, the Enlightenment prevailed in northern and western Europe, whereas the pockets of Enlightenment thinking that had sprung up in other places, such as the Ottoman Empire and India, never took off. Moreover, in the eighteenth century, the nations where the Enlightenment occurred began to overtake the rest of the world in technological knowledge and economic power, and in the nineteenth century brought massive improvements to the living standards of ordinary people.

The final chapter of the book is especially interesting and potentially controversial, as it explores why the Enlightenment was successful in Europe and north America but not elsewhere. It brings us back to the author’s account, given near the start of the book, of what the shift in thinking that defined the Enlightenment really amounted to. In his view, it consisted of five simple elements: recognition of the limits of reason, empirical thinking, toleration of dissent, universality, and progress. Of course, in a broad sense the Enlightenment was a rational project, in that its thinkers used reason to question authority and dogma. But they rejected the notion that pure reason could reach truths that, as it happened, only empirical methods could reveal. Once dogmas were questioned, dissent was inevitable, and the issue of toleration became unavoidable. Wakeling argues that it was precisely this shift in thinking that explains the success of the countries where the Enlightenment took root.

This is controversial, not only because fashionable post-colonial theory is suspicious of the Enlightenment, but also because some writers think the flourishing of Western civilisation is traceable to Greco-Roman times and Christianity.

Wakeling’s rebuttal of the latter notion is, in essence, that the Enlightenment’s empirical style of thinking and its toleration of dissent amounted to a radical break with the past. There was much that was bad about the Greco-Roman world, and much of the history of Christianity is one of intolerance.

In reply, one might say that it was the best features of the classical world, such as Greek democracy and philosophy that inspired Western civilisation, and that it was not so much Christianity as its connection to state power from the fourth century onward that explains why the Enlightenment took so long to occur. As Wakeling concedes, Jesus reportedly said that his Kingdom was not of this world, and Christians were persecuted in the Roman Empire until 313 AD. These questions are of course complex, but whether or not Christianity ultimately contributed to the Enlightenment, Wakeling is persuasive in arguing that the latter was almost certainly a major factor in Western success, due to its distinctive style of thought.

I highly recommend this book both for scholars and the general reader. It is a rare combination of erudition and lucidity; it makes its thesis plain from the outset and it sets out its evidence clearly and thoroughly. Since it is primarily an historical analysis, it does not respond to contemporary philosophical critiques of the Enlightenment, such as that of Alasdair MacIntyre. Some thinkers might regard the Enlightenment view of human nature as naïve and lacking in spiritual insights into our darkest flaws: a world of rights and prosperity may be lacking in love and humility. But for all that, the Enlightenment provided fertile soil for the better as well as the worse aspects of humanity, and readers will find this stimulating book an invaluable resource.

Adam Wakeling, Why the Enlightenment Matters: The shift in our thinking that made the modern world, is published by Australian Scholarly Publishing, May 2023.

See also Wakeling’s article for the Freethinker, Do we need God to defend civilisation?

The post The Enlightenment and the making of modernity appeared first on The Freethinker.

Following the barbaric terrorist attack of 7 October 2023 on innocent Israeli civilians, large numbers of young Westerners came out in support not of the victims but of the perpetrators. Many not only failed to condemn Hamas, a genocidal Islamofascist organisation, but even celebrated the atrocities committed. There is clearly a moral confusion here. What might explain it?

It is easy to see why young, uneducated Muslims raised in a fundamentalist culture rife with antisemitism might side with Hamas. But a keffiyeh-clad UPenn student glorifying rape, murder, torture and kidnapping before a jubilant crowd of her peers? That calls for a deeper explanation.

As a former radical, who grew up middle-class in Austria and became involved with the international far-left and anarchist scene through punk culture in the late 1990s, I am familiar with such callousness. And I know a thing or two about the mentality behind it, the social dynamics at play and how ideology corrupts young, impressionable minds. I also know from experience that the spell of radicalism can be broken.

At the time of the September 11 terrorist attacks, I was part of an anarchist-leaning underground scene that interpreted the tragedy in the context of the chickens coming home to roost. We saw the capitalist West—in particular the US, with its Middle Eastern ‘outpost’, Israel—as a global oppressor. This made Al-Qaeda’s terrorism seem somewhat justified. Many in our circles reacted with glee or even admiration. After all, ‘Down with Western civilisation’ was one of our slogans.

Like the progressives defending Hamas today, we were deeply confused about the intentions and worldview of the perpetrators of 9/11. Our enemy’s enemy, we assumed, was our friend. As one American activist with a similar social background to mine, who found himself in Washington, DC on the day of the attacks, reported in the anarchist periodical Rolling Thunder,

‘I wished I could put a black flag on the roof so whoever the fuck was behind this would know we were anarchists trying to fight capitalism and the state, who had no great love for the U.S. government—so please don’t kill us, thank you very much!’

However, a common enemy does not imply shared values or goals. The Islamist mass-murderers who hijacked those planes clearly did not share the anarchists’ ‘dreams of a more compassionate world’, an oft-repeated mantra that belies their rationale. ‘Many of [the people killed] had been running the financial apparatus of global capitalism, pushing the buttons that calculated the numbers written in the blood of the poor,’ according to the young anonymous activist in DC. In other words, they had it coming. Yet despite these claims, many of those killed in the 9/11 attacks were just ordinary people: adults, children and even unborn babies.

Similarly, young Hamas apologists today tend to look at those savagely brutalised on 7 October not as innocent civilian victims but as avatars of the ‘Zionist entity’. In this dehumanising view, which denies the historical connection of the Jewish people to Palestine, every Israeli is, by definition, an occupier complicit in the oppression of Palestinians. Some anti-Zionists have gone so far as to argue that there is no such thing as an Israeli civilian. This, in part, explains why misguided young radicals feel justified in ripping down or defacing posters of kidnapped Israeli civilians—including children.

Like me and my anarchist peers at the beginning of the millennium, these radicalised young people have learned to view the world through a low-resolution lens of oppressor and oppressed. Through this lens, Palestinians can do no wrong, because they are assumed to be the oppressed group. In the words of Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad: ‘We are victims … everything we do is justified.’ Yet Hamas-controlled Gaza had not been under Israeli occupation since 2005, although it must be conceded that, according to Aljazeera, ‘Israel has maintained strict control over Gaza’s airspace and territorial waters and restricted the movement of goods and people in and out of the enclave.’

Conversely, since the Jewish state is seen as the oppressor, Jews do not qualify as victims. Of course, this ignores the well-documented fact that Jews are undoubtedly one of the most victimised groups in history. Their demonstrable success in the face of such adversity, however, in areas ranging from business to culture and science—Jews are greatly overrepresented among Nobel laureates—contradicts the prevailing progressive narrative that disparities in outcome necessarily imply unearned privilege and power. This fallacy is also central to antisemitism. Not for nothing was antisemitism referred to as ‘the socialism of fools’ as early as the nineteenth century.

Another oft-committed fallacy is that of moral equivalence. The argument goes that many more Palestinians than Israelis have died in the generations-long conflict, as if that would somehow excuse Hamas’s orgy of violence on 7 October. While it is legitimate to criticise Israel’s devastating military response, intent does not even enter into the equation. In the same fashion, the radical community I was involved with back in the early 2000s morally equated US and UK military action with Islamist terrorism. We, too, failed to differentiate between collateral casualties and the deliberate targeting of non-combatants. All that mattered was the number of dead on either side.

If it is all about numbers, however, it makes no sense to accuse Israel of ‘genocide’, at least as a consistent policy over the long term, since both Gaza and the West Bank have seen significant population growth. The same is true for Arabs living in Israel, whereas Jewish populations in Arab countries have declined dramatically. Considering these long-term trends and the fact that Israel has, for many decades, had the military strength to conquer and ethnically cleanse the Palestinian territories, it is just not plausible to assume that the motivation behind the current war against Hamas is genocidal. This is not to deny that we are witnessing a humanitarian tragedy on the ground in Gaza. But anti-Israel protesters calling for a (unilateral) ceasefire forget that Hamas could instantly end the war by releasing all Israeli hostages and surrendering.

Nor is Israel an ‘apartheid state’, as many young protesters have claimed. Such rhetoric has a long tradition among radicals and serves to morally discredit the enemy, in this case a multi-ethnic democracy that grants equal rights to all its citizens, including, of course, the 21.1 per cent who are Arabs. This is not to ignore the fact that Arabs have been discriminated against, mistreated and displaced in the context of Israeli occupation and settlement. However, by perpetuating fundamental misconceptions about Israel as a nation, young pseudo-justice warriors in the West have made themselves into useful idiots for antisemitic theocrats in the Middle East. Greta Thunberg did the jihadists’ bidding when she appeared on stage donning a keffiyeh and chanting, ‘No climate justice on occupied land!’ The George Washington University students who projected the words ‘Glory to our martyrs’ onto a campus building were more explicit in their approach. But the message was the same: Hamas is engaged in a just war of resistance. In a cynical reversal of victim and perpetrator roles, Hamas’s terror against Jews has thus been reframed as restoring justice ‘from the river to the sea’, in a slogan which carries genocidal implications.

Funded in large part by autocracies such as Iran and Qatar, Hamas seeks to wipe Israel off the map. This is not just because the Jewish-majority country receives military and financial support from the hated US, but also because it is seen as an alien entity in an otherwise Muslim-dominated region of the world. The events of 7 October have, once again, made clear that, for Hamas, killing Jews is an end in itself. This is not to suggest that all Gazans share this attitude or deserve the death and destruction inflicted upon them. But it would be a mistake to downplay the role of radical Islam, martyrdom and antisemitism in this conflict, especially considering that Palestinian support for Hamas has soared since the beginning of the war.

Still, most young Western anti-Israel protesters, even those openly sympathetic to Hamas, will deny allegations of antisemitism. In addition to the antisemitic tropes used at their protests, however, their obsessive focus on the world’s only Jewish-majority country, founded to protect Jews from genocide and persecution, is itself indicative of antisemitism. Tracing Zionism’s historical roots, the writer Ralph Leonard notes in the Freethinker that ‘early Zionist thought made its claims not in the name of the Jewish faith, but of the Jewish people’. This is a crucial distinction to make—because antisemitism targets Jews as a people. Nor is the conflict in the Middle East primarily about religion, although both sides invoke it, and although Hamas is a radical Islamist organisation.

While some anti-Zionists naively assume that once Israel has been obliterated, the remaining Jews will be permitted to live in peace in a ‘liberated’ Palestine, others just do not seem to think that Jewish lives matter—for otherwise they would not want Israeli Jews to become a vulnerable minority again.

Strong anti-Israel sentiments were also common in the radical underground of the early 2000s and influenced the way we made sense of September 11. For us, Israel was an illegitimate occupier of Palestinian land that had to be defeated. Anyone who supported it we regarded as complicit in the oppression of the Palestinian people and thus as a legitimate target for the ‘global Intifada’. This included civilian infrastructure. Naturally, we also boycotted Israeli products so as not to support the ‘occupation’. None of this seemed antisemitic to us. As one anarchist propagandist argued in 2006, ‘[T]he cost of the establishment and perpetuation of the state of Israel has been colossal in terms of the suffering and death of both Israelis and Palestinians.’

What is missing from this analysis is the counterfactual: what would happen in the absence of a Zionist state in the Levant? On 7 October, Hamas gave us a brutal taste of what that would mean for Jews. Antisemitism is rampant across the Arab world. Moreover, ‘Israel’s establishment brought many benefits to the Arab population in the region,’ according to the now-deceased Israeli diplomat Moshe Arens. ‘An Arab victory in the 1948 war against Israel,’ he wrote, ‘would not only have led to the destruction of the Jewish community here, but would most likely have caused havoc and suffering to the local Palestinian population.’

As a former Israeli official, Arens was, of course, biased. But he had a point: by cultivating large swathes of previously unploughable land, Zionist settlers laid the foundation for Israel’s thriving economy, which created unprecedented opportunities for Palestinian Arabs. Had Israel been defeated in 1948, the area would most likely never have blossomed into the prosperous, multi-ethnic, democratic nation it is today. In all likelihood, it would instead be indistinguishable from the countries it borders.

Of course, this does not give Israel carte blanche. In my experience, however, progressive radicals rarely entertain such counterfactuals or question their ideological assumptions. While my peers and I styled ourselves open-minded critical thinkers, we clung to our axiomatic beliefs. But our hostile stance toward Israel and its allies in the West did not go unchallenged in the post-9/11 era. When, for example, a member of a punk rock band from our milieu was seen sporting a T-shirt with the slogan, ‘Burn, Israel, burn’—in Germany, of all places!—the group was collectively accused of antisemitism and had several concerts cancelled.

Part of the reason the group found themselves banned from left-wing music venues across Germany was that the Anti-German movement was gaining ground among German leftists at the time. A typical banner of this political group read, ‘Down with Germany, solidarity with Israel, for communism.’ Anti-Germans supported the US after September 11 because of its instrumental role in liberating Europe from Nazism; they also supported Zionism as a matter of principle in light of the Holocaust.

Back then, our main point of criticism of the Anti-German movement was that its ideology was one of collective guilt rooted in German identity. Young radicals today, however, seem to have no qualms about embracing such identitarianism when it comes to race, gender and so on. What is more, our anarchist principles—‘no gods, no masters’—stopped us from ever siding with governments, much less with theocratic ones. The same cannot be said for activists who support Hamas.

Nevertheless, today’s protest movement strongly reminds me of my experience as a young radical. We were absolutely convinced of the righteousness of our cause: the end justified the means. Nor did we lose sleep over potential unintended consequences or seek out information that contradicted our preconceived notions. We interpreted major world events, such as 9/11, through the narrow and distorting prism of our radical ideology. As would-be revolutionaries, we were unscrupulous optimists, blind to the ever-present danger of retrogression and unappreciative of the civilisation we had inherited.

However, ours was a fringe ideology confined to underground echo chambers—along with, as I found out later, certain pockets of academia. So what explains the prevalence of a similar belief system and attitude among young people today? The September 11 attacks, after all, were not followed by mass youth protests in support of the terrorists, at least not in the West.

While mass immigration from the Muslim world has certainly exacerbated the situation, it is no secret that radical professors in the humanities and social sciences have, for decades, been teaching students to scorn Western civilisation, with its emphasis on reason and science, to problematise ‘whiteness’ and embrace ‘decolonisation’.

This worldview took root in academia in the context of postcolonialism under the influence of the Palestinian-American scholar and activist Edward Said, who, as early as 1978, critiqued Western discourses about the Orient as a form of imperialism. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ideas about language and power, postcolonial thought has since found its way into many fields of study. For example, a 2013 article in the journal The Canadian Geographer set out to ‘advance personal and educational decolonization [and] interrogate how whiteness continues to be normalized within environmental education through various dominant narratives [and] the ongoing erasure of Indigenous Peoples.’

Race entered the picture with the rise of Critical Race Theory (see below) and its offshoot, Whiteness Studies. The latter constitutes a form of activist scholarship aimed at ‘dismantling white supremacy,’ which it views—based on Foucauldian discourse analysis—as the underlying power structure of the West.

When contextualised as a non-white, indigenous liberation movement against Western-supported ‘settler colonialism’, Hamas ticks all the boxes. With its murderous bigotry theorised away or simply ignored, the terrorist organisation that has ruled Gaza with an iron fist since 2007 has become something of a poster child for progressives. Add to that the fashionable notion that all forms of oppression are interrelated, and all oppressed groups are natural allies by virtue of their oppression by Western society and its power structures, and you end up with absurdities such as ‘Queers for Palestine’.

University students defending Hamas often find support from faculty. Such support appears to be more ardent among the humanities and social sciences than in STEM, business, economics and law. At Columbia University, two open letters were issued following the massacre of 7 October, one defending and one condemning students’ defence of Hamas. An analysis of the signees’ affiliations revealed that, unlike in the other departments, a majority of faculty members in the humanities and social sciences supported rather than condemned pro-Hamas sentiments among the student body.

The professors, in other words, are backing their radicalised protégés. This highlights a general problem with the progressive movement today: a lack of adults in the room. It is only natural for rebellious youth to be attracted to a protest movement that rejects societal norms and values. And because it challenges the established order, Palestine is a perfect issue to rally around. However, without adequate boundaries being set by their teachers and mentors, radical students are running wild on campus and beyond.

Even high school students have joined the anti-Israel movement. Street protests and school strikes are one thing. But hundreds of fanatical teenagers rampaging through the halls of a high school after discovering a Jewish teacher had attended a pro-Israel rally, and forcing the terrified educator to hide in a locked office, is another thing altogether. One is reminded of the 2017 Evergreen State College turmoil and hostage situation, which occurred because a professor, Bret Weinstein, had objected to an initiative barring white students and faculty from entering campus. A self-righteous student mob formed and accosted Weinstein before effectively taking university staff, including college president George Bridges, hostage in a conference room. Today’s teens have seen radical groups such as Black Lives Matter enforce their ideology through violence and intimidation. A defining moment was the BLM-Antifa riots of 2020.

Under the influence of such groups, young people have also learned to identify oppression with ‘whiteness’. The latter is both a racial concept and a shorthand for the liberal-humanist value structure of the West. Based on American notions of race and racism, this ideology treats Jews as essentially white and Palestinians as ‘BIPOC’ (‘Black, Indigenous and People of Colour’). This helps explain recent slogans such as ‘You’re either on the white or right side of history,’ spotted on a placard at a pro-Palestine demonstration in the UK, with the flags of Israel, the US, the UK and France surrounding the word ‘white’. Note that these nations are all liberal democracies, unlike the places represented by the flags around the word ‘right’: Palestine, Congo, Sudan and East Turkestan.

It is crucial to understand that what we are dealing with here is an anti-liberal ideology based, among other things, on Critical Race Theory, which originated with American legal scholars such as Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado and Kimberlé Crenshaw. As the jurist Jeffrey J. Pyle explained in 1999, ‘Critical race theorists attack the very foundations of the liberal legal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism and neutral principles of constitutional law.’ This is because they regard liberal values as ‘mere social constructs calculated to legitimate white supremacy.’ And while they ‘purport to share the liberals’ goal of racial and social justice, they view that endeavour not as a matter of principle, but as a matter of simple group interest to be achieved ‘by any means necessary’.

When I was first taught to ‘problematise whiteness’ in an American Cultural Studies course at university, I was intrigued by the esoteric rhetoric and progressive pretensions of this obscure—and obscurantist—philosophy, which seemed to offer a new language for the broader revolutionary struggle against oppression. What put me off, though, was its monomaniacal focus on race and its tendency to accuse an entire group of people of racism just by virtue of their skin colour. My radicalism, after all, was colourblind. It would have never occurred to me, for instance, to frame the September 11 attacks in terms of ‘brown people v. white people’.

That was twenty years ago. Since then, a bloated Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy, informed by the same theories, has usurped the West’s institutions of science and learning, making its ideology mandatory policy. And it does not stop there. Cloaked in the language of civil rights, it has also spread to the realms of business, politics and culture. The Jewish-American journalist Bari Weiss has described the underlying belief system as

‘… a worldview that replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.’

For Weiss, this worldview has antisemitic implications:

‘For Jews there are obvious and glaring dangers in a worldview that measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity. If underrepresentation is the inevitable outcome of systemic bias, then overrepresentation—and Jews are two percent of the American population—suggests not talent or hard work, but unearned privilege. This conspiratorial conclusion is not that far removed from the hateful portrait of a small group of Jews divvying up the ill-gotten spoils of an exploited world.’

Easily the most powerful catalyst for the propagation of this ideology, in particular among young people, has been the rise of social media, with the legacy media trying to keep up. Loud minorities have seized a megaphone to shame and intimidate a silent majority afraid of being called out or cancelled, while algorithms designed to boost engagement have functioned to reinforce echo chambers, increase polarisation and accelerate social contagion.

But perhaps the most consequential aspect of social media has been that it has created compelling alternative realities for young people lacking real-world experience. Like progressive ideologues in academia, those living online tend to measure truth not by whether their views correspond with objective reality, but by whether their equally biased peers agree, a phenomenon scientists have described as the ‘echo chamber effect on social media’, which works by ‘framing and reinforcing a shared narrative’. It is no wonder, then, that there are people out there who deny the truth of the Hamas massacre of 7 October 2023 or call it an ‘inside job’— in other words, who are taken in by conspiracy theories that play on the portrayal of Hamas as the victim.

I fell for similar conspiracy theories back in the day, and for similar reasons. In the mid-to-late 2000s, movies such as Zeitgeist, Loose Change and Fahrenheit 9/11 set out to challenge the ‘dominant narrative’ about what had happened on 11 September, 2001. More importantly, however, these movies confirmed my community’s anti-American outlook. Hardly any of us put it past the US government to have staged, orchestrated or at least facilitated the attacks as a pretext to go to war for oil. This goes to show that echo chambers have always existed. In terms of scale and reach, however, social media has completely changed the game.

Israel’s enemies know very well how to exploit social media for their propaganda machine. Online jihadis bombard young users with emotionally charged half-truths and misinformation. But even they must have rubbed their eyes in disbelief when they saw Osama Bin Laden’s newly recirculated and blatantly antisemitic ‘Letter to America’, in which he justifies 9/11 on the basis of US support for Israel, go viral on TikTok. Nor did my former life as a radical prepare me for such a trend. Having said that, perhaps if I had read the letter as a young radical, I too would have found parts of it compelling. However, in the absence of social media, my ability to publicly advertise my ignorance on the matter would have been limited.

This points to another major problem with social media: it incentivises young people to share their opinions on subjects they know nothing about. There is almost an expectation to take a political stance. Indeed, a failure to do so could arouse suspicion and lead to ostracism. However, as shown by scientific evidence, it is probable that the brain is not fully developed until the age of about 25. This, and the sheer intellectual difficulty of forming a coherent philosophical ideology, may help explain why overly simplistic ‘takes’ prevail online and offline, especially among the young. Sloganeering has replaced reason and intellect by packing broad socio-political concepts into easily consumable and endlessly repeated catchphrases, which young people have latched onto. Nor is there any incentive to consider counterfactuals, or simply think things through, before posting or chanting slogans such as ‘globalise the Intifada’. On the contrary, unthinking regurgitation signals loyalty to the tribe.

Before the internet and social media, such slogans and catchphrases often reached us in the form of song lyrics through the underground music scene. I was in my late teens when a punk rock lyric shaped my understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for years to come: ‘Fuck Zionism’. Judging from my experience, youth culture undoubtedly has the power to mould a young person’s political worldview, especially if complex political issues are presented in the form of such overly simplistic slogans. I was not particularly rebellious as a teenager, but I responded to radical messages of this sort on a visceral level.

There is also the thrill of joining a movement, which can offer a sense of meaning, purpose and belonging to young people. As a radical, my social identity was tightly interwoven with my politics. This made it difficult to apply sufficient scepticism to the beliefs professed by my peer group. The same dynamic appears to be at play when we see masses of young progressives parroting the slogans of antisemitic extremists online and in the street.

A more charitable and optimistic interpretation is that today’s young people have an appetite for justice: they identify injustices in the world and want to be part of the solution. I can relate to that. The problem is that they have been misled. Had they not been so deceived, they would be protesting Hamas’s theocratic terror regime, which not only indiscriminately butchers Jews, but also holds its own people hostage and uses them as human shields. They would understand that people who behave in this way are not seeking justice, and they would act accordingly rather than engage in the theatre of radicalism.

However, it may not be too late for these young activists to see the errors of their way and change course. I am living proof that this is possible: I overcame my radicalism and learned to value the peace, freedom and prosperity characteristic of Western liberal democracies. For me, the turning point came when I understood that these are extraordinary and fragile civilisational achievements, and that neither the West nor Israel is primarily to blame for other cultures’ failure to build free, peaceful and prosperous societies. Of course, the West, broadly defined, has a lot to answer for; however, its cultural and economic achievements stem from a set of values and ideas rooted in Enlightenment humanism. Radical Islam, as propagated by Israel’s enemies Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthi movement, negates these values and ideas.

There is no way round it: the young people supporting Hamas and its allies on social media, on campus and in the street must come to their senses and abandon their erroneous preconceptions. ‘We can offer something else in return,’ says ex-Muslim author and human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who would have sided with the protesters in her youth. ‘But we do have to work for it, and we do have to agree on the basis of what it is that we want to transmit.’ She elaborates:

‘One of the questions that I have asked myself is: What is it that [Muslim] immigrants have in common with Gen Z? … both groups have been failed by us, because we are failing to transmit to Gen Z, and we are failing to transmit to immigrants who come here, what it is that they are going to inherit, what this society is all about, the most basic, fundamental principles of this society.’

While the reasons for young people’s current moral confusion about Hamas are manifold and call for a diversified response, this certainly seems like a good starting point. It is up to us to pass on the Enlightenment tradition of the West to the next generation—whatever their cultural and religious background. We must lead by example and stand up against antisemitism in all its forms. We must defend liberal values from corrosive ideologies and refuse to be intimidated. We must do our best to make young people understand what is at stake, and that Hamas is the antithesis of whatever it is they think they are fighting for. Many will not listen. But some will.

The post Young, radical and morally confused appeared first on The Freethinker.

Quebec holds a cultural distinction in the framework of the Canadian Federation that should be better understood and appreciated. The Quebecois know what it means to take pride, collectively, in what they have fought for. Yet too often and by too many, Quebec is harshly and wrongly called racist for its pride in preserving its secularist, pluralist culture. This culture is the very same one that endless numbers of new Canadians—immigrants and refugees—freely choose to adopt by coming to Quebec to create new lives for themselves.

Yves-François Blanchet, leader of the Bloc Québéçois, made this point during a press conference before he met with Amira Elghawaby, the federally-appointed anti-Islamophobia adviser, earlier this year. Elghawaby had written in 2019 that ‘the majority of Quebecers appear to be swayed not by the rule of law, but by anti-Muslim sentiment.’ This was in response to public support for Bill 21, a Quebec law placing limits on the wearing of religious clothing by several types of public sector workers. Blanchet’s response to her was: ‘Someone who says Quebec is racist needs to know more about Quebec.’ I agree with him on this point. Unless you study Quebec’s history, you will have little understanding of the sociocultural and sociopolitical transformations that the province underwent after 1960, during the period of la Révolution Tranquille (‘the Quiet Revolution’).

Before the Quiet Revolution swept across the province, Quebec was a largely rural and conservative society dominated and maintained by the Catholic Church, which promoted traditional social hierarchies. During the first half of the 19th century, the Catholic Church wielded significant power in the cultural, religious and political spheres, especially in higher education. In fact, the province set up a Ministry of Public Instruction in 1868 but abolished it in 1875 due to pressure from the Church. Catholic religious leaders combined nationalism with anti-secular Ultramontane ideas to further their interests and increase their authority.

Conservative Catholic domination of Quebec reached its apogee in la Grande Noirceur (‘the Great Darkness’), the period during which Maurice Le Noblet Duplessis’ Union Nationale party held power (from 1936 to 1939 and again from 1944 to 1959). Duplessis viewed Quebec as a Catholic province and ran it with an iron fist, as if it were his own private Catholic corporation. He championed values aligned with the Church and allowed Catholic leaders to directly participate in education, health services, and social assistance, thus affirming the idea of a Quebec that was distinctively and exclusively Catholic. The Duplessis era was the culmination of centuries of Catholic domination of the social and cultural framework of the province.

By the 1960s, the people of Quebec were no longer willing to remain subservient to the clergy and its political backers. ‘Things have to change,’ was one of the slogans of Quebec’s Liberal Party, led by Jean Lesage, during the 1960 election campaign. The victory of Lesage in that year was the beginning of a period of nearly 20 years of dramatic modernisation. New, progressive approaches were adopted in the social and political realms.

Notably, the Liberal government set up a Ministry of Education which created a state-controlled education system and gave women the same rights to higher education as men. It also effectively secularised Quebec by decoupling Church and state and limiting religious influence in public institutions. Since the 1960s, Quebec’s identity has been rooted in the ideal of secular governance; it is seen by Quebecois as a place where all people are represented fairly, rather than one governed by ecclesiastical power in which the clergy dominates the people.   

This brings us back to Bill 21 and Quebecois secularism today. Should accommodations for religious minorities be granted? If so, how should they be implemented and what are the limitations on such accommodations?

There are justified criticisms of Bill 21 but there is also much misunderstanding about it. These misunderstandings often stem from two different traditions and interpretations of secularism. In the English-speaking world, secularism focuses on individual freedom of religion whereas in the French-speaking world, laïcité focuses on the collective freedom from religion. This is because the English-speaking and French-speaking worlds have had different historical experiences with religion. In general, the French sought freedom from the dominance of the Catholic Church and the English fought for the individual’s freedom to worship according to their conscience.

Bill 21 is in the spirit of the secularism of the French Republic, which has also been accused of racism because of its enforcement of laïcité for religious minorities. Such accusations are misplaced, however. Bill 21 makes no distinction, for example, between the types of religious symbols worn or displayed. All religions are removed from the public sphere, and this is seen as an equaliser for the benefit of all Quebecois citizens.

‘Est Québécois qui veut l’être’ (‘Whoever wants to be a Quebecer is one’), said René Lévesque during his victory speech after the 1976 Quebec election. The ethical importance of that statement is that the social criteria for being Quebecois are not centred on ethnicity or allegiance to any religion but instead are founded in the upholding, understanding and embracing of the immemorial values of Quebec society. These values are the values of the Enlightenment, as well as liberalism and democracy.

Opponents of Bill 21 see it as a ‘racist’ ban on religious symbols. They see it as an assault on religious minorities in Quebec and argue that it misapplies the principle of religious neutrality as understood in Canadian law. This Canadian principle, which is an interpretation by the Supreme Court of Canada, holds that governments must remain neutral on questions of religion by neither favouring nor disfavouring any particular belief. This implies that although the Canadian government cannot be explicitly religious, it also cannot be explicitly anti-religious: the state must treat religious groups equally.

The problem created by treating religious groups equally is that it opens the door to limitless demands from all religious groups, including illiberal ones. These groups would have criticism of religion designated as hate speech. They would have illiberal and bigoted practices—such as the imposition of Sharia family courts—be not just tolerated but approved of. Treating religious groups equally is mistaken because it falsely assumes that they consist of a homogenous community that can be represented by one or a few loud (usually conservative and male) voices. It thus disregards the repressive treatment that minorities within these minorities often face and it sets up bigoted, misogynistic interpretations of religious doctrine as the one true version that must be respected and accommodated.

Bill 21 does not misapply religious neutrality. It understands and applies it through a French lens. This differs from the English lens that interprets religious neutrality on the federal level. This is perhaps why Anglophone Quebecois were more upset with the bill than their Francophone fellows—indeed, English-language school boards were exempted from the law by Canada’s Supreme Court. It is important to recall that the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian Constitution, which was invoked by Quebec’s National Assembly in passing Bill 21, was intended precisely so that unreasonable court decisions could be rejected by Parliament and provincial legislatures. In 1981, Justice Minister Jean Chrétien stated clearly that the clause would allow legislatures to quickly ‘correct absurd situations’ resulting from court decisions. ‘We needed to have the supremacy of the legislature over the courts,’ Peter Lougheed, then the Alberta premier, who suggested the clause in the final negotiations on the Constitution in the early 1980s, explained. ‘We did not [want] to be in a position where public policy was being dictated or determined by non-elected people.’

The question, then, is this: What kind, or rather kinds, of religious beliefs will be accommodated, permitted and tolerated? Quebec more than perhaps the rest of Canada at present has an excellent chance of strengthening its vigorously pluralistic society. But for this to happen, religious groups need to be compelled to abandon certain presumptions that are incompatible with Quebec’s open liberal democratic society—and should certainly not be allowed to undermine Quebecois secularism.

‘A nation is judged by how it treats its minorities,’ Lévesque once said. Must we now shy away from treating religious minorities with the same maturity as we would any other religious group? Why should we not have the same expectations of minority groups as with any others? Should they not be expected to assimilate and to be open to justified criticism of their practices and beliefs? Is it not insulting to give special protections to their feelings of offence?

The domestication of religion is one of the unremitting responsibilities, as well as one of the hallmarks, of civilisation. Those who, inspired by nebulous notions of diversity, equity and inclusion, would cast aside liberal and Enlightenment values, must understand that they would be throwing away the very things that make liberal democracy a system worth having in the first place. Quebec’s Bill 21 is an assertion of liberalism in the spirit of the Quiet Revolution, not a negation of it, and the values of laïcité are among the most precious—and hard-won—that Quebec has.

The post Quebec’s French-style secularism: history and enduring value appeared first on The Freethinker.

During the coronation of King Charles III, the Metropolitan Police arrested 64 people, most of whom they claimed were there to disrupt the inauguration of our new head of state. Six of these were members of the group Republic, which seeks to abolish the monarchy. They were detained for 16 hours.

What terrible disruption did these nefarious republicans have in mind? Were they planning to plant bombs in letterboxes? Were they going to throw paint at the King’s golden carriage? No. They were there to hold up some placards in protest against the institution of monarchy. They liaised with the Met for months before the coronation and, so far as we know, had no plans to do anything seriously disruptive, let alone illegal.

The Republic protesters were arrested because the police suspected they were going to ‘lock-on’ to objects so that they could not be easily removed. This power was given to the police by the absurd and draconian Public Order Act 2023—which was passed shortly before the coronation, perhaps not so incidentally.

The arrests were an affront to the very idea of British liberty. Graham Smith, the head of Republic, has denied that he and his fellow protesters had any equipment which would have allowed them to attach themselves to anything. But even if they did, they would have simply been victims of legal rather than illegal illiberalism.

Worse, the coronation arrests form part of a pattern. At the King’s Accession Proclamation in Oxford last September, one man was arrested for shouting three words: ‘Who elected him?’ Not long afterward, in London, another man was threatened with arrest for walking while holding a blank sheet of paper: he was told by an officer that he would probably be arrested if he dared to write ‘Not my king’ on it.

Meanwhile, King Charles III, the supposed defender of our constitution and our liberties, has been silent throughout it all. Is not the monarch, symbolically at least, supposed to be the ultimate guarantor of our freedom?

Enter Graham Smith once more, who, fresh from detention, has recently released a book making the case against the monarchy and for a republic. In writing Abolish the Monarchy: Why We Should and How We Will, Smith has done all republicans a great favour: here, in one slim volume, is the ultimate knockdown of the royals, which shreds every one of the usual monarchist arguments and presents an inspiring vision of a future British Republic.

Smith’s book is tightly argued and very well-researched: a testament to his decades of republican activism. Every monarchist should read it. If they remain unconvinced upon closing it, they either have a brilliant case for monarchy that has yet to be made or their brains have simply gone so soft from Windsor worship that they are unable to change their minds.

Most of the arguments Smith presents will not be new to staunch republicans like me, but they are argued so well and backed up so strongly that one envies his knowledge and skill. Even one well-versed in the perfidy of the Windsors might discover new lows. Did you know, for example, that, in the 1960s, the late Queen Elizabeth II successfully lobbied for the royal household to be exempt from race discrimination laws and that this exemption still stands today?

Not that Abolish the Monarchy is merely a personal attack on the royals, though there is plenty of that. It is, fundamentally, a book about our constitution and our principles. Smith argues that the monarchy is the source of many of our political woes, not because the monarch has day-to-day political power, but because the near-limitless power of the Crown is now invested in the Prime Minister:

‘This idea of Britain’s parliamentary democracy as the blueprint the world has taken to its heart, of Britain as one of the oldest, most stable democracies in the world, is founded on a bargain that has suited the interests of both the royals and the political classes alike. The reality is somewhat different: a parliament that has stumbled from one reform to the next, begrudgingly moving on the issue of suffrage while slowly centralizing power in the hands of the House of Commons, and then concentrating power further into Downing Street. Simply put, who has power and why in Britain, is a matter of historical contingency. We could do a lot better.’

This centralisation of power, and the powerlessness of our head of state in the face of it, is one of Smith’s favourite themes. Without an elected head of state and a written constitution, we are left at the mercy of parliamentary sovereignty—which in practice means the supremacy of the government. There is almost nothing stopping the Prime Minister of the day from legislating for whatever they wish, so long as they have an unassailable parliamentary majority. And this is not even to mention the sweeping powers, not subject to any sort of democratic process, afforded to the Prime Minister by the royal prerogative and the Privy Council.

Of course, we are unlikely to become a dictatorship, as Smith acknowledges. We have a strong liberal democratic culture despite the flaws in our constitution. But we would be better off with proper constitutional guarantees of our liberties, rather than trusting their safekeeping to Prime Ministers with monarchical powers. And these flaws can still threaten our democracy even if we never become a full-blown authoritarian state—think, for example, of the Queen’s helplessness in the face of Boris Johnson’s 2019 prorogation of Parliament, which the Supreme Court held to be unlawful.

Another of Smith’s most important points is that Britain’s transformation into a democracy is incomplete. All that we have gained over the centuries has had to be wrested away from the clutches of monarchs and politicians, and our liberal culture owes little to them – least of all to the monarchs. All we lack now is a properly democratic constitutional system. A liberal democratic culture without a written liberal democratic constitution and all the structures that flow from such a constitution is one always at the mercy of the dishonest and the mendacious, just as a written constitution is hardly worth the paper it is written on if there is no democratic culture in place to uphold its spirit. Right now, we have one, but not the other.

But what if we had both? What if we also had a written constitution, a fully democratic parliament, and an elected head of state—that is, what if we had a secular democratic parliamentary republic?

Would Britain be soulless? Would it be (to caricature the monarchist position) just another boring country? The answer to both questions is no. We would still have our history and our culture, and we would have finally fulfilled the promise of our long and honourable democratic tradition.

No president would be perfect, but they would be accountable, and they would represent us in a way no monarch ever could. Personally, I would prefer a head of state who could effectively enforce a written constitution and bravely lead the way in defending liberal values. Think of Václav Havel and Mary Robinson, two presidents who proudly supported Salman Rushdie in the 1990s while our own head of state, the great champion of our vaunted liberties, was silent. Our monarchs seem to have spent more time secretly lobbying for tax exemptions than standing up for liberty.

If there is one criticism I would make of Abolish the Monarchy, it is that it is at times too tame, too moderate. This is part of Republic’s strategy to widen its appeal, but it does a disservice to the genuine radicalism at the heart of the republican position. This is why Abolish the Monarchy does not quite fit into the great British pamphleteering tradition epitomised by Thomas Paine.

Certainly, Smith is right that demanding a British Republic is not to advocate a replay of the French Revolution, and that we already have most of the pieces in place to create a democratic parliamentary republic. But there is something revolutionary about the spirit of republicanism. As he points out, republicanism is essentially the demand for a true liberal democracy: ‘[republicanism is about] more than replacing one head of state with another—it’s about rebalancing power between government, Parliament, and people. … The challenge is to take what we have and make it democratic, top to bottom.’ Republicans should not be so coy about the radicalism of this project.

The monarchy is by definition undemocratic, if not anti-democratic, as well as sectarian and secretive. Almost all the members of the Royal Family are, in this republican’s view at least, negligible human beings. If the royals are stunted by their upbringing, a republic would set not only us but them free, too. For republicans, the Crown is not the bedrock of our liberties, but rather the fount of all that is rotten and fetid in our politics. The constitutional monarchy is an insult to the best of our history and culture. In short: bring on the British Republic.

Graham Smith, Abolish the Monarchy: Why We Should and How We Will, published by Penguin, 1 June 2023.

See also: The Freethinker and early republicanism: the letter by a ‘librarian from Colchester’ that led to the formation of Republic

Graham Smith (not that type of republican), interview on the National Secular Society podcast.

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The post Bring on the British republic – Graham Smith’s ‘Abolish the Monarchy’, reviewed appeared first on The Freethinker.

Folarin Iman was criticised in 2019, when the Free Speech Youth Advisory Board she helped to found, and which would ultimately become Free Speech Champions, was reported in the Guardian to be an ‘astroturfed’ front for the Free Speech Union, founded by the right-wing journalist Toby Young. In the 2019 general election, she stood (unsuccessfully) as the Brexit Party candidate in Leeds North East, gaining 1,769 votes. Last year, she became a presenter at the newly founded GB News, which has been criticised for its right-wing bias and its approach to free speech.

In 2020, she founded the Equiano Project, which describes itself as ‘a forum to promote freedom of speech and open dialogue on the subjects of race, identity and culture.’ In 2021, she was appointed as Trustee on Youth Engagement at the National Portrait Gallery by Johnson’s government. The Guardian and the Art Newspaper were quick to draw attention to this appointment, because of her association with GB News.

Folarin Iman is now no longer involved with GB News or the Free Speech Union, nor a member of any political party.

I met her over coffee in the Blue Boar Pub, Westminster. We discussed the origins of the Equiano Project, what ‘racism’ means, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the problems with ‘decolonising the curriculum’. Other topics included her path to where she is now, her British-Nigerian roots, and whether she still thinks Brexit was a good idea. The interview also raises the question of which orthodoxies – on the left and the right – can be criticised by whom. Comments are open below.

~Emma Park, Editor

How would you describe your childhood or teenage years – were there any defining moments?

I grew up in Kent, but for the first two years of secondary school, I went to a private boarding school in Hertfordshire. I left halfway through Year 8 because I was homesick, so there was a panic to get me into a new school. I ended up going to one of the local comprehensive schools, which was a culture shock. For sixth form, I went to a grammar school. This had a big impact because it made me reflect on how your social, cultural and economic status shape your sense of what is possible for you.

Boarding school kids all believe that they can achieve anything – and they are right. With many of the other [state schoool] kids, their expectations and ambitions were less, even though they were intelligent and capable. Going to several different schools, I also had to start again repeatedly in terms of friends, so I was used to being the outsider and trying to persuade people that I was coming from a good place. Also, my mum has always been political. She has been involved in campaigns in the UK. My father is also Nigerian, but I have not spoken to him for ten years.

What is your mother’s take on things politically?

She is small-‘c’ conservative. She is a British Nigerian, but contrary to what people might expect, she is not an evangelical Christian, but an atheist, so she is very independent-minded. Mum got us debating, discussing and thinking independently. She worked really hard in multiple jobs to send me and my sister to a good school. That has shaped my thinking about the importance of hard work, not making excuses for yourself, and not seeing yourself as a victim, even if there are things that you are being victimised by.

My mum was born in Nigeria, but I have only been to Nigeria twice. Despite that, I still feel connected to it. I love the music, a lot of the history, elements of the culture – not all. I see myself as British Nigerian, even if I do not speak the language. I have spent time studying Yoruba. I think it is part of the experience of being a first or second-generation immigrant, of trying to locate your place in the world.

Do you have any religious beliefs?

I would describe myself as agnostic. I have never had a practising religion. I grew up around evangelical Christians, but I studied Arabic at university, so I spent a lot of time around Islamic culture and lived in Morocco.

What has your path been from university to where you are now?

Originally I thought that I would go into Middle Eastern foreign policy. But I started university in 2015, and those years, 2015-18, were a huge, angry time politically. Trump came to power, Brexit happened. The populist movements, the campus free speech debates – it seemed like an important time to participate in the public conversation.

Once I left university, my first job was working for Index on Censorship. I was a project manager, where I was able to create a free speech project from scratch. I met journalists and writers, and spoke at events.

During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, I felt a moral responsibility to present a different perspective. What was being presented as unquestionable about British society and the experience of being a black person in British society did not reflect my experience, or that of my family, or of all the people that I knew. I had a small platform and decided to start writing about these things. And to my excitement, it got picked up.

In 2019, you were the Brexit Party candidate for Leeds North East. Do you still think Brexit was a good idea?

I did not actually vote for Brexit. I did not vote in the referendum either way, because I was in two minds. On the one hand, I supported the principle of greater sovereignty and democracy, but I was worried about the people that were leading the Brexit campaign and whether or not their vision of what Brexit meant reflected the kind of society that I wanted to live in.

Once we voted for Brexit, I did believe that it was imperative to implement it. That is why I stood for the Brexit Party. That surprised people, because I was a young person. I would probably get my head chopped off by my friends and colleagues if I said that I had Brexit regret. I do not know if Brexit was a good thing, or at least, I think there is a lack of discussion about what we need to do to make it work.

Where would you place yourself on the political spectrum?

This may surprise people, but I see myself as a bog-standard liberal. All the positions I have taken, contrary to popular belief, have been from a liberal standpoint. To me, Brexit was a question of sovereignty and democracy, which is a liberal argument. I have criticised identity politics because it contradicts the liberal ideals of colour-blindness, individual freedom of conscience and autonomy.

But isn’t GB News a right-wing platform?

It is probably true to say that there is a disproportionate number of people right of centre who present and appear on GB News. However, they are committed to platforming different viewpoints and oftentimes people on the left will just not go on, which is unfortunate. For example, Owen Jones and Aaron Bastani have been invited, but will not go on. That only perpetuates the type of people that are there.

If you are someone that critiques the orthodoxies, you may just have to accept being labelled right wing. I know many liberal-minded people on the centre left who are called ‘right wing’ because they defend free speech. That is unfortunate, especially when we live in an ecosystem of ‘guilt by association’.

Why did you found the Equiano Project, and what are its aims?

I founded the Equiano Project in 2020. It was something that I had been thinking about before the Black Lives Matter movement. But it became urgent then, because we were being told that all black or ethnic minority people felt that Britain was a fundamentally racist society and that race and racism were really the primary way in which they viewed the world and related to each other. That was just not true. The Equiano Project was founded in order to host a series of discussions and debates about these issues: decolonising the curriculum, whether liberal ideals can inform solutions to questions of racism, whether we need a new narrative on race, and the causes and consequences of racial disparities.

The first event was entitled, ‘Is it time to forge a new narrative about race?’ It was a success. Speakers included a wide range of people, but all committed to liberal ideals. After that, it expanded. People would ask us to speak at schools and cultural institutions like museums and galleries, and try to navigate the complex cultural and moral questions that people were grappling with about race, due to the public pressure to be seen to be doing something. We continue to open up the space to discuss these issues from a wide range of perspectives.

Who is the project funded by?   

We have only been funded by individual donations from ordinary people. That is where all of our money has come from.

Have you received much backlash over this project?

Surprisingly, no. I think that is because I have been careful to involve diverse perspectives, to understand where the viewpoint I disagree with is coming from, and to counter that in as nuanced a way as possible.

What is ‘race’, what is ‘racism’? How are they related to each other?

My idea of being anti-racist is to abolish race. ‘Race’ is the categorisation of human beings into biologically distinct subcategories. That is what we are doing when we see each other as permanent, distinct races and treat each other differently as such. The problem with contemporary anti-racism is that its proponents take race to be real in an important sense. They see different identity groups as having intrinsic meaning. They attribute meaning to white identity, and they reverse-attribute meaning to black identity by seeing it as morally superior and innocent, and ‘whiteness’ as a force of domination. I do not attribute meaning, positive or negative, to any racial category. I believe in the goal of achieving a colour-blind society.

‘Colour-blind’ in what sense?

In a political sense: that we should not treat each other differently from a political standpoint on the basis of race. It is equality in the true sense of treating people equally. That does not mean that we cannot recognise our distinctiveness. I am proud of my Yoruba heritage and it has a history, a culture and a legacy that has meaning to me. I do not need my self-esteem or my identity affirmed by the state or by the education system. When you enter society, you enter into something that is beyond race: a sense of citizenship, something universal, a shared civic community where we participate as equals. That, to me, is democratic. We are all capable of entering into it, and we all should have the ability and capacity to shape it.

How would you define ‘racism’?

‘Racisim’ is prejudice and discrimination against people based on their real or perceived race, and also the attribution of morality or moral values based on someone’s perceived race. Even the statement that ‘whiteness’ is a force of domination I would class as a form of racism, just as I would class the discrimination in employment against a black male as a form of racism. Having simple definitions is really important for us to be able to understand what these problems are.

You recently did an investigation into the trend in schools to ‘decolonise the curriculum’. Could you say a bit more about that?

‘Decolonisation’ is the removal of a colonial power from the state governance of a particular country. Decolonising has nothing to do with the extent to which certain ideas or ways of behaving are or are not influenced by a previous colonial power. The attempt to expand the definitions of colonisation and decolonisation is damaging. For example, if an African society, such as Nigeria, thinks parliamentary democracy is a good thing and it works better than the earlier system of clans and chiefdoms, that is not colonial, that is them making a judgement using their own agency. The attempt to attribute huge sections of modernity to colonialism in a pejorative sense is deeply corrosive to the intellectual, political and moral development of African-descended people.

The liberal ideals of free speech and democracy are based on the moral principle that we are capable of weighing up competing arguments and coming to our own conclusions. We are moral agents. If you believe that those ideals are white only, you are effectively saying that only white people are moral agents. That is a deeply racist and morally objectionable way of thinking.

The kinds of things we are seeing young kids being taught at school are pernicious.

What schools have you been looking at for your investigation?

They were state and private schools across the country. At the Equiano Project we get emails from parents on a regular basis, and even dissident teachers, who are worried about what is being taught. Other organisations describe experiencing the same thing: curriculum materials that promote a form of racial essentialism, a narrow, simplistic idea of society. One of them was that ‘racism started when white people decided to oppress black people’. For a kid, that is very confusing – it is open to misunderstanding and even to a sense of insecurity and self-loathing. All of this is being done in the name of anti-racism. But I think we have gone a long way from knowing what our foundational values are. We are morally confused.

How should these issues be discussed at primary school?

They should not be discussing them at primary school. What we need to be doing is promoting values that we all agree with: being kind, treating people as you want to be treated, not judging a book by its cover. These things do not racialise kids.

The Equiano Project invokes the values of ‘freedom, common humanity and universalism’. Can these values unite people across the political spectrum and around the world?

Yes. It was these values that won out in the 1960s civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, like Frederick Douglass before him, argued for our common humanity – so as to render racism absurd from a political standpoint. People forget that in America there are still people alive today who lived through segregation, or who remember how, in Britain, you would once be spat at on the street if you were mixed-race. Nowadays, racism is highly socially taboo. By and large, people feel like they belong. That is due to the ideal of common humanity, not because of identitarian activism.

When you make blanket statements and seek to homogenise race, and try to funnel everyone’s experience through that single lens, it is divisive, because that is not how people see themselves. People are complex, with a web of desires, relationships and interests.

Have you ever experienced racism yourself?

Of course. There is not a single ethnic minority person in this country who has never experienced racism. But did it define me? No. Did it completely traumatise me? No. If someone shouts the ‘n’ word at me, I actually feel more sorry for them. But has it happened a lot? No.

 What is critical race theory and what is your view of it?

Critical race theory is an academic school of thought with many serious scholars, like Kimberle Crenshaw, Derrick Bell and Richard Delgado. It emerged in the 1980s as an attempt to explain why there was still de facto racial inequality in America, when there was de jure equality and segregation was illegal. This school of thought attempts to understand this disparity by arguing that liberal principles, such as equality under the law, freedom of expression, and colour-blindness, are not politically neutral or universal ideals, but are couched in white Western racial superiority, and their application reproduces inequality. They argue that racialised power structures shape outcomes.

But I think they are wrong. To suggest racism is permanent or inevitable is a cynical and pessimistic way of viewing the world.

How far does politics come into your role as Youth Engagement Trustee in the National Portrait Gallery?

As a gallery that is about history, there are debates at board level about who we consider important, and what we say about those people portrayed in the gallery. These debates reflect the debates going on in wider society around contested history. Some people want us to emphasise that empire is a moral evil, whereas others may take a different approach.

My argument is that we need more history, not less: the past is as complex as the present. Whilst there are examples of great triumph and bravery, there are also examples of extraordinary suffering and brutality. All of those things tell us about our humanity, and therefore we should keep them all. That is an honest approach to history. I am not for removing portraits or being too moralistic in how we describe them. We should all be able to make up our own minds about the actions of certain people.

Is it appropriate to judge the past by contemporary moral standards?

I do not think the present should be made hostage to the future or the past hostage to the present. For all we know, in fifty years’ time we are going to be judged as morally reprehensible for factory farming. Our ancestors probably knew a lot of things, and were probably more interesting and smarter than us in different ways. They had the Enlightenment – we probably have a counter-Enlightement! I do not believe in projecting our contemporary moral values onto the past and then attacking the past for not meeting our present moral expectations.

In the project which became Free Speech Champions, the Guardian reported that some of the students originally involved left because they said it was too close to the Free Speech Union. What is your response to this? 

Free Speech Champions is still going strong. Many of young people that are involved in the project are now working for magazines and newspapers. In the early days, the question of how to create free speech in such a politically heated climate, for a generation who have only ever associated free speech with harm, was a difficult challenge. Ultimately there were different views about what constituted free speech. I tend to take the broadest view of free speech, whereas other people have differing views, and that led to some of them not wanting to continue. Some of the people who originally left have since changed their minds and have participated in some of the project’s events and initiatives.

Is there a problem for a free speech movement like yours, that you may not be able to include enough people on the left?

Out of all of the young people in FSC, a minority are on the right. That is partly because the right has a problem with free speech. This is that, by ‘free speech’, they often mean ‘my free speech’ – ‘I want to say what I want on race,’ ‘I want to say what I want on gender.’ But actually, free speech as an ideal to expand open enquiry, for experimentation, for exploration, does not always attract people on the right.

For me, free speech is about liberal culture and liberal ideals. It is an open question how far many conservatives subscribe to those ideals. In FSC, most of the young people are politically homeless. There are several from the old left – the Bennite left; others are disaffected liberals. Unfortunately, if you defend certain things, someone is going to label you right wing. But you have to keep standing up for what you believe in.

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During the pandemic, outlets that had previously turned to me for pieces on Brexit or prorogation or the Northern Ireland Protocol started asking me to write about coronavirus. At first, the requests concerned legal questions — the difference between a fixed penalty notice and a fine, say, or how judicial review works. These fell within my area of expertise, and I was happy to provide clarity.

Like many lawyers, I also became alarmed at attacks on civil liberties and began to criticise what the government was doing. For reasons obscure to me, the single worst encroachment acquired a dreadful name. ‘Lockdown’ is a term borrowed from prison management and came to describe a situation where states were effectively incarcerating their populations. Worse, of all the politicians to issue a stay-at-home order, it had to be the least serious man the UK’s political system has produced in recent decades. Every time Boris opened his mouth, I half expected to hear a ba-dum-tss at the end of each sentence. It was like being conscripted by Groucho Marx.

However, my view that civil liberties are as important as scientific truth — and that civil liberties and scientific truth are incommensurable with each other — only crystallised when those same publishers started asking me to analyse various restrictions on a scientific, not a legal, basis. This I refused to do, partly due to lack of expertise, but mainly because I thought my civil liberties arguments stood on their merits. They did not need to be set off against science or weighed in some sort of balance with science on the other side.

Coronavirus exposed how human beings argue about incommensurable values. By this, I mean values that are not comparable on some common scale — values that are intrinsically different. Those on one side, who thought managing coronavirus turned on following the science and heeding scientists like Chris Whitty and Neil Ferguson (who perhaps enjoyed the power), and those on the other side, who thought people had a right to object to having their lives micromanaged by the state, gave every appearance of coming from different planets. The two groups were appealing to values so unalike in kind that they could only ever talk past each other.

Complicating matters was the fact that lockdowns were popular — at least until higher-ups began breaching lockdown rules themselves, starting with Ferguson himself, then Dominic Cummings, next a gaggle of journalists, and finally Boris, No. 10, and chunks of the civil service. Liberals on both left and right often fail to appreciate how people quite like paternalism. From time to time, when voters are given a straight-up choice between paternalism and liberalism, paternalism wins by a landslide. Only when the costs of lockdown and school closures became clear did individuals as powerful as former Chancellor Rishi Sunak break ranks and start saying, ‘we shouldn’t have empowered the scientists in the way we did.’

This electoral reality led many of those sceptical of not only lockdowns but other Covid-induced civil liberties infringements to abandon their positions. They then opted – in my view, foolishly – to fight on the enemy’s terrain: science, ‘following the science,’ and scientific truth. We all witnessed unedifying spectacles as the lunatic fringes on both sides proceeded to disgrace themselves. There was a moment there when I wanted to put the Church of Maskitarianism in the arena against Anti-Vaxxers United and let them fight it out to the death.

Those who believe that there are incommensurable values present throughout civil society are known as ethical pluralists. Those who believe that human values can ultimately be reduced to one super-value, such as utility, or happiness, are known as ethical monists. During Covid, civil liberties — even among reputable human rights organisations and think-tanks — were sidelined. The ethical monists won. They won not because there was no debate. There certainly was a debate; unfortunately, it was a contest between competing scientific visions.

The dominance of economics over the way we talk publicly about the things we esteem in human life, and the way this has played into so-called ‘evidence-based policy’, has meant that public discourse is often, de facto, a form of ethical monism. In other words, the monist argues that apparently different values, once properly understood — that is, translated in terms of the super-value — can be plotted on the same scale, and thus easily compared, by assigning each some sort of numerical value: Value A has X units of super-value Alpha, value B has Y units of super-value Alpha.

Therefore, in deciding between the two, you have only to compare X and Y to see which is the greater. Moral decision-making is that straightforward. Even Sunak’s recent, and thoughtful, interventions — where he complained of SAGE scientists’ refusal ‘to acknowledge trade-offs’ — falls wholly within a monist, consequentialist framework that assigns incommensurable things some common and comparable value.

The problem, of course, is that ‘civil liberties’ and ‘scientific truth’ cannot be fitted into one value scale. However, based on conversations I have had with former colleagues, it seems many people do think it is possible to reduce all values to one super-value, like, say, utility. Lawyers, meanwhile, many of whom disagree with this claim, tend to be ethical pluralists.

Ethical pluralism is commonly associated with political philosopher Isaiah Berlin. However, the approach was first articulated by Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, a distinguished Victorian jurist and later a High Court judge. Berlin’s acknowledgement of this had the effect of partially rehabilitating Stephen’s reputation. Previously, he had been written off as reactionary, in part because when he developed ethical pluralism, his interlocutor was none other than John Stuart Mill. Indeed, the two men had several long-running clashes.

In Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1874), Stephens argued, contra Mill in On Liberty, not only that law without force was empty, but that Mill’s utilitarianism had a flattening effect on moral disputes. Stephen pointed out that when people keep disagreeing, the person who thinks moral decision-making is a simple calculation between comparable goods is forced to reach for some alternative explanation for the rancour. Very often, he claimed, the alternative explanation is to question the intellect or good faith or motives of those on the other side:

‘There are differences which can neither be left unsettled nor be settled without a struggle, and a real one, but regarding which the struggle is rather between inconsistent forms of good than between good and evil. In cases of this sort no one need see an occasion for anything more than a good-tempered trial of strength and skill […] There is no surer mark of a poor, contemptible, cowardly character than the inability to conduct disputes of this sort with fairness, temper, humanity, goodwill to antagonists, and a determination to accept a fair defeat in good part and to make the best of it.’

During lockdown, it became easy and common for people on one side to write off all lockdown sceptics as conspiracists, and people on the other side to write off all lockdown supporters as authoritarians. That is what happens when ethical monists fail to grapple with disagreement over incommensurable values.

Monism, with its seductive promise to enable decision-making without conflict, is a noble aim. But it is misconceived. If values are genuinely incommensurate, then the contest between them is inherently fraught. There is no right answer. The fight will go on until one side is defeated and left, in Stephen’s words, ‘to make the best of it.’

Would it have made a difference if lockdown sceptics had not pivoted to science, fighting instead for civil liberties? That, I suspect, is a Known Unknown. I do think it would have made for a more reasoned, less fraught debate. It is hard for many people, on all sides of politics, to dismiss civil liberties out of hand. Civil liberties in modern liberal democracies do have a rich and storied heritage, which goes back to classical antiquity. They resonate.

On a related note, the immense fixed penalty notices handed out by the authorities, some as high as £10,000, were often contested by a committed team of civil liberties lawyers, including barristers Adam Wagner and Francis Hoar. Many of the people saddled with them — commonly university students and small businesses — had no capacity to repay such vast sums. Going to trial had the effect of turning them into much smaller fines, since the law requires that fines must be reasonably capable of repayment. The Manchester Metropolitan University students fined for tearing down the barriers confining them to their halls of residence, protesting, and (in jest) renaming the institution HMP MMU, had a point. Unfortunately, the main difference between fixed penalty notices and fines — as far as the law is concerned — is that with the latter, convictions are recorded.

Had those matters been litigated in the context of a broader debate between partisans of science and partisans of liberty, they might have shifted the dial at least a little. People other than lawyers would have been alarmed at old folk dying alone, or hospitality firms bankrupted up and down the country. And they would have been able to say with more confidence that these were things to which ‘scientific truth’ has no answer.

For what it is worth, supporters of mandatory vaccination who argue ‘my body, my choice’ in other circumstances have now created serious cognitive dissonance for themselves. Meanwhile, I simply do not think a modern liberal state can justify lockdowns.

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For thousands of years, people have dimly suspected that exposure to the natural world might be good for them. But now Freddy McFrog, Professor of Behaviour Management at the University of North Uxbridge, has carried out a study which proves it.

A randomised sample of 374 adult humans was divided into two groups, ‘Walkers’ and ‘Pill-Takers’. The endorphin levels of each group were measured before, during and after either a walk in the countryside or a dose of anti-depressants. While the average endorphin levels of both groups were similar at the start of the experiment, they increased noticeably in the Walkers while they were out in the local nature reserve, and dropped slightly in the Pill-Takers immediately upon consumption of their medicine.

Staggeringly, three hours later, the Walkers’ endorphin levels remained high, while those of the Pill-Takers had fallen further. According to the report, some of the Pill-Takers even demanded more pills, ‘in the misguided belief that this would reverse the effects of the first dose.’

The results of the experiment show that, even in the twenty-first century, nature is still a more efficacious drug than pharmacological nurture. ‘This is a stunning discovery,’ said McFrog. ‘It seems that science has yet to reproduce the benefits that can be gained by simply heading to the nearest green space. It certainly gives us a new target to aim for.’ 

The project, involving a team of fifty researchers, was funded by WeMindU, an international health and technology conglomerate where McFrog is a consultant. The report has now been published in the leading science journal, Knowledge.

‘Previously, the idea that strolling up hill and down dale might make you happy was a truth that people had merely intuited by observation and reflection,’ said McFrog. ‘Now it has been established by science and become a fact.’  

When asked what the difference was between truth and facts, he replied, ‘Truth is a layman’s concept. It’s what we call “subjective” – it’s just your opinion. But facts are science: they have been checked by scientists. You can’t argue with facts.’ 

But what would happen if another scientist were to dispute those facts? McFrog’s reply was blunt. ‘Then he would be wrong, dangerously wrong. At best a useful idiot, playing into the hands of right-wing libertarian fascists. We would not publish him in any peer-reviewed journals. And of course he would be erased from the internet.’

Based on the results of McFrog’s study, WeMindU is now producing an app, TreesPlease, to continuously monitor its user’s endorphin levels. If it detects they are lower than average, it will automatically switch into ‘nature’ mode, with options like flowers, birdsong, and trees rustling gently in the breeze.

‘TreesPlease will be the perfect solution for those who are unable or unwilling to leave their homes,’ said Taylor Sunshine, a WeMindU marketing specialist, ‘or for those living in human-heavy areas where nature has been eliminated.’

The app costs £0.99 to purchase, but will be pre-installed on all new operating systems by regulations made under the Pandemic Act 2020. ‘The benefits of this technology will be enormous,’ said Doreen Norbert, Minister for Science and Religion. ‘At the cost of a mere £100 million to the taxpayer, it’s a bargain.’

‘We anticipate that the app will succeed where drugs have failed,’ said McFrog, who is on the government’s WISE committee. ‘It will optimise people’s mental health. And make it much easier to lock them down next time we need to.’

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