By Pat Sheil
PHILOSOPHY
Discriminations: Making Peace in the Culture Wars
A.C. Grayling
One World, $32.99
Philosopher and social commentator A. C. Grayling is, if nothing else, relentlessly prolific. Since the early 1980s he has written (and co-authored), scores of books, many of them dealing with questions of ethics and morality in public life.
To be fair, he is somewhat skittish on the subject of “morality”, and for good reason: as a loaded word, “morality” carries more cultural baggage than any airline would let you stuff into an overhead locker.
But when it comes to ethics, and the distinction between what is inherently fair, as distinct from being deemed right or wrong by self-appointed moral arbiters, he is erudite, forensic, and convincing.
In Discriminations, he weighs into what he describes as “the culture wars”. One only has to think of the hijacking, recasting and sarcastic denigration by the political right of the word “woke” to see this unseemly stoush from Grayling’s ringside seat. So successful has been the belittling of “woke”, both as a word and an aspiration, that even those on the left, who see a wider awareness of entrenched disadvantage and discrimination as their raison d’etre, are now rarely heard or read using it.
Perhaps this is unsurprising. Despite its worthy origins in American abolitionist movements in the 19th century, and revival during the first Black Lives Matter protests a decade ago, woke has become a clumsy, catch-all agenda with a whiff of self-righteous exclusivity about it.
Philosopher and author A.C Grayling.
In Discriminations, Grayling dissects the evolution of cultural warfare (in which the celebration/denigration of a woke world view is but one battle among many), and makes a sensible, if optimistic, case for an armistice of sorts. The “culture wars”, “cancel culture”, and the lack of accountability enjoyed by cyberbullies are, to Grayling, all manifestations of a collapse of the notion of common courtesy.
Civilised debate (a rare enough mode of discourse at the best of times) has, in our electronic era, degenerated into a cacophony of catcalling and dog whistling. Grayling laments that “in the first third of the 21st century, the application of human rights protections in matters of race, reproductive rights, sexuality, sex and gender should be uncontroversial, but they are not”.
But he warns those of us who see these and other rights as self-evident (while acknowledging the right to free speech, and to argue that they are not), to be wary of making our points too vociferously, lest we find ourselves wrestling in the mud pit with our detractors.
“Campaigners for social justice have much to gain from taking Aristotle’s point about anger, ‘to be angry with the right person, in the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose’. That is not easy, but necessary,” Grayling advises.
And in a world where everyone with an online connection can tear strips off just about anyone else on the planet, we find that well-calibrated judgements on when to let fly are in short supply indeed. You don’t need a lot of evidence to build a case against an opponent, especially when sharing your views with those of like mind. So it’s no wonder that an adversary’s harmless quip taken out of context can, and often does, snowball into a bloodthirsty social media pile-on.
These days it is far easier to ignore Aristotle and follow the lead of Cardinal Richelieu, to whom Grayling refers toward the end of the book as having “once remarked that he could use two lines from anything anyone wrote to hang him.
“He meant that by clever insinuation and manipulation he could prove anyone guilty of something. Often a superficial, partial or deliberately distorted reading of something someone did or said can be given the Richelieu treatment. It is a stock-in-trade of political quarrels, and has become likewise in the so-called woke wars.”
Most internet trolls aren’t nearly as clever as the Cardinal, but nor do they have to be. Any witless primary or high-school bully can wreak emotional havoc with a mobile phone and delinquent parents. Discriminations is a cogently argued plea for moderation and empathy in a world where we all have the technical capability to behave like the school cyber-goon, and far too many of us do.
In me, Grayling is preaching to the converted, and I concede that there’s nothing like a well-written confirmation of one’s beliefs to bring on a contented nodding of the head.
Today is election day, and at time of writing, I’ve noticed that the word “woke” has been used sparingly, if at all. Perhaps Peter Dutton has been advised that promising to make school curriculums “less woke”, as he did at the starting gate, was sounding a tad too Trumpian for local tastes.
And whoever becomes prime minister tonight, A. C. Grayling would be the first to point out that the last thing Australia needs, now or ever, is a full-blown US-style culture war.
A.C. Grayling will appear at the Melbourne Writers Festival (May 8-11) and the Sydney Writers Festival (May 19-27).
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