BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, ‘Groupthink’
"'To find yourself on the wrong end of a digital pitchfork mob. It can be pretty traumatic. I found it less traumatic than some, I'm happily married. It didn't really affect my career as a journalist, only my career in education. But it can be extremely psychologically harmful. One example of someone finding it very traumatic, was a professor at Dartmouth called David Bucci, who after he found himself quite unjustifiably targeted by a #MeToo outrage mob at his university, slipped into depression and ended up taking his own life. And I could tell you three or four people who have been canceled who've ended up committing suicide'...
‘I think one of the interesting developments we've seen happen over the past 25 years or so, is that 25 years ago, it was a common place amongst social psychologists, that one of the psychological characteristics that people on the right is that they had a very well developed disgust instinct, that they were easily repulsed, that they were concerned about moral contamination, and that's why they were, for the most part, conservative, but I think we've seen that overdeveloped disgust instinct migrate from the right to the left. And now generally speaking, of course, there are examples of people say, complaining about Jeremy Corbyn sharing a platform with an Islamist hate preacher of course, but for every one example like that, there are 99 examples on the other side of people claiming that because someone is adjacent to someone with toxic views, that they therefore caught their toxic views. Example, Jordan Peterson. He was invited to give a series of lectures by the Cambridge divinity faculty last year, when a photograph was circulated of him standing next to a fan wearing a T-shirt proclaiming him to be a proud islamophobe. That invitation to give those lectures to Dr. Peterson was rescinded. He'd become contaminated’...
‘Recently, we saw a guy being punished by the Scottish courts for describing the boyfriend of his ex girlfriend, who happened to be Irish, as a leprechaun. That was designated a racially aggravated incident by the sheriff in the Scottish court in question’...
‘We're in a situation now where people are getting fired from their jobs, their characters are being assassinated. They're being judged and found guilty of having the wrong opinion by a very small number of people in a kind of witch hunt. Are we not living through a gross abuse of power?’
‘I think we can all hear examples that are extreme where somebody has been sacked from their job who shouldn't have been sacked from their job. But I don't see this sudden and is this something that is constraining really quite robust public conversation, quite varied views being expressed across a whole range of areas and disciplines. I don't see it constraining the things that people say, in my church circles or elsewhere. So I do think we need to be aware we wary of letting the exception become the rule.’
‘Take JK Rowling for example. She was subject to gross abuse, but more than that publisher came under great pressure to drop her. I mean, this is surely by any standard definition a witch hunt, isn't it?’
‘Well, I think people are entitled to take individual action if they feel that they no longer want to buy Ms Rowling's books because of something that they believe she stands for. I mean, I would defend her right to have her opinion and as somebody who is a voice in public society to express that opinion. I would, I would hope that when she does that, as with any office do, that we are aware that we are people who are seen to have a large following and influence that we're, that we're careful of the impact that that might have on people who heretofore have perhaps trusted us, looked up to us, we may feel that something that we say is now upsetting them, is worrying them, perhaps even frightening them if they feel that they are being dehumanized.’
‘But what what we're talking about is not people deciding not to buy her books. Of course, everyone's entitled to loathe, despise, reject anyone's writing, and not buy it and not subscribe to it. What we're talking about is a pile in. What we're talking about is a, it's a campaign of vilification in which somebody finds themselves to be victimized by a mob of people.’...
‘I'm 59 years old. For most of my adult life, there was a consensus of homophobia, of everyday sexism and of complacency about racism. So, it is, actually isn't it time for a reset?’
‘Um, well, I'm not quite sure in terms of reset because the things you've mentioned, massive strides have been achieved and you'll get thinkers like Douglas Murray will point out that as a gay man, you know, things have never been better. But rather than focus on what's been achieved, there's always something else and there's always something else to be offended by’...
‘I think she was trying to tread a careful line, she certainly didn't want to approve of what she called dehumanization, by which she meant very nicely, that everyone should be able to earn his or her living, and not be prevented from earning a crust, which I'm sure is very nice of her. But then she went on to say that that didn't mean that everybody should be able to be, to have a role in a university. And I found this extremely chilling, because I think this really got to the point that she was trying to kind of fudge, that she really doesn't think that people who have opinions which go against the grain of cultural orthodoxy should have platforms and she said, access to an academic platform has to be negotiated, you know, as if it was kind of a democratic position for a small group of aggrieved minorities, to have some kind of say over who should be entitled and able to express his or her opinion as an academic in a university. And that to me is to basically not just misunderstand the function of a university, but to close it down as a crucible of knowledge and free expression.’"
