4106 The Diversity/Freedom Paradox | David M. Haskell and Stefan Molyneux
The state of freedom of speech is not good. Dr. David M. Haskell joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the state of Free Speech, Wilfrid Laurier University and the Lindsay Shepherd controversy, the opposition faced by the Laurier Society for Open Inquiry, the push for equality of outcome, the importance of religious criticism and much much more!Dr. David M. Haskell is the Associate Professor of Digital Media & Journalism and Religion & Culture at Wilfrid Laurier University and the author of “Through a Lens Darkly: How the News Media Perceive and Portray Evangelicals.”Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/dmillardhaskellBook: http://www.fdrurl.com/Through-A-Lens-DarklyYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
He is the Associate Professor of Digital Media and Journalism slash Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier University.
You can check out – we'll put a link to his book below.
And, of course, twitter.com forward slash dmillardhaskell.
That's D-M-I-L-L-A-R-D-H-A-S-K-E-L-L. Thanks so much for taking the time today.
It's my pleasure. So it's been a while since I trod the hallowed halls of higher education, and I think for people who've graduated a while ago, they may not be quite as aware as they should be of the kind of sea change that is occurring regarding things like freedom of speech, open inquiry, critical thinking, reason, evidence, all the things that we kind of associate as the purpose, certainly, of an arts education to teach people how to think, how to evaluate evidence, how to formulate arguments and rebut arguments.
So, I guess for those who are a little older, I wonder if you could tell us what is the state of free speech in higher education these days?
Well, right now, free speech is not dead.
But certainly it's under attack, and that's across university campuses across the West.
At one time, probably about 20 years ago, we begin to see the change, and it's with the dawn of aggressive political correctness.
And what you see happening is that universities begin to really change their mandate.
They begin to change what they're all about.
So at one point, when universities were founded, They really took it as their mission to delve into academic inquiry, to even talk about tough subjects, subjects that were uncomfortable.
It was the pursuit of truth.
What you're seeing now is a different goal.
That goal is to make sure that Groups that are deemed marginalized or victimized, that they receive special care, that the injustices of the world are taken care of.
That's become the main goal of universities, especially in the arts and humanities programs.
And when these two competing goals come into contact with each other, you've got to make a choice.
Are you going to pursue truth, or are you going to make sure that people are comfortable?
And unfortunately, our universities, especially the arts and humanities departments, are choosing comfort.
And when that happens, it means that some things aren't going to be allowed to be said.
And this happened, again, about 20 years ago.
We started to see it happening, and now it's reached epidemic proportions on university campuses.
And it's strange because this idea, I mean, I've sort of termed it the fascism of feels, which is the idea that if something makes you feel uncomfortable, it is automatically a bad thing.
Or to be exposed to ideas that you consider to be egregious or wrong or even immoral is somehow a bad thing.
But for me, I mean, ever since I was a teenager, I was very hostile to ideas of totalitarianism, central planning, communism, Marxism, and so on, socialism to some degree.
And yet I managed to struggle my way all the way through a master's at University of Toronto while being exposed daily to the sandblast of these kinds of ideas.
And I became a stronger person by learning their flaws, their strengths, their weaknesses, how to debate them.
If you really do think ideas are egregious, you should really bathe yourself in them, I think, so that you can learn how most effectively to fight them.
Absolutely. And really, that was the raison d'etre of university.
It was, let's have a competing structure of ideas.
We want to have a contest of ideas, because in the contest of ideas, the truth will out.
The truth will rise to the top.
But when you're inoculated, when you're shielded from competing ideas, the only thing that happens is your ideas, even if they're wrong, are reinforced.
So... You pointed out correctly that the best thing you can do for someone is to expose them to ideas that aren't their own, that they don't appreciate, or maybe that they even find offensive.
Because in that, you build mental resistance.
I often think of competing ideas or offensive ideas as heavy weights for the mind.
And when you allow your mind to lift and deal with that heavy weight, it builds it.
That's what makes us mentally resilient.
You made a fantastic connection in one of your recent articles regarding the psychological practice of cognitive behavioral therapy, of increased exposure to that which you're afraid of as a way of diminishing and overcoming your fear.
With the idea being, if you're afraid of spiders, then you look at a picture of a spider, and then you look at a video of a spider, and then you look at a baby spider, and then you let the baby spider walk in.
You progressively expose yourself to things, and you find out that they're really not as bad.
As you think they are, and or in the realm of ideas, you find yourself very effective in pushing back against them.
I've never heard that connection made before.
I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about it so that people can help people to understand why this robustness is so essential.
Absolutely. So right now, cognitive behavioral therapy, what you're mentioning, is really the gold standard for allowing people to overcome phobias.
And it's antithetical to what you would see on university campuses where they try to shield you from these ideas that you're afraid of.
It's been shown, lots of good research on this, that when you come into contact with ideas that you find offensive, they actually will improve your mental resilience.
So what I found, let me use the example from Laurier just to give it a little bit more light and illustration.
Here at my university, we had a scandal dealing with Lindsay Shepard.
Lindsay Shepard was a grad student.
She showed a video.
The video was of Jordan Peterson.
And some people complained.
In fact, we found out later that it wasn't really a true complaint.
It was a manufactured complaint.
If we want to get into that, we can.
But what I will say is the people who were opposed to such a video being shown on my campus said that an idea like that would harm.
They said that an idea could do mental harm.
Well, we know from cognitive behavioral therapy that ideas that you're opposed to will make you healthier.
But we also know from other psychological studies that there really isn't any proof that For the general population, an idea will do harm.
And I'm thinking right now of the work of Scott Lillenfeld of Emory University.
He did a meta-analysis of this idea of microaggressions.
Now microaggressions are these slights that you might experience where you feel that there was an offense, but there was no physical violence involved.
And what This professor did.
He said, well, let's look at all the literature and let's see whether or not these offensive ideas truly do harm.
And what he came to after examining all of the literature was there's absolutely no proof that when you are someone who is not already suffering from some mental problem or mental defect, being exposed to ideas you're opposed to, it simply doesn't do mental harm.
That's a lie.
And we're seeing this lie promoted on university campuses.
And that's a problem because, again, it shuts down free expression.
It shuts down inquiry.
And we've got to, as professors, as people who are supposed to be scholars, we've got to say, really, the literature doesn't even support this idea that ideas will cause harm or that opposing ideas will cause harm.
I mean, it's a strange thing to me.
Because if you have someone who faints at the sight of blood, maybe being a surgeon isn't the thing for you.
If you have somebody who doesn't like loud noises and weaponry, well, then maybe being in the army isn't for you.
And for me, I can't sort of help but think.
Let me know what you think of this.
I can't help but think. If you find...
Opposing ideas make you anxious, make you panic, and you feel that they're doing some sort of irrevocable physical harm to your brain, to your body, to your soul.
Maybe debate just isn't the place for you.
Maybe this is just like fainting at the side of blood and considering a medical degree.
Maybe this is just not the right place.
I really think that there's something to be said for that line of thought.
We've got law programs now where students have I've protested the fact that they have to study the legislation and even the case studies related to rape or sexual assault, and they say that they find it to be triggering.
That's a word that they'll often use.
But my thought is, if you're going to be a lawyer and you're going to be representing clients who have had this experience, man, I don't know how you can say, I can't be exposed to that and then expect to be prepared when you're actually in the field.
And this goes with many other areas of study where you know that When you're in the real world, outside of the pearly gates of a university, the ivory tower of a university, you're going to be exposed to this stuff.
Heck, if you turn on Netflix, you're exposed to this stuff.
So for us to be trying to shield students from these everyday occurrences and notions because they're university students, well, that just seems ridiculous.
Well, then things used to be quite a bit more elite in the old academe, right?
Which is that you used to have 10% or so of people going to university, and they were, in general, the cognitive elite, you know, with people with the highest reasoning skills, the highest verbal skills, sometimes even highest the math skills and so on.
And now the net has been cast very wide.
And I wonder if casting the net wider is bringing a bunch of people in who may not be the most well-suited for this level of robust intellectual jousting.
You know, like, I mean, I'm not going to become a farmer if I faint if I get dirt under my fingernails.
There's an interesting correlation there that you've brought up.
And what we've been seeing, especially in the arts and humanities, is increasingly the average to get into those programs have gone down.
And That's because, and it's this cycle, so let's just examine this cycle a bit.
As parents realize that arts and humanities degrees actually don't teach critical thinking anymore, And they don't teach critical thinking because they're only willing to present one side of an argument.
And you can only get critical thinking if you get both sides of the argument.
So parents are catching on to this.
And they're finding that rather than being well-educated, being able to think clearly, students are just being indoctrinated in these programs.
So parents are saying, OK, I'm not going to send my kid there.
I might send them off to a trade.
I might send them off into a business program or a science program, math, computer, any of the STEM fields.
So then the arts faculty and administrators say, holy cow, we've got a problem here.
Nobody's coming to our programs anymore.
And we have seen year over year decline in these programs.
So what do they do?
Well, they say, well...
We're going to lower the average to get in, because then we can cast a wider net.
And then that presents a problem unto itself.
Because you're going to have kids who might be less likely to be critical thinkers in the first place.
And so they're even going to be more open to indoctrination.
They're going to listen to a professor and take it as gospel.
So there's a real problem there, and it's a vicious circle, really.
Well, in my entrepreneurial days, we used to call this a death spiral, which is when you're not doing well in business, you can't afford to hire the best people.
So you hire people who aren't as competent, and then you end up doing worse, which means you have to hire people who are less competent.
It's like, if your basketball team isn't doing well, lowering the standards for entry for your basketball team ain't going to turn things around.
And I would like there to be a soft turnaround, but there may be a hard bounce, because I think that, particularly in arts, they're kind of strip mining the credibility of previous generations of arts degrees, which were rigorous.
And rational and challenging and produced great thinkers.
And I know that a lot of people in the STEM fields look at arts like it's kind of frou-frou.
It's like, but that's the bedrock of our civilization.
These are the values. I mean, you're not going to get a lot of moral values out of, say, a physics degree or an engineering degree, a computer science degree.
Essential, though, these things are for running a country.
To actually have a civilization, you need values.
And that means, at least it used to mean, an arts degree.
Yeah, it used to mean an arts degree.
But now, I play a little game sometimes, and I will go on the website of a university, a Canadian university, and I'll look at what people, what the professors in a program are studying.
And I'll do this for the arts and humanities.
And so I'll look at the folks in the English department.
And the thing that is striking to me now is the number of people, let's say, in English, who are not studying what I would say It would be conventionally thought of as English literature, but they're studying gender, race, colonialism, white privilege.
And again, this is in the English department.
Nobody's studying Shakespeare.
I'm sorry, fewer are studying Shakespeare.
But a lot of people, if you look and you say, wow, they're all studying the same thing.
Go to communications, the communications department.
Try and find somebody who's actually studying the political economy of the media in Canada, or even the financial structure.
Very hard to find.
But look for those people who are studying gender, race within the media, and it's almost everybody.
So this really should cause concern to parents and students, because if your professors are all playing in the same sandbox, how are you going to get a diversity of ideas in your courses?
And this is a complaint I get from a lot of students as well.
They say, you know what?
That course I just took with so-and-so professor in that particular program, That was the same course I took with so-and-so in the same program.
And I took it last year in the same program.
I mean, there's only so many ways you can dig into this when you're really supposed to be digging into all of communication studies or all of English literature or Any other program in the arts and humanities, you just can't keep playing this one-trick pony.
In the old days, 20 years ago, when I was doing my first degree in English and philosophy, we might have touched on race and gender and class, but that was a course.
That wasn't the whole curriculum.
Yeah, I remember taking a course on race relations at McGill, but it wasn't embedded into everything.
And I think my concern is, to be perfectly frank, David, my concern is that it's kind of turning into a four-year, slow-motion, two-minute hate exercise, wherein sort of Western values, white males, the patriarchy and all of this – I think we talk about it in terms of propaganda and propaganda is the opposite of thought.
It's not even the absence of thought.
It's the opposite of thought because it gives people the illusion of an answer when what they really need is open-ended questions.
My concern is how much people are being taught To hate the country, to hate the West, to hate males, to hate whites and so on.
And that this is going to not only render them not great at competing in the free market, but may render them actually very hostile to the free market, which means that it's actually kind of crippling their chance to succeed in a market environment.
I worry about that as well.
And I take a historical view.
And I know that...
It is typically not external powers that cause countries to fall, but it's actually internal rot that causes a country to fall.
And often it is the elites within a society that begin to propagate some pretty nasty ideas that percolate down to the general populace.
And in a university When you have young men and women and they're being told by someone who seems to have a lot of credibility, they've got a PhD, they have a tenure-track position or a tenured position at a university, they're speaking from authority.
At least that's the perception among these young people.
And you need their approval to pass.
Which is important. Well, this is the other thing, right?
You've got to toe the party line or you're not going to be able to justify the hundreds of thousands of dollars you're spending on your university education or 20 scores of thousands if you're in Canada and you get a good deal.
But my point would be that before a country can really be taken over ideologically and then by Whoever the nasty forces are, they first have to convince people that it's not worth defending.
And the way you do that is you say, you know, everything about your society is bad.
Everything about this particular majority group is bad.
And if you can convince enough people of that, well then it's sure easy to get your way, to have your way.
And the thing that is striking to me is that we are so lucky To be in the West, and in Canada in particular, it's better than anywhere else.
And the fact that young people, students in arts and humanities programs can be convinced otherwise, just shows how pernicious the instruction can be in these classrooms.
Because just look around you at the freedoms you have that are not experienced anywhere else.
And yet to be told and then believe that your society is generally negative, wow, that takes a hard sell.
Well, it also reminds me of the sort of classic paradigm of an abusive relationship.
To take the sort of classic example, a man starts dating a woman and then begins to criticize her and undermine her and turn her against herself and turn her against all her values.
And he hollows her out so he can replace her with his narcissistic need and the puppetry of Of abuse.
And this is how I think this kind of invasion, and it comes in particular from the left, I think, in this particular manifestation.
Sometimes it's come from the right in the past.
And look at Germany in the 1930s.
But in this case, it's coming from the left.
And it is, to me, a very abusive relationship, particularly for people who come to Canada.
And then say Canada is a terrible, terrible place.
I mean, because it does ask, it begs that basic question.
It's like, well, if Canada is such a terrible place, huh, then what people are doing here?
And so I do think, and I would say this to a husband who was abusing his wife.
It's like, either she's not a terrible person, in which case you're a terrible person for telling her she is, or she is a terrible person, in which case you should not be with her.
And this relationship writ large in culture can produce extraordinary amounts of social conflict.
I want to get back to the point you raised, and I think it's excellent, that we sometimes will see new Canadians who then will be quite caustic toward the country.
But I would point out that they tend to be people who have gone to arts and humanities programs.
Whereas if you find, I'm thinking second generation, even first generation Canadian, And they haven't gone off to an arts or humanities program.
And you ask them about the country.
They are solidly patriotic.
And they realize the goodness of this country.
And it's because they haven't been told otherwise.
Instead, they've experienced the goodness.
They know what they've come from.
And they're pleased with what they've seen here.
I mean, they voted with their feet to get here in the first place.
And now they have incredible opportunities.
And they appreciate it.
And you see that time and again.
You only see this negative view from people who have been instructed, thoroughly instructed to believe this because it is actually counter to the reality.
Again, we've never had it better.
We've never had more rights for people.
We've never had more freedoms for people.
We've never had more security in terms of our health and all the other good things that make a nation worth living in.
We've never had that. So the people who come and aren't indoctrinated into this negative way of thinking, they see it and they appreciate it.
It's those who tend to go into these particular programs where they can be programmed to actually believe that up is down and black is white And again, so I just want to say that there are those people who do come as first and second generation Canadians who do love this country and who do appreciate this country, and it's because they've experienced it and haven't heard second and third hand through academics what they should think.
Well, and I completely agree with that, and it's an excellent point to make.
One thing I find fascinating is the promise of diversity versus the delivery of diversity in higher education.
Because, of course, the idea of diversity is, well, you know, bring lots of different groups in, bring lots of different, you know, bring your genders in and so on, and you'll get a richer and wider perspective.
You'll have better arguments.
You'll have more experiences brought to the table and so on, which all sounds great.
You know, I'm I'm down for that.
You know, the more arguments, the more perspectives, the more experiences that are brought to the table, the better off.
But there does seem to be a little bit of a bait and switch, which is, okay, let's have all this diversity.
And it's like, well, now you can't criticize this group, and this group's going to get offended, and this group's going to get upset, and you can't say this, and you can't say that.
And so the idea that diversity is going to enrich and widen your intellectual experience as the promise seems to be delivering something quite the opposite.
Well, there isn't diversity on a university campus, at least not in the professoriate.
That's clear. I mean, all the data will show us that.
I'm trying to think of some studies.
Joel Invar at Tilburg University did a study of people in social psychology, and it was a very large sample.
It was across the West, so U.S., Canada, and Scandinavia, U.K., etc., etc., And he looked at the political affiliation and also the social values of people in the social sciences in particular.
And what he found was, and I just want to get this right, only 4% were conservative.
And to me...
And then 90% were identified as liberal or left-leaning.
That's not diversity.
Who else did a study recently?
If ever your viewers want to go on, I'm sure they've been to Heterodox Academy, founded by Jonathan Haidt.
There was a recent study put out by a fellow, oh, his name escapes me.
He was looking at...
Anyway, he was looking at the intellectual diversity on university campuses, and this has just been in the last year.
And again, he found that it was less than 10%, it was 9%, 9% of professors, and this is across all programs, including the sciences, Nine percent or less were conservative, libertarian, or right-leaning.
Now, when you have such a widely over-representation of leftist views on a university campus, you are not going to get a diversity of ideas.
You're not going to get a debate happening.
Everybody's going to agree with each other.
And the people who are We'll just stay quiet because they know that there's a gang mentality.
And we can see that too. I mean, survey evidence shows that people who are conservative on a university campus, and I'd include myself in that category, although I used to see myself as left-leaning, and then the left moved incredibly far from where I stand, especially in terms of free expression.
Anyway, It's wise for someone of a conservative worldview to say nothing if you're a professor.
Because the other stuff that Joel Inbar found was that those professors on the left will sink your grants.
25% of leftist professors said they would sink the grants if they found it was coming from a conservative.
I don't want my research grants to be sunk.
He also found that a third of those professors on the left said that if they were on a hiring committee, they wouldn't hire someone who was a conservative.
So, I mean, it's open season.
And this is what happens when you have a A group that is ideologically uniform, and they can talk to each other and tell each other how they're right, and they're not going to let the other side in.
So there isn't diversity on university campuses right now.
The empirical evidence shows that.
And really, this will cause incredible problems for people who are trying to learn because they're not going to get both sides of the story.
Oh, I get lots of calls.
I do a call-in show and I get lots of calls from students who are libertarians or who are right-leaning or at least not hard.
I even get calls from leftists who are like, well, I'm a leftist, but I'm not that kind of leftist because those guys are crazy.
Like, I'm not a Stalinist.
I'm not a Maoist. I'm not a Trotskyite.
And it is a peculiar kind of agony.
Because the problem is, even if they were all on the left, but they were still into critical thinking, that would be one thing.
But you talk about this critical theory as opposed to critical thinking, which is kind of like using the word social justice and combining it with justice.
To me, justice is equality of opportunity.
Social justice is equality of outcome.
And if you say critical thinking, fantastic, you know, let's go the full Socratic route.
But if you say critical theory, that is a very, very different thing where you have to tell people what's good or bad before you show it to them and punish them if they deviate from the party line.
And I wonder if you can help people understand how that leftist or really quasi-Marxist critical theory began to worm its way into academia.
Yeah, for sure.
What I've seen on my campus and other campuses across North America and into the UK is there's this idea that we need to filter any kind of curriculum through a critical lens.
But as you've already pointed out, we think, oh, critical lens.
Well, we have two competing ideas.
That's not what they mean. Let's criticize the Communist Manifesto.
No, no, it's never that. No, right.
So critical theory, actually, you see it, the beginnings of this in the Frankfurt School.
So a group of German academics, they then come to Columbia University, and they set up shop, and they become the critical theorists.
And I mean, I'm not going to do justice to the entire explanation.
And I'd encourage people to simply Google it and look it up, but I'll give you the Coles notes, and it's this idea that really these people primarily were Marxists, and what they saw was that the ideas of economic Marxism, they simply didn't work.
They took the idea of oppressor and oppressed.
Now, in traditional Marxism, the oppressor is the capitalist and the oppressed is the proletariat.
But in this case, they said, well, you know what?
The oppressor is anyone from the dominant culture.
So if you're in the West, that would have been men primarily, whites, and probably Christian as well, all included in that.
So those suddenly became the villains.
And then you had the oppressed.
Now, the oppressed was anyone who wasn't in the majority, but then there were also special groups who were particularly marginalized, whether it was people of color or people of gays and now transgendered people.
And women, of course, for a long time as well.
And women, of course, certainly, yeah. And so it's a very bifurcated system where they say, There really isn't nuance here.
You are either the oppressor or the oppressed.
And if you're the oppressed, you're good.
And if you're the oppressor, you're bad.
And we're going to do everything we can in order to show how bad the oppressor is.
And we're also going to try and remove the power from them.
But what it doesn't take into account is the level of the individual.
There are white males who are born into poverty.
There are white males who are beaten by their parents.
And these people, certainly, they're the oppressed themselves.
So at the level of the individual, this whole idea breaks down.
And that's why it was such an incredible thing when, out of the Enlightenment, we began to say, Is the individual?
And how can we honor the individual?
And let's move away from tribalism.
And let's look at each person as an individual.
Because when we do, we know that everybody's different.
And this idea of equality of outcome is absolutely madness, because there just isn't Equality of distribution in terms of skills in people.
So instead we just say, okay, you know what?
Everybody will have the equal right to prosper.
But knowing that equal outcomes, well, that's a fantasy.
And to try and make equal outcomes is only going to lead to more inequity.
Yeah, here's my imitation of a band trying to pick the best singer.
Hey, who's the best singer?
Okay, you get to be the singer.
You know, I mean, that's the way it works. I mean, not everyone has an equal singing voice.
Not everyone has equal intelligence.
Not everyone makes the same choices.
And that's diversity of me, is diversity of outcome.
And the one thing, see, I can get behind this idea that there are exploited and exploiters.
I mean, to me, it's more associated with government power than it is with the free market.
But I could easily turn this back on the Marxist professors and say, okay, so you guys are selling indoctrination as education.
You're lying to people in a lot of ways about the outcome of what you're teaching them.
And you're basically funneling them into tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt when they think they're going to learn how to think when they're just going to learn how to nod, unobey, and hate.
Now, that to me is pretty exploitive, but you won't hear a lot of that coming out of the professors these days.
You don't. And I think if we did a little bit of truth in advertising, one of my personal problems with academia is that we don't specifically publish the outcomes of our graduates, where we say whether they went on.
And so, and I think that's That's disingenuous and it doesn't do a service to the public.
So I'll just, I would point out that, so someone taking a gender studies degree, there was a study done in the US that showed that that person will be in the bottom 8% of earners in their country.
Wait, are you saying that they're contributing to the gender wage gap?
But that's just ironic in a way, isn't it?
It is ironic.
But my point would be that That outside of the university, people will recognize the value or lack thereof of a particular degree.
And increasingly, gender studies, which may have started out as a fine scholarly pursuit, and certainly when there was real oppression happening systemically, codified in law against women, that Then such a study makes sense.
But now, when there is simply no reason to believe that there is systemic racism, we just don't have laws on the books anymore.
And if there is racism, it's at the level of the individual.
It's not at the level of the system.
But my point would be, with things like gender studies, if you're at the bottom 8% of earners who have a university degree, Maybe we should be telling our students, you know, unless you're really into this and you just want to do it sort of on a lark or because it's personal edification, whatever, we need to be more truthful about that.
And I guess the area where you do see truth is...
The average it takes to get into these programs.
So to get into gender studies programs, you probably need about a 70.
But if you wanted to get into health sciences, for instance, at McMaster University, it's about a 95.
So the universities really have shown you, by virtue of the academic average needed, what the worth of the degree is.
So let's picture the academic average as the cost.
To get in. And those that cost a lot probably have greater value after you finish.
Yeah, and I think it's frankly unconscionable what is being done to the young people in academia at the moment because there is this lie about the value of the degree.
There are the lowering of standards without everyone explaining that that means that the degree becomes less valuable no matter how high your average is going in.
Because if they say, oh, employers, if they get wind of, and they usually do, oh, you only need a 70 to get into this course.
Maybe you had a 95 and got into this course.
You're going to be lumped in with everyone who's in the 70.
So it strips the value from everyone who's doing this course.
If it ladles you down into debt, it delays your chance to get a career going.
It delays your options after graduation.
You've just got to take the first job you can get, which might be suboptimal.
It delays your chance to settle down and get married.
If you're taught to hate the patriarchy and been suspicious of men and think that you live immersed in some thorny razor blade rape culture all around you, it's going to interfere with your capacity to love, to pair bond, to settle down.
If you want to have kids, to have kids, to be happy.
I mean, it really is predatory, not just financially, not just in the years that they're there, I think it really alters the trajectory of a young life in a very negative direction.
It does. And I want to just move on to or extrapolate on a point you made.
Employers are actually getting pretty familiar with what potential employees look like coming from certain programs.
And if you're in a program...
That has become known for agitation over things that simply don't matter to the rest of the world.
If you're in the program that is constantly claiming victim status, if you're in the program that is constantly causing disruption, employers are going to say, maybe I don't want to hire you.
And that's not to say that there aren't valid whistleblowers and people who have a strong conscience for right and wrong and justice, all that.
But if you come from a program that is exclusively known for false flags and for just promoting violence or promoting disruption, Sorry to interrupt, but we see some of these racially charged incidents, some of them being revealed as hoaxes.
Well, that is extraordinarily dangerous for an employer because if the media gets hold of that, your entire corporate brand could be destroyed over what could turn out to be a false allegation, but you can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Right. You know what would be an interesting exercise is to see the rate of employment for students at a place like Evergreen State University or Evergreen State College.
So for those viewers who don't know, Evergreen State literally was taken over by social justice warriors.
And they had, at one point, they had an exercise where they told white people not to come to the school.
They were just incredibly racist, many of these students.
And it was caught on video and tuition, I'm sorry, enrollment has gone down and there are now cuts at the university.
But I'm wondering from the point of view of employers, How are these graduates, people who graduated in the last year from Evergreen State College, are they getting jobs or employers saying, whoa, I heard about you in the news.
I certainly don't want your disruptions in my company.
I don't know. I'd be interested in that.
Well, you know, people seem to put far more effort into buying a computer than researching the outcome of nearly a half-decade commitment and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And I strongly urge people, go and find out what are the employment opportunities in your degree, maybe even in that geographical region and certainly in that college itself or in that university because it's a huge investment.
I had a friend – I have a friend who's an economics professor who would bemoan the fact that students wouldn't come to his open sessions.
You know, he'd have – sit there with his door open and anyone could come by with questions.
And I remember he was telling me he was railing at the students saying, look, you know, it's not just the money you're paying to be here.
It's the money you're not being paid because you're here.
Look at the opportunity cost.
And he sort of ran it on the board.
And, you know, this is a while back ago, but it was, you know, $300,000, $350,000 American in terms of what people were paying and what income they were not getting paid because...
They were there. It is the second biggest thing you're going to spend money on usually outside a house.
And people just like, they feel like they're on this conveyor belt.
Like, well, you finished high school and you go do this degree.
And, oh, these people took me.
And it's like, be aware.
Certainly understand the loans that you're getting into.
But do the research and figure out what is it like on the other side.
Research the professors.
Are they friendly to reason and evidence?
Are they friendly to the free market?
Because that's where you're going to make your money after you graduate.
And what are their views on gender?
You know, do they promote hatred of any particular group?
Often it's the white males and so on.
That's a very, very important set of decisions that you're making because this is the foundation for your adulthood.
It certainly is.
And now, as you were saying that, I was thinking, well, what if somebody already finds themselves in a university program and they think, oh, I'm screwed.
I'm in my second year.
You know, I didn't take that advice and now here I am.
And my... My thought on that is this, if you already find yourself in a university program and your professors are only, and it's clear that your professors are only giving you one side of the story, this could be happening in, again, arts, humanities, social sciences, and it's just clear that they are filtering everything through a social justice lens or a diversity, equity, inclusion lens, and it's It's simply not giving you both sides of the story.
I would encourage students to educate themselves.
And how do they do that? Well, first of all, by watching shows like yours.
And I would say if parents are watching this, get your kids watching.
Freedom in Radio, there are other sites as well.
Jordan Peterson's got some great videos out there.
And I'm sure if they are interested in someone who's a bit younger, my name is Josephine.
She's a Canadian political science graduate who has some great videos.
But parents really have to know, and students have to know, there's great content Right.
you can get the other side of the story.
And you have to educate yourself.
Let's talk a little bit about religious criticism, which is a fairly hot topic in Canada these days.
You have a great article, but we'll put the links to it below.
But the article regarding the benefit of criticism, I mean, being criticized is wonderful for It's like an inoculation.
It hurts in the moment, but it keeps you safe from error in the long run.
But with regards to religion, it seems to me that criticism, which has often been banned as blasphemy and so on, is particularly useful to religious institutions.
And I wonder if you could compare the benefits to Christianity versus some of the fears that people have that criticizing Islam is and always will be Islamophobia.
Yeah, I mean, and this is one of my areas of research.
So I'm cross-appointed to journalism as well as religion.
And by religion, I'm not a theologian.
I'm a sociologist of religion.
So one of my areas, I've looked at media, portrayal of certain religions, etc.
And so I'm speaking with some authority on this.
And I know that in terms of Christianity, for example, We can see how Christianity, and I'm talking about conservative Christianity in particular, how it changed, or how the believers who are conservative Christians have changed in their perceptions because of criticism.
Now, there will be some in the Christian community who say, oh, I wish that it hadn't happened, but we're just talking about what has happened.
So if you look about 10 years ago, it was 18% of evangelicals, conservative Protestants in the U.S., We're really firmly against gay marriage.
But that has gone up by 10, 15% in the last 10 years in terms of their acceptance.
Now, that's not saying that they're full-on supporters of homosexual lifestyles, but in terms of their acceptance of gay marriage.
And why has that happened?
Why have they moved?
Why have they become more moderate or more progressive, if you want to use that term?
It's clearly because of the barrage they've received In media, academia, and even from government in relation to criticism.
They've been criticized for their position on homosexuality.
So they've moderated that position.
So I use that because nobody ever cares when you point out something happening to Christianity.
But what I see as very dangerous is this movement, especially in Canada, to prevent criticism of Islam.
It's often under the guise of Islamophobia.
They say if you're saying anything against Islam, then it's Islamophobic.
And this is the route toward real dangerous outcomes.
I'll give you an example.
So we saw the Rotherham sex grooming scandal, the Rotherham sex grooming scandal in Rotherham, England, where a number of Pakistani Muslim men literally raped and sexually abused white girls, young white girls. And there have been some commentators—let me just finish that story— It was really, it was known.
It was known what was happening in the Rotherham scandal was that this was going on, but people in city council, in the police, in the social service agencies, they didn't want to say anything for fear of being pegged a bigot or being Islamophobic.
And just to interrupt it, it got so bad that one, I think it was two fathers, led the police to the house where their daughters were being abused and the police arrested the fathers rather than the perpetrators.
Exactly, which is just mind-boggling.
And What we saw in that case, and what I fear could happen in Canada, is because no one would speak out, because they didn't want to be called a bigot, because they didn't want to be accused of Islamophobia, this went on for years.
So that literally hundreds and hundreds of young children, young girls, were brutally abused.
And I see That similar hesitancy beginning to take root here in Canada to speak out.
And let me be clear, there are moderate Muslims who want to speak out against this and they too are shut down.
So the point that I would make is we have to be able to criticize because from criticism comes correction.
And there's a group, the National Council of Canadian Muslims, And they put forth a definition of Islamophobia that actually said that it involved, even if you criticized the cultural or political practices of Islam, well, oh my goodness, I want to criticize some of the cultural practices of some Islamic countries.
I do. And I want to criticize some of the social and political practices.
But if you're saying that that all falls under the rubric of Islamophobia, then that silences me.
For anyone who values freedom, who values the rights of women, who values the safety of gays and lesbians, We need to be able to speak out against certain types of Islam that are really problematic and to not be able to do it because someone said, well, that's Islamophobia. Well, that's craziness.
So just to conclude then is I see this movement to use the label Islamophobia to stifle what should be virulent criticism and important criticism of problems within Islam.
Well, I mean, I think you're right.
And the scope of these grooming scandals is, as you know, much wider than Rotherham.
It went on among hundreds of towns and cities in the UK. And this is the most frustrating thing to me, David, is that...
To be able to criticize, say, Islam or any particular group means that they're under the rubric of free speech and we can all get along and have our recent debates and go back and forth and so on.
But boy, if you really want to start provoking something like Islamophobia, have three decades worth of Muslims being able to rape girls with impunity.
And that's going to start to generate some real Islamophobia.
That's going to be kind of tough to call a phobia after a while.
If they're outside the rule of law, If you can no longer criticize, say, female genital mutilation, it's like, okay, now we have a problem.
And we don't have a problem because of Islam, we have a problem because I'm not allowed to speak and to argue and to debate in a rational manner.
And that to me is the great frustration.
If you want to provoke Islamophobia, start shutting people down because of the spurious charge of Islamophobia, which is not an argument.
The word phobia is not an argument.
And it seems to me very strange to be in a world where people can openly say that all white males are racist and sexist and it's a rape culture and it's colonialistic and it's predatory and it's nasty and it's mean and it's evil.
But if you say, well, it's not great to throw gays off buildings, well, that's just unacceptable.
And it's like this is a very topsy-turvy world to be navigating at the moment.
And let's just put it into context or to broaden the scope of it.
It was when we couldn't criticize Christianity, and in particular, Catholicism, that we saw incredible abuse within the Catholic Church.
Pope Francis recently said, you know, what was a big problem in the abuse scandal of the Catholic Church was that we had a culture of silence.
And I'm so pleased that he recognized that.
Any time that you have a culture of silence, it allows evil to fester.
And there's a research group out of the UK, Quilliam.
I'm not sure if it's called Think Tank, but it's actually very moderate Muslims who are on this.
And they have said, listen, there is a link between certain Islamic faiths, and I'm using faiths plurally there, that some people are coming and they're interpreting the Koran in this way.
So we're not going to pretend like it's not Islam.
It is, but it's a version of Islam, their interpretation of Islam.
And it is contributing to this kind of behavior.
And as someone who's studied the effect of theology on behavior, I can say conclusively, all these people who say, well, no, X religion doesn't cause this behavior.
Well, that's just crazy. That's the equivalent of saying a certain idea couldn't motivate a certain action.
It does. So to say that certain interpretations of Islam can't cause certain behaviors, well, that's a lie.
Because we know that ideas have consequences.
My point would be that there are moderate Muslims who have identified this problem, but even they have difficulty finding a voice in the media.
Yeah, I mean, it's funny because I think since, and this is a very broad brush generalization, so I apologize for where it goes astray.
But I think as we have generally drifted away from faith and purpose and religion in the West, we're having more and more difficulty understanding the motivations of religious people.
And when you have fundamentalist religious groups of any denomination and you are generally a kind of hedonistic, self-motivated, self-interested secularist, it's almost like, well, I don't speak that language anymore, so I'm sure they're just like me.
They just kind of want to be comfortable.
They just want to get their job and go vacationing and play squash and so on.
It's like, no, no, no, no. There are people out there in the world who take these religious texts extraordinarily seriously.
And I'm not hoping that they're just hypocrites.
Like, that can't be the hope that they have no integrity and won't follow these texts.
It's like, no, they really believe this.
It matters. It's very real.
It is the path to heaven. And it can be destructive.
But as we've kind of drifted away from any kind of overarching philosophy or purpose or drive, it's like these people have just become incomprehensible to us, fundamentalists of every stripe and hue.
And they can be both secularists.
I view Marxists as fundamentalist secularists.
But it's like we just don't understand what it's like to have a higher purpose.
And so we can't really imagine how that can motivate people anymore.
Although there is a double standard as well.
And I'm thinking of, do you remember the Westboro Baptist Church?
So they were out of the US and it was really just a family and an extended family.
And they were the ones who used to go off to the funerals of gay people and they would have signs that said, God hates fags.
And they were very incendiary, just terribly intolerant people.
But when you read the media reports on that, the media has no trouble saying it is their belief in certain scripture that causes them to have this behavior.
And sometimes they'd even quote, they'd say Leviticus, for example, the book of Leviticus in the Old Testament talks about homosexually being an aberration and people who are gay should be put to death.
And these people are taking it literally.
So the media and others seem to be very capable of saying, oh, look, this theology caused this consequence or caused this action in the Westboro world.
Sorry to interrupt. I hate to do this, but I just wanted, before I forget the point, of course, Jews and Muslims accept the Old Testament as well, but it was only ever focused on Christianity, which has a New Testament, which is the whole point of Christianity, but I just wanted to point that out.
That's right. No, exactly.
And these people at the Westboro Baptist Church, I mean, they did support their views with Old Testament and some New Testament scripture.
But the point that I'd make here is that the academics and the media folks who were looking at this said, aha, see, this theology has caused this behavior.
But for whatever reason, those same academics and those same media pundits won't make that connection With Islam.
And that's a problem, because if you're ever going to solve this issue, you need to be able to say, here's where the issue originates.
So how did Christians overcome this?
The Christians, who are more moderate Christians, said, you know what?
We're not going to pay attention to those verses.
They literally say those verses don't apply anymore.
So that's one technique.
What we need to be able to do then is to talk about the issue as it applies to the Muslim or Islamic faith and say, okay, here are the problematic verses.
These are the ones that are using to justify behavior that we would deem unacceptable in the West.
So what are we going to do with them?
You can either totally make them into metaphors or we can just say we're going to reject them because that's how Christians have had to deal with it.
And that's how Jews have had to deal with it.
But if you can't at least acknowledge that there's a problem actually in the theology, well, then you can't come to solutions.
And I think that a lot of this stuff is driven by a hostility towards Christianity.
And I think this comes...
I mean, the Marxists have, I think, been traditionally quite hostile towards Christianity as a whole.
And the persecution of priests in Marxist regimes is usually quite...
And that, I find, is one of the major driving emotional forces behind it, is that, I don't know if it takes a huge amount of courage to attack a group that has turned the other cheek as one of its central commandments, but this hostility towards Christianity,
which whether you're an atheist or not, you have to recognize that Christianity is the underpinning of Western civilization in terms of universality, in terms of ethics, in terms of individual conscience and free will and all of the things that have helped us build a more individualistic society.
This hatred and hostility towards Christianity as, I guess, like white males, is the unprotected group that everyone can dump on without repercussions.
But heaven forbid you take 1% of the criticisms and apply it to any other group and suddenly you've just a There's no Christian-o-phobe word, right?
There's no white male-o-phobe word, but there's all this other phobias that are supposed to be around there.
In other words, since phobia is a kind of mental illness, all criticisms of any particular group or ideology is a sign of mental illness.
But that's back to Soviet insanity where communism is perfect and therefore if you're not happy under communism, you're mentally ill, and we're going to give you horse tranquilizers and put you in a white room.
That is not a way to have a civilized society.
No, no.
And what gets lost within this barrage of criticism against Christianity?
So we'll just talk about that for a moment.
So in Canada, for example, Christians give three times the amount.
These are practicing Christians.
I just want to make the distinction between people who will say on a survey, I'm a Christian versus those who actually attend religious services regularly.
So practicing Christians in Canada give three times the amount of average Canadians or non-practicing Christians to charity.
They also do twice as much volunteering, and when they volunteer, they give 40% more time.
So really in terms of benevolence and altruism and societal good, Practicing Christians, and it's typically conservative Christians, whether they're conservative Catholic or conservative Protestant, punch way beyond their weight.
So there's a lot of reason to, if someone is a Christian, to be proud of that.
But I just want to also...
I love the nuance.
I want to have a nuanced view.
And I get why, coming out of the Enlightenment, there was a pushback against Christianity.
And we see within...
The Catholic Church, for instance.
There was a guy, Pius IX, in the 1850s, who really was very totalitarian.
And he had a – it was called a syllabus of errors where he wrote down all the things and all the books you couldn't read and all the things you couldn't do.
And so this was certainly – Mimicking things we see today from the radical left where he was trying to have a conformity to his view.
And Christianity was part of that.
And there have been movements within Protestant Christianity that have been equally totalitarianism or totalitarian.
But within Christianity, I think this has been its saving grace, if I can use that almost as a pun.
Is that within Christianity, there's always the seeds of its own correction as well.
Because as people move toward these more totalitarian models, the very words of Jesus will come to condemn them and say things like, well, we've got to separate church and state.
Render under Caesar what's Caesar.
Render under God what's God.
It's this idea of, well, you actually have to love your enemies.
And then these kind of ideas will trip up the people who have the totalitarian impulses.
I don't know that other religions have that, and I think that's maybe a reason why we often see correction within Christianity, but maybe not so often in other world religions.
Christianity, as far as the relationship with God and personal ethics and conscience and free will, to me, is wonderful.
Christianity, I guess like all belief systems, tends to try and spread to areas where its competence is not as great and may in fact interfere with progress.
So Christianity should never have said, we do science, in my humble opinion, because science is not theology.
Christianity should never have said, we do medicine and prayer is the best way to get better because, well, antibiotics tend to be a little bit more effective.
So when Christianity spread, I think, throughout the Dark Ages and the early Middle Ages, to the point where it was dominating medicine and science and other more rational and objective disciplines, well, that was a problem.
And then when science and medicine came surging back in the sort of mid to late Enlightenment, certainly after Francis Bacon, then it had to hammer back against the theology that was masquerading as science and medicine to take the two, and the free market, of course.
I mean, the idea that the church should run the market I think it's been a big baby with the bathwater situation insofar as people say, well, the church turned out to be wrong about the shape of the solar system or the origin of life and evolution and so on.
And it turned out to be wrong about faith and prayer as the way to cure illness.
And it turned out to be wrong about Managing the free market and so on.
And therefore, there's no such thing as ethics.
There's no such thing as free will.
There's no such thing as conscience.
And we're all meat machines in a Nietzschean anti-universe striving for power like monkeys.
And that to me was where you just – I wish that pendulum would just kind of slow in the middle bit.
You know, yes, it's a course correction.
But you know what happens when you're slipping on ice and you turn the wheel too hard?
You just spin out of control.
Sorry, I wish there was a question in there.
I'm sorry for the long sort of thing, but I think that's one of the things that happened.
We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater, and I agree.
And the one thing that often gets forgotten when we're criticizing the church or institutionalized Christianity...
For being anti-science or suppressing science is that the majority of the great scientific discoveries, especially moving out of the Middle Ages and into the scientific revolution, were done by Christians.
And I'm thinking like Isaac Newton, for example, Kepler.
Galileo himself was a very devout man.
So what I would point out, and this isn't my idea, but it's certainly the idea of others.
I think that...
Who is the first person who originated this?
Alfred North Whitehead, I think in his 1920 lecture at Harvard, was saying that really There isn't anywhere else you can find this movement from alchemy to chemistry, this movement from astrology to astronomy, but you do find it in Western nations that embrace the Christian faith.
And then he asked the question, well, why is that?
And his suggestion was that it was only within the Christian faith that they believed that because God was rational, The world or the universe could be intelligible and that rational answers could be found.
And certainly in the writings of people like Isaac Newton, you see that idea where he specifically says in his diaries and his other writings that I knew that I would be able to find these mathematical equations.
I'm paraphrasing here, but I knew that I'd be able to find these mathematical equations because God is rational.
And it was this belief That there was a rational designer and that the world was built by this mastermind that led these Christian scientists to be able to believe that they could find the answers that were stymieing everybody else.
Well, and I think it's this wonderful tension that is unique to the West, which Christianity did not expurgate other thinkers.
And that wrestling of, to me in particular, this is again oversimplistic, but it's a way of looking at it, I think that's helpful.
This wrestling between Jesus and Socrates, that Jesus teaches you how to live, but Socrates teaches you how to think.
And this... Lack of hostility towards non-Christian thinkers.
I mean, as you know, I mean, among the scholastic medieval philosophers, Aristotle was known as the philosopher.
Not just a cool guy who was around before Christ and probably went to limbo who had some cool stuff.
The philosopher. And this wrestling of the Greek or Roman tradition, Greek in terms of philosophy, Roman, I think, more in terms of law.
This tension or this wrestling or this, it's not even really a conflict, but this navigation, I guess, between the poles of Socrates and Jesus, I think, has given this incredible fertility to Western thought and Western creativity.
That's certainly true.
And you see it also, you mentioned Aristotle and Plato too, and it made me think of Someone like Augustine, who said that when you are looking at how to discover knowledge, you've got this book we'll call the Bible, but he also said you've got the book of nature.
And what he was talking about was scientific observation, or what he called natural philosophy.
And he said the two really coexist.
And where one conflicts with the other, it's because you're not understanding one or the other, because they won't conflict.
So that was a pretty good idea on his part, because it gave license then to pursue scientific observation and scientific experimentation.
Because it was suggesting that, really, the one will complement the other.
So out of that Augustinian tradition, you then see people willing to experiment and explore, knowing that it was in keeping with their faith worldview.
Yeah, it's so wonderful stuff.
Let's close on this question of hate speech, which...
Frankly, troubles me to no end, because I don't see that as being correctable.
Because to me, the adding of a negative emotional word to the word speech is not an argument against free speech.
And you wrote about one of your Laurier colleagues in an op-ed.
She wrote, as an academic, I support free speech as well as academic freedom.
But... These are not without limitations.
Freedom of expression is limited by the consequences of that speech.
Spreading hate is not free speech.
Now, there's an old saying, I'm sure you've heard of it, that anytime anybody issues a statement, you can throw out everything they say before the word but, you know, because that's just a natural thing.
I'm sorry, but it's your fault, right?
So, this idea that spreading hate is not free speech, Well, first of all, of course, Marxism is full of hatred.
Marxism hates the productive classes.
It certainly destroyed the kulaks.
It destroyed homosexuals at times.
It hates the exploitive classes, the capitalist class, full of hatred.
And it's not even subtle, like it's right there in the text.
And so this idea, the concept of white privilege is a racist concept.
Which spreads hatred and discontent a lot of times.
The concept of the patriarchy spreads hatred and discontent.
So the idea that you can somehow objectively say what is hate and what is not, the idea that you can somehow map the consequences of free speech is completely delusional.
And to me, that's the Dunning-Kruger effect writ large that you can somehow imagine how all of this stuff is going to play out.
And also, it seems to me every single progress in human society that everybody would acknowledge as a real progress generated a lot of hatred and opposition when it first came along.
People said, hey, maybe we shouldn't.
And Christians, in fact, said, hey, maybe slavery, you know, the oldest human tradition outside of procreation, maybe slavery isn't that great an idea.
The amount of intuperation and hatred and rage that that generated.
Okay, well, if we have hate speech laws, guess what?
We still have slavery because it really bothered a lot of people.
And I don't know, it just...
This whole idea really bothers me because if my ideas are bad, just show me how they're bad.
Humiliate me if I don't listen.
But this idea that you're going to map out how free speech is going to play out and then know what you should let be said and what you should not let be said, there's no bottom to that hole that I can see.
Yeah, for me, and we've had to deal with this at Laurier.
Ever since the Lindsey Shepard scandal, a free expression task force was launched.
I'm sorry to interrupt you.
Just as you started, we did touch on this earlier.
If you could just remind people or tell them who don't know the Lindsey Shepard thing briefly, that would be great.
Oh, sure, sure. So Lindsay Shepard was a grad student.
There is a grad student. She's just finishing up her master's at Laurier.
And she showed a video that included Jordan Peterson.
And she was then subjected to an ad hoc star chamber and interrogation by two professors and a woman from the diversity and equity office.
And they accused her of transphobia for showing this video.
The video was a debate regarding the use of gender specific pronouns, if I remember rightly.
That's right. And it had aired on public television before hundreds of thousands of people, and yet they said that it was improper for her to have shown it in the classroom.
What made it improper was that she didn't choose sides, that she had done so neutrally.
That was the problem.
So she was Told she had been transphobic and that she had done harm in her classroom.
She created a toxic environment.
Anyway, there was an actual investigation.
At the end of the investigation, it turned out that there had actually not been a formal complaint.
That part was made up, and it was also determined that, indeed, Lindsay Shepard, the grad student, had done nothing wrong.
And out of this, because of the scandal, everybody outside the university, because of national media attention to this issue, they said, what the heck is going on?
Is this actually what goes on at universities?
Are there really these ideological bullies who will try to verbally beat a young grad student into accepting their point of view?
And there are, and it does happen.
But as a result, there was quite a scandal, a national scandal, and to To ameliorate the situation, my university launched a free expression task force to decide the extent to which free expression can happen on a university.
Why a university has to form a task force to decide that they want to have free inquiry and free expression, that was a question that was raised.
But nonetheless, I was nominated to the task force.
I sat on the task force.
And this was one of the things that kept coming up.
With my colleagues on the task force, for myself, I want maximum free expression on my university campus and on all university campuses, because only through maximum free expression within the bounds of the law can you actually find out what the truth is.
But it was interesting because my colleagues would often try to insert censorship or restrict speech, and they do so by making the claim.
That, well, free speech can't be hate speech.
But their definition of hate speech was not the legal definition.
It was this definition that it really could include anything that caused offense to a group deemed to be marginalized.
Well, and which only provokes people to feign offense if they don't actually experience it in order to shut down ideas they don't want.
It's giving way too much power to people.
Right, then you're giving people the heckler's vote.
You just say, I'm upset, and then suddenly there's no debate anymore.
So for my purposes, I said, really, let's just stick close to what Canadian law says.
In the criminal code, we've got Section 319, and 319 says that you can't advocate violence against a person or a group.
Now, I'm paraphrasing, but that's really the essence of it.
And what we know from Canadian law and the decisions of the Supreme Court is that if something is true, if something is said in good faith, if something is said civilly, if something does not advocate violence, it never qualifies as hate speech.
I know that, but it's interesting that my colleagues who also have PhDs and also have studied these, they ignore that, or they dismiss that, or they try to change that.
And that's just so treacherous.
And that disregard for the law is deeply shocking.
And I think people need to be aware of that.
Well, that's just the law.
It's like... You know, that's kind of the basis of our civilized interactions with each other.
You kind of need to be on board with the law when it comes to allowing people to speak in your environment.
At least take it into account a little bit.
At least give it a drive-by.
That's my only request.
It's not only ignorance of the law.
It's ignorance of history.
Because if you look at history and say, how did any marginalized group, women, homosexuals, how did they get the rights that they enjoy today?
It's because they had free expression.
And I think that this is missing from people on the left, those who are on the regressive left who are saying, we've got to shut down free expression.
We've got to enforce restrictions on speech.
They don't realize that that is a really dangerous precedent because it never goes well.
It will come back to bite you.
Well, and the thing that troubles me about all of that as well is I want to know the worst possible ideas in society so we can track them and map them and oppose them.
Because that's like, you know, you have this antibody system, you know, this immune system in your body that if something comes in that's dangerous to you or foreign or whatever, you kind of want it to know where it is.
You don't want to blind it because then you get, I don't know, some illness that's going to take you down.
So this idea, it's like, well, we're just not going to let this group speak or we're not going to shut down this group and so on.
It's not going away.
There's the internet. There's the dark web.
There's the underground. These things aren't going to go away.
It just means you can't track them anymore and you can't see where they show up and oppose them with all the force of reasoning and evidence at your disposal.
This idea that you can just cross something out and it vanishes.
It's like the little kid, you know, you're playing hide and seek with a two-year-old and they're like, you can't see me!
It's like, no, you've just covered your eyes.
You haven't become invisible.
Right, right. Well, I'd like to say that there's a happy ending to the Free Expression Task Force, or at least a happy ending for me.
I actually had to step down in good conscience.
We had come out with, this is back at the beginning of May, we came out with a statement that I felt was for maximum free expression.
And it had been a lot of to and fro and back and forth.
And we went public with it.
And we had a town hall meeting, and things were looking fairly positive.
There was some pushback from both the right and the left, but I think overall it was a good compromise document that actually did allow for maximum free expression.
But then, just a week after, we came out with the draft statement.
And again, the full statement has never been passed by Senate.
That actually happens at the end of May.
So at the end of May, whatever the real statement will be, will come out.
So we don't know what that'll look like.
But anyway, a week after the draft statement came out, my university, the administration, outside of the task force, on their own, came out with a policy.
And that policy said that they were going to charge groups for security if they wanted to bring a speaker.
Now you say, well, what's wrong with that?
Well, the truth of the matter is, what they'd done effectively was they had just shut down anyone who would bring in a speaker who was conservative, libertarian, or right-leaning.
You see, the only people who ever get protested on university campuses are those people who are speaking on the right.
And the only people who will do the protesting and the disrupting Are those on the left?
And if you want my data on this, Heterodox Academy has published a study where they looked at all of the disruptions that happened from 2000 to 2012.
And they found that for those disruptions between 2000 and 2012, 90.5% were done where the protesters were on the left and the speaker was on the right.
And I would also argue that since 2012, it's gotten a lot worse.
And by worse, I mean that the left has become more radical and the right has been shut down even more.
So I'm sure it's beyond that 90.5.
So all this is to say my university, the administration, when they put forth this policy, essentially they were doing an end run.
They said, okay, well, maybe we've got this free expression document.
But if you want to bring in someone who's a right-leaning speaker, they'll pay this security fee or they'll have to.
And if they can't pay it, well, then they can't hold the event.
And so I tried to convince my other task force colleagues to stop moving ahead.
I said, listen, we wanted to guarantee that marginalized voices could be heard.
This free expression document was to guarantee marginalized voices could be heard.
Please, Stop working on this draft until our university rescinds this new policy that effectively shuts down right-leaning speakers.
Unfortunately, none of my colleagues on the task force would stand with me, so I'm not on the task force any longer.
Well, I actually commend you for your integrity with regards to that.
And to me, this kind of opposition to free speech is one of the inevitable consequences of The combination of irrationality and power.
Because if you're rational and you have authority, then you have no problem with free speech because your position is rational or can be defended or you can be improved or whatever.
If you're irrational and have no power, like if you're just some crazy person on a street corner screaming at the sky, well, you can't really restrict other people's free speech because you don't have any authority.
But when you have both irrationality and sometimes I think it's actually anti-rationality, Plus authority, that is, to me, the witch's brew that tends to douse the growing flames or fire of free speech.
And to me, this goes all the way back to postmodernism and the revolt against reason that occurred that came out of the left starting, I guess, really late 19th century through the Fabian socialists and through postmodernism and so on.
They're openly anti-rational, which means that they can't stand against the gales of reason and evidence, but they won't let go of their position.
And once they get power, they tend to shut things down.
That's funny. I mean, you've nailed it when you say that there is this anti-rationalism within the left, especially the academic left.
One of the most popular textbooks that's used in gender studies classes or cultural studies classes, it's an anthology that was put together by Margaret Anderson.
In the introduction of the book, she explains what the book is going to do.
In it, she says, I'm paraphrasing here and I would encourage your viewers to look it up.
I think it's on page 14. It says, the idea that objectivity is best found through rational thought is both a masculine and Western idea and one that we will challenge throughout this text.
And as I was reading both that book and other books that are put out by Those who embrace gender studies, cultural studies, I kept seeing that they really hate empirical evidence.
And they really hate rational thought.
And what they want are these ideas of lived experience, which we used to call anecdotal evidence.
The plural of anecdote is not data.
No, it's not.
And it took me a while to come to the realization that the reason that they want to make sure that objectivity, rationality, empirical evidence is shuttled to the side is so that they can really have any kind of gobbledygook come forward and they can say, this is our truth.
And when you can convince people that anything is true, well, you can convince them of anything, right?
It becomes faith. It becomes a matter of blind faith.
Yes, it's faith but without commandments.
It's faith without discipline.
It's faith without subjecting yourself to higher standards.
It really is a narcissism of the universe is me.
And of course, logically, if there's no such thing as truth, then you shouldn't be teaching anyone anything.
You know, I don't believe in ghosts, so I don't lead a lot of people around on ghost hunting expeditions because that would be completely hypocritical.
And of course, as people have committed to the left over the last century and a half in particular, I know it goes back further, but it really got its spark in the mid to late 19th century.
They had all these promises, you know, well, you know, there's this capitalist mode of production, but that's going to prey upon itself.
It's going to hollow out the middle class and you're going to end up with a few very rich and a lot of really poor and so on.
And they made all these predictions and they said, well, we've got the socialist means of production, collective ownership of the means of production dictated by the proletariat.
It's going to be wonderful. It's going to be like steroids to the musculature of the modern economy.
And then what happened, of course, is that none of those predictions came true.
In fact, quite the opposite came true.
The middle class, which was supposed to diminish under capitalism, grew.
The poor grew richer.
And the same thing has happened over the last 20 years, in particular in China and India.
It's been the greatest single reduction in human poverty in the history of the planet.
It's almost likely to never be repeated again unless someone figures out how to trade better with Africa.
And so all of the predictions that they had, all of their carefully reasoned arguments and what they expected to happen was going to happen, didn't happen.
In fact, the opposite happened. And so then you face a crossroads.
And the crossroads is, I got these predictions.
The exact opposite is happening.
Maybe I was wrong. I got to reevaluate and so on.
Or you just say, wait, reason and evidence are opposing my ideas?
To hell with reason and evidence.
We'll throw it out. We're just going to go with whim and subjectivity, which then uncorks this weird collectivist rage against anyone who disagrees with you.
Yeah, and as you pointed out, the reason that the left, and we'll call them the far left, the regressive left, get so angry is anger Reads better than stupidity, right? I think I have my new t-shirt.
It reads better than stupidity.
Yeah. And to people who are used to sophistry, passion equals commitment equals truth.
Where, of course, in a rational philosophy, you know, reason equals virtue equals happiness.
And emotions are highly suspect in a rational philosophy.
But in the world of sophistry, emotions and yelling and being willing to pull fire alarms, that shows that you're committed.
That shows that you're certain.
And somehow that means that you're right.
There are a lot of parallels between what we see in the social justice movement or the regressive left and what we see in really fundamentalist religious behavior.
There certainly are so many parallels there.
And I think that that is a good way to understand it because then you also can appreciate how it is almost unassailable When you do make arguments, and this is the frustration I find, when you finally do make contact with someone who's on the regressive left, you're ready to have that conversation.
It's like Trying to argue with someone in a cult very often.
They don't want to listen.
They don't want to listen. They have their platitudes that they're going to speak, and it's this loop.
And then, you know, rather than scream at you heretic, they'll call you bigot.
So there are so many parallels there.
And I don't know.
So I need to look at this more.
If we can figure out how people were deprogrammed from cults, that might be the best way that we can help people recover from the regressive left.
But I need to research that a little bit more.
Well, you know, and just to sort of close on this point, one of the ways in which cults tend to disintegrate is it generally is not based on evidence.
Like, we all know these cults.
They were very famous in the 19th century, where some charismatic Gandalf-style guy would come along and say, the world is going to end three Thursdays from now, so we've got to get to this mountaintop so we can survive it or whatever, right?
And they all go up to the mountaintop and the day comes and goes and it's like, oh, you know what?
Maybe I got my numbers wrong a little bit.
It's going to be, you know, four Tuesdays from now.
And they just keep running from mountaintop to mountaintop and there doesn't seem to be any null hypothesis.
So it usually is not reason and evidence.
I mean, everybody knows smoking is bad for you, but a lot of smokers keep smoking.
And it's usually...
Some sort of disaster that wakes people up.
You kind of have to hit rock bottom.
And this is one of the reasons why I think the work that you're doing, the work that Jordan Peterson is doing and other academics, not just in Canada, but around the world and thinkers saying, you know, really think carefully.
I mean, they're kind of right that it is a toxic environment, but it's not a toxic environment because people are bringing facts.
It's a toxic environment because people are programming you with lies.
And if we can try and get people to think more carefully about engaging in these kinds of brain rotting degrees, then what can happen is the financial incentive tends to change.
You know, when the cult goes broke, suddenly a lot of people kind of shake their heads and say, oh, okay, well, now there's no financial incentive.
And it's like you wake up from a nightmare.
And so to me, there is an ostracism or boycott or pushback against this kind of stuff.
The reform is very unlikely to come.
From within, because there's so much of a positive feedback loop and there's so much profit in it.
But if we can get people to fund them less or go less, then there may be a chance for either people to wake up or just be displaced by people who actually attract the thinking audience.
And we are seeing that already.
Again, and I teach within the arts and humanities, and I value the arts and humanities, what they could be.
But I also see that enrollment continues to decline.
And it's because people outside the university have recognized that the emperor has no clothes.
That the value of this degree is not worth the money as it stands now.
And it is very unlikely.
We've had a lot of tenured professors who are promoting these non-empirical ideas, unempirical ideas.
And you're not going to get rid of them.
But what we might see is if we starve those programs, and it's not me calling for that, it's just parents are doing it already, maybe there will be correction because they'll just say, listen, if we want to ensure that people actually populate Or populate our programs, we've got to change.
Money is a strong motivator in that regard.
So maybe we'll see that.
People respond to incentives.
All right. Well, and also, I think these kinds of conversations really help people as well.
And so I really, really appreciate the time that you spent with me and my listenership today.
Just wanted to remind people to follow Dr.
Haskell's excellent Twitter at twitter.com forward slash dmillardhaskell, d-m-i-l-l-a-r-d-h-a-s.
K-E-L-L. He's got wonderful books.
We'll put a link to some of his recent articles, which are also elegantly written and well worth your time to digest.
I certainly wish you the very best of luck in your continued attempt to save what is most gracious and powerful in the arts.
And I, like you, love the arts, which is why it's a particular torture to see a beautiful statue get dripped in acid.
So I'm sure we'll win in the long run, but it's going to be a bit of a bumpy road.
But I certainly appreciate your time today, and I hope we can do it again.
