Political correctness: a force for good? A Munk Debate - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

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Okay.
Brilliant minds.
Even mediocre minds operate better under stimulus.
Canadian A visual is a Canadian, and you can't take someone.
Barack Obama has systematically rebuilt the trust of the world in our willingness to work through the Security Council and other incendiary.
You must not talk to anybody in the world, any of our allies.
Whatever you wanna call this system a Mafia state of feudal empire, it's a disaster for ordinary Russians.
Okay, brilliant minds, even mediocre minds operate better under stimulants.
Canadian officials is a Canadian and you can't take way.
Someone Barack Obama has systematically rebuilt the trust of the world in our willingness to work through the Security Council and other memory.
You must not talk to anybody in the world, any of our allies.
Whatever you wanna call this system a Mafia state of feudal empire, it's a disaster for ordinary Russians.
I think that's the kind of hypocritical argument that, if I were tiny, that find quite annoying for historical Chinese.
Foreign apology can be described if Barry and management, science and religion are not incompatible.
Religion forces, nice people to do unkind things are men obsolete?
My conclusion to this question is No, I won't let you be.
Show me to work.
Pretext!
I quoted them saying, Show me a free program.
You can keep screaming that and it doesn't change the point way.
Do not want sympathy.
We do not want pity.
We want opportunities.
It's an appalling slander to me, too.
The Muslim religion.
I never said the word Muslim.
In my culmination, it was a Muslim free fulminations.
It is that kind of restraint.
It is that kind of sober minded, sensible, intelligent foreign policy that Obama represents.
So I guess what I'm telling you is he sort of a closet Canadian.
Vote for him, for God's sake, Please, gentlemen, welcome.
My name is right.
You're Griffis.
Since my privilege to have the opportunity to moderates tonight's debates and to act as your organizer, I want to start by welcoming the North American wide television audience, tuning in right now across Canada on CPAC Cannons, Public Affairs Channel C span across the continental United States and on CBC radio ideas a warm hello, also to our online audience watching this debate over 6000 streams active at this moment on Facebook Live Bloomberg dot com and Monk debates dot com.
It's great to have you as virtual participants in tonight's proceedings and hello to You, the over 3000 people who filled Roy Thompson Hall for yet another monk debate.
Thank you for your support form or and better debate on the big issues of the day.
This debate marks the start of our 10th season, and we begin this season missing someone who was vital to this debate.
Siri's in every aspect.
It was his passion for ideas, his love for debate that inspired our creation in 2008 and it was his energy.
His generosity and his drive that was so important in allowing us to really win international acclaim is one of the world's great debating.
Siri's, his philanthropy, its legacy.
Wow, it's incredible.
Last fall, we all remember that $100 million donation to cardiac health here in Toronto, transforming the lives of tens of thousands of millions Canadians to come.
We're all big fans and supporters of a terrific school for global affairs on the U of T campus, represented here tonight by many students are in its master's program, Congratulations to you, and also in a generous endowment last spring to this Siri's that will allow us to organize many evenings like this for many more years to come.
Now, knowing our benefactor as we d'oh the last thing he'd want is for us to mark his absence with a moment of silence that wasn't his style.
So let's instead celebrate a great Canadian, a great life and a great legacy of the late Peter Munk.
Bravo, Peter, Go Peter!
All right.
I know he would have enjoyed that.
And I want to just think Melanie Anthony Cheney for being here tonight.
Thio be part of Peter's continuing positive impact on public debate in Canada.
Thank you guys for being here tonight.
Now, knowing Peter is I did the first thing on his mind at this point in the debate would be right.
You're stop talking.
Get this debate underway.
Get our debaters out here.
Come on, get the show on the road.
So we're going to do that right now because we have a terrific debate lined up for you this evening.
So let's introduce First are pro team arguing for tonight's motion, be it resolved what you call political correctness I call progress.
Please welcome to the stage.
He's an award winning writer, scholar, broadcaster on NPR and sports networks across America.
Michael Eric Dyson, Michael Come on Out.
Michael's debating partner is also award winning author, she's columnist at The New York Times and someone who is gonna bring a very distinct and powerful perspective tonight.
Michelle Goldberg, Michelle, Come on out.
So one great team of debaters deserves another and arguing against our resolution, be it resolved.
What you call political correctness, I call Progress is the Emmy Award winning actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet and tonight debater.
Stephen Fry Stevens teammates, is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, a YouTube sensation and the author of the big New International bestseller 12 Rules for Life.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Toronto's Jordan Peterson.
Theo.
Okay, we're gonna get our debate underway momentarily, but first, a quick check list to go through.
We've got a hashtag tonight hash at Monk debate.
Those of you in the hall and those of you watching online please weigh in.
Let's get your opinions going also, for those of you watching online right now, we haven't running pole WW Monk debates dot com ford slash votes reflect input.
React to this debate as it unfolds over the next hour and 1/2.
My favorite part aspect of the show, that was Peter's brilliance and creation.
We have our countdown clock.
What this does is it keeps our debaters on their toes and our debate on time.
So when you see these clocks on the screen go down to zero, I wanted you to join me in a warm round of applause.
And, uh, we'll have a debate that ends when it's supposed to end.
Uh, now, let's see.
We had our resolution tonight.
On the way in.
We have this audience of roughly 3000 people here in downtown Toronto vote on be it resolved what you call political correctness I call progress.
Let's see the agree disagree on that number.
36% agree, 64% disagree.
So a room and play now we asked you how many of you were open to changing your vote over the course of debate.
Are you fixed?
Agree, disagree.
Or could you potentially be convinced by one or other of these two teams to move your vote over the next hour and 1/2?
Let's see those numbers now.
Wow.
Okay, Pretty open minded crowd.
This debate is very much in play.
And as per the agreed upon order of speakers, I'm gonna call in Michelle Goldberg first.
Michelle, would you like a sip?
But what are you gonna sip of water where you start calling Michelle Goldberg first for her six minutes of opening remarks, Michelle.
Okay, well, thank you for having me a CZ regular knows.
I initially bought a little bit at the resolution that we're debating because there are a lot of things that fall under the rubric of political correctness that I don't call progress.
I don't like no platforming or twitter or trigger warnings.
You're like a lot of middle age liberals.
There are many aspects of student social justice culture that I find off putting.
Although I'm not sure that that particular generation gap is anything is anything new on the record about the toxicity of social media?
Call out culture, and I think it's good to debate people whose ideas I don't like, which is why I'm here.
Um, So if there are social justice warriors in the audience, I feel like I should apologize to you because I'm probably not.
You're probably gonna feel like I'm not adequately defending your ideas.
But the reason I'm on this side of the stage is that political correctness isn't just a term for left wing excesses on college campuses or people being terrible on Twitter, especially, is deployed by Mr Peterson.
I think it can be a way to delegitimize any attempt for women and racial and sexual minorities, to overcome discrimination or even to argue that such discrimination.
Israel.
In The New York Times today, Mr Peterson says, quote the people who hold that that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy.
They don't want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence.
That sounds particularly in scene to me because I'm an American and our president is Donald Trump.
But but it's an assumption that I think underlies worldview in which any challenges to the current hierarchy are written off his political correctness.
I also think we should be clear that this isn't really a debate about free speech.
Um, Mr Peterson once referred to what he called quote the evil trinity of equity diversity and inclusivity and said those three words.
If you hear people mouth those three words equity diversity and inclusivity.
You know who you're dealing with.
You should step away from that because it is not acceptable.
He argues that the movie frozen is politically correct propaganda, and at one point he floated the idea of creating a database of university course contents.
The students could avoid postmodern critical theory.
So in the criticism of political correctness, I sometimes hear an urge or an attempt to purge our thought of certain analytical categories that mirrors.
I think, the worst caricatures of the social justice left that want to get rid of anything that smacks of colonialism or patriarchy or white supremacy.
I don't really think we're debating the value of the Enlightenment, at least not in the way that somebody like Mr Fry, I think, is a champion of enlightenment.
Values springs it.
The efforts to expand rights and privileges once granted, just tow landowning white heterosexual men is the Enlightenment or is very much in keeping with the Enlightenment.
To quote a dead white man, John Stuart Mill, the despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.
I think that some of our opponents, by contrast, frame challenges to the despotism of customs as politically correct attacks on a transcendent natural order.
Um, to quote Mr Peterson again, each gender, each sex has its own unfairness to deal with.
But to think of it as a consequence of the shoulder of the social structure, it's like, Come on.
Really?
What about nature itself?
But there's an exception to this because he does believe in social interventions to remedy some kinds of unfairness.
Which is why in the New York Times, it calls for quote enforced monogamy to remedy the woes of men who don't get their equal distribution of sex.
Um, when it comes to the political correctness debate, we've been exactly here before.
Allan Bloom, the author of The Closing of the American Mind, compared the tyranny of feminism in academia to the Khmer Rouge.
And he was writing at a time when women accounted for 10% of all college tenured faculty.
It's worth looking back at what was considered annoyingly, outrageously, politically correct in the 19 eighties.
Last time we had this debate, you know, having to call or not being able to call indigenous people, quote Indians or having to use hyphenated terms, at least in the United States of terms like African Americans, you know, adding women or people of color to the Western Civ curriculum.
Not making gay jokes or using retard is an epithet, and I kind of get it right.
New concepts, new words sort of stick in your throat the way we used to.
Talking and thinking seem natural and normal, you know, by definition.
And then the new terms, new concepts that have social utility stick and those that don't fall away.
So if you go back to the 19 seventies, Miss Umms as an alternative to Mr Mrs Stuck Around and Women with A Y didn't, um and I think that someday I hope to Someday we'll look back and marvel at the idea that gender neutral pronouns ever seemed like an existential threat to anyone.
But I also don't think it's clear that, you know that might not happen, because if you look around the world right now, there are plenty of places that have indeed dial back cosmopolitanism and reinstated patriarchy in the name of staving off chaos, and they seem like terrible places to live.
You know, I come to you from the United States, which is currently undergoing a monumental attempt to roll back social progress in the name of overcoming political correctness.
And as someone who lives there, I assure you, it feels nothing like progress.
Thank you.
Great.
Start to the debate, Michelle.
Thank you.
I'm now gonna ask Jordan Peterson to speak for the con team.
Hello.
So we should first decide what we're talking about.
We're not talking about my views of political correctness.
Despite what you might have inferred from the last speaker's comments.
This is how it looks to me.
We essentially need something approximating a low resolution grand narrative to unite us and we need a narrative to unite is because otherwise we don't have peace.
What's playing out in the universities and in broader society right now is a debate between two fundamental low resolution narratives, neither of which can be completely accurate because they can't encompass all the details.
Obviously, human beings have an individual element and a collective element, a group element.
Let's say the question is what story should be paramount, and this is how it looks to me in the West.
We have reasonably functional, reasonably free, remarkably productive, stable hierarchies that are open to consideration of the dispossessed that hierarchies generally create.
Our societies are freer and functioning more effectively than any societies anywhere else in the world, and that and then any society's ever have.
And as far as I'm concerned, and I think there's good reason to assume this, it's because the fundamental low resolution grant narrative that we've oriented ourselves around in the West is one of the sovereignty of the individual.
And it's predicated on the idea that all things considered the best way for me to interact with someone else's individual, to individual and to react to that person as if they're both part of the process.
Because that's the right way of thinking about the psychological process by which things we don't understand can yet be explored and buy things that aren't properly organized in our society can be yet set right.
The reason we're valuable as individuals, both with regards to our rights and responsibilities, is because that's our essential purpose.
Announce our nobility, and that's our function.
What's happening as far as I'm concerned in the universities in particular and spreading very rapidly out into the broader world, including the corporate world.
Much too, it's, uh, much to what should be its chagrin is a collectivist narrative.
And of course there's some utility and a collectivist narrative because we're all part of groups in different ways.
But the collectivist narrative that I regard as politically correct is a pastiche of a strange pastiche of postmodernism and neo Marxism in its fundamental claim is that no, you're not essentially an individual, you're essentially a member of a group, and that group might be your ethnicity.
And it might be your sex might be a race.
And it might be any of the endless numbers of other potential groups that you belong to because you belong to many of them and that you should be essentially categorized along with those who are like you on that dimension in that group, that's Proposition number one.
Proposition Number two is the the proper way to view The world is as a battleground between groups of different power.
So you define the group's first, and then you assume that you view the individual from the group context.
You view the battle between groups from the group context and you view history itself has a consequence of nothing but the power maneuvers between different groups that eliminates any consideration of the individual at a very fundamental level.
And also any idea, for example, of free speech.
Because if you're collectivist at heart in this manner, there is no such thing as free speech.
It isn't that it's debated by those on the radical left and let's say the rest of us, so to speak.
It's that in that formulation, there's no such thing as free speech because for an individualist free speech is how you make sense of the world and reorganize society in a proper manner.
But for the radical left type collectivist that's associated with this viewpoint of political correctness, when you speak, all you're doing is playing a power game on behalf of your group, and there's nothing else that you can do because that's all there is.
And not only is that all there is in terms of who you are as an individual now and how society should be viewed, it's also the fundamental narrative of history.
For example, it's widely assumed in our universities now that the best way to conceptualize Western civilization is as an oppressive, male dominated patriarchy, and that the best way to construe relationships between men and women across the centuries is one of oppression of women by men.
It's like, Well, look, no hierarchy is without its tyranny.
That's a That's an axiomatic truth.
People have recognized that literally for thousands of years, and hierarchies do 10 towards tyranny, and they tend towards the use of patient by people with power.
But that only happens when they become corrupt.
We have mechanisms in our society to stop hierarchies from becoming intolerably corrupt, and they actually worked pretty well, and so and so I would also I would also I would also point this out.
You know, don't be thinking that this is a debate about whether empathy is useful or not, or that the people on the con side of the argument are not empathetic.
I know perfectly well, as has insured Mr Fridays that hierarchies tend to produce situations where people stack up at the bottom and that the dispossessed and hierarchies need a political voice, which is the proper voice of the left, by the way and the necessary voice of the left.
But that is not the same is proclaiming that the right level of analysis for our grand unifying narrative is that all of us are fundamentally to be identified by the groups that we belong to and to construe the entire world has the battleground between different forms of tyranny in consequence of that group affiliation.
And to the degree that we play out that narrative, that won't be progress, believe me.
And we certainly haven't seen that progress in the university's.
We've seen situations like what happened in Wilfred Laurier University.
Instead, we won't see progress.
What will Reese turn to is exactly the same kind of tribalism that characterized the left.
Thank you, Jordan.
Michael.
Eric Dyson.
Your six minutes starts now.
Thank you very kindly.
Wonderful opportunity to be here in Canada.
Um, thank you so much.
I'm going to stand here at the podium.
I'm a preacher, and I will ask for an offering at the end of my presentation.
This is the swimsuit competition of the intellectual beauty pageant.
So let me show you the curves of my thought.
Oh, my God.
Was that a politically incorrect statement I just made?
How did we get to the point where the hijacking of the discourse on political correctness has become the kind of man a keen distinction between us and them.
The abort of fantasy just presented is remarkable for both its clarity and yet the muddiness of the context from which it has emerged.
What's interesting to me is that when we look at the radical left, I'm saying what he had.
I want to join him.
They run enough, and I'm from a country where a man stands up every day too sweet, the moral mendacity of his viciousness into a nation he has turned into a psychic a mode.
You'll get Justin, we got Donald.
So what's interesting, then, is that political correctness has transmogrified into a caricature of the left.
The left came up with the term political correctness.
Shall I remind you we were tired of our excuses and our excesses and are exaggerations.
We were willing to be self critical in a way that I fear.
Micro Frayer Sze.
My compatriots are not.
Don't take yourself too seriously.
Smile.
Take yourself not seriously at all, but what you do with deadly seriousness.
Now it is transmogrified into an attempt to characterize the radical left.
The radical left is a metaphor.
It's a symbol is an articulation.
They don't exist.
Their numbers are too small.
I'm on college campuses.
I don't see much of them coming.
When I hear about identity politics, that amazes me.
The collectivist identity politics.
Last time I checked White Folk Infinite Race that was an invention from a dominant culture that wanted groups toe at their behest.
The invention of race was driven by the demand of a dominant culture to subordinate others.
Patriot all right, patriarchy, patriarchy was the demand of men toe have their exclusive vision presented?
The beauty of feminism is it's not going to resolve differences between men and women.
It just says, May.
I don't automatically get the last word course of my career and he never did.
And so identity politics has been generated as the bet noir of the right.
And yet the right doesn't understand the degree to which identity has been foisted upon black people in brown people in people of color from the very beginning, on women, in trans people, you think that I want to be part of a group that is constantly abhorred by people at Starbucks.
I'm minding my own black business walking down the street.
I have group identity thrust the public.
They don't say, Ah ha!
There goes a Negro highly intelligent, articulate verbals capable of rhetorical fury at the drop of a hat.
We should not interrogate him as to the bone of today's of his legal status.
No, they treat me as part of a group, and the problem is that our friends don't want to acknowledge.
Is that the hegemony?
The dominance of that group has been so vicious that it is denied us the opportunity to exist as individuals.
Individualism is the characteristic moment in modernity.
Mr.
Peterson is right.
The development of the individual, however, is predicated upon notions of intelligence.
Emmanuel Constant, David Human.
Others philosophically Cart day card comes along, introducing knowledge into the the phrase, saying that knowledge is based upon a kind of reference to the golden intelligence, the reflective glass that one possesses, and yet he got rooted in the very ground of our existence.
So knowledge has fleshly bases, and what I'm saying to you, the knowledge that I bring as a person of color makes a difference in my body because I know what people think of me, and I know how they respond to me and that ain't no theory.
And my my medic trigger warnings only trigger warning that one is from a cop.
Are you about to shoot me?
Not funny in America, where young black people die repeatedly, unarmed, without provocation.
And so for me, identity politics is something very serious And what's interesting about safe spaces I hear about the university I teach there.
Look, if you're in a safe space in your body, you don't need a safe space.
Some of that is overblown.
Some of it is ridiculous.
I understand.
I believe that the classroom was a robust place for serious learning.
I believe in the interrogation of knowledge based upon our understanding, usually of the edifying proposition of in like 10 minutes.
At the same time, some people ain't as equal as others.
So we have to understand the conditions under which they have emerged in which they have been benighted and attacked by their own culture.
And I ain't seen nobody be a biggest snowflake and white man who complained, Mommy, Mommy, they won't let us play and have everything we usedto have under the old regime where we were right.
Racists in supremacists and dominant and patriarchs and hated gays and lesbians and transsexuals that Yeah, you gotta share.
This ain't your world.
There's her about his world.
And let me.
And by saying this, you run that story from David Foster Wallace Fisher going down to Fisher going and the older fish comes in the opposite direction.
He said, Hello, boys.
How's the water?
They swim on, they turn each other.
What the hell is water?
Because when you get it, you don't know what?
When your dominance, you don't know it.
Nothing.
Keyser Soze, he said, is more interesting that the devil did and make people believe he didn't exist.
That's right.
Thank you, Michael.
Steven Europe.
We're gonna put six minutes on the clock and please start time as quick as possible because you're fine.
Miss that plane to London.
I went half hear the end of it from the bright groom's mother.
Uh, God in agreeing Thio, participate in this debate on stand on this side of the argument, I'm fully aware that many people who choose incorrectly, in my view, to to see this issue in terms of left and right, devalued and exploded terms I think they are will believe that I am betraying myself in such causes and values that I have espoused over the years.
I've been given a huge grief already simply because I'm standing here next to Professor Peterson, which is the very reason that I am standing here in the first place.
I'm standing next to someone with whom I have differences, shall we say, in terms of politics and all kinds of other things, precisely because I think all this has got to stop this rage, resentment, hostility, hostility, intolerance Above all this, some with us or against us certainty.
A Grand Canyon has opened up in our world the fist year.
The crack grows wider every day.
Neither on each side can hear a word that the other shrieks.
And nor do they want to.
While these armies and propagandists in the culture wars clash down below.
In the enormous space between the two sides, the people of the world trying to get on with their lives, alternately baffled, board on, betrayed by the horrible noises and explosions that echo all around.
I think it's time for this toxic binary zero sum madness to stop before we destroy ourselves.
Uh, I better nail my colors to the master before getting further in this, it's only polite to give you a sense of where I come from.
All my adult life I have bean what you might call the left ear.
A soft lefty, a liberal of the most handwringing milk sop, milk toast variety, not a burning man.
The barricades Socialist Not even really a progressive worth the name I've bean on marches, but I've never quite dead wave placards or banners.
Um, I allude member off that band the S J.
W, uh, Social Justice Warrior.
I don't think highly of social injustice, I have to say, but I character myself mostly as a social justice warrior.
Bye.
Intellectual heroes.
Growing up were Bertrand Russell and G more liberal thinkers.
People like that.
Writers like E.
M.
Forster, I believed.
And I think I still do believe in the sanctity of human relations, of the primacy of the heart and friendship and love and common interest.
The's a more personal interior beliefs than they are.
Political exterior convictions.
Maura Humanistic version of a religious impulse.
I suppose I trust in humanity.
I believe in humanity.
I think I do, despite all that has happened in the 40 years of my adulthood.
I am soft and I can easily be swept away by harder hearts and harder intellect.
I'm sometimes surprised to be described as an activist, but over time I have energetically involved myself with what you might call causes.
I grew up knowing that I was gay.
Well, in fact, from the very first I knew I was gay.
I remember when I was born looking up and saying, That's the last time I'm going out one of those I'm I'm I'm Jewish.
I'm do it.
I have a natural was horror of racism.
I naturally, I want racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, bullying, bigotry, intolerance of all human kinds to end that surely a given amongst all others.
The question is how such a golden aim is to be achieved.
My ultimate objection to political correctness is not that it combines so much of what I have spent a lifetime living and opposing preachiness with great respect, piety, self righteousness, heresy, hunting, denunciation, shaming assertion without evidence, accusation, inquisition, censoring.
That's not why I'm incurring the wrath of my fellow liberals by standing on this side of the house, my real objection is that I don't think political correctness works.
I want to achieve.
I want to get to the Golden Hill, but I don't think that's the way to get there.
I believe one of the greatest human failings is to prefer to be right, them to be effective.
Um, on political correctness is always obsessed with how right it is without thinking of how effective it might be.
I wouldn't class myself as a classical libertarian, but I do relish transgression, and I deeply and instinctively distrust conformity on orthodoxy.
Progress is not achieved by preachers and guardians of morality.
But to paraphrase e of Guineas, um, yacht in by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics, I, uh I may be wrong.
I hope to learn this evening.
I really do think I may be wrong, but I am prepared to entertain the possibility that political correctness will bring us more tolerance.
Onda better world.
But I'm not sure, and I would like this quotation from my hero, Bertrand Russell to hover over the evening.
One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
Let duck prevail.
So great set of opening statements to set the scene.
We're now going to go into a round of rebuttals to allow each of our presenters three minutes to reflect on what they've heard and to make some additional points.
We're gonna do that in the same order that we had the opening statement.
So Michelle Europe first, we'll put three minutes on the clock for you.
So first I would say that I think that the attempt to draw a dichotomy between individual rights and group rights is a little bit misleading.
Um, traditionally, there have been large groups of people who have not been able thio exercise their individual rights, and I think that a lot of the claims that are being made on behalf of what we politically correct types call marginalized groups are claims that people who you know have identities that have not traditionally been at the center of our culture or been at the top of our hierarchies have as much right to exercise their individual talents and realize their individual ambitions.
Right when we say that we want more women in power or more people of colors, voices in the cannon or in the curriculum or directing movies.
All of these things they're not, because at least on my part, I'm interested in some sort of very crude equity.
But because there are a lot of people who have not traditionally been able, Thio realized themselves as individuals.
That's what the women's movement waas.
That's what the civil rights movement waas.
That's what the gay rights movement Waas that's in some ways what the trans rights movement was.
I mean, far from a collectivist movement, this is kind of liberalism.
Classical liberalism pushed to its extreme right, these air people saying I have a right to define my identity against the one that was collectively assigned to me.
Finally, I would say, You know, a lot of the things that Stephen Fry said you know, in particularly his temperament were probably in agreement.
But this inquisition, this sense Sorious nous.
On the one hand, I'm sort of I see where he's coming from, but I think it's a little bit virtual right.
I mean, nope.
Who's who's really censoring you?
I understand what it feels like to feel censored.
I understand what it feels like to be on the wrong side of a Twitter mob or get a lot of nasty comments, but and that a bad feeling, you know, and it's a counterproductive tactic.
But that's not censorship, you know.
And again, it's a little.
It's especially strange coming from a country where you know the president of the United States is trying to levy additional postal rates on the owner of The Washington Post, you know, in revenge for its reporting.
And people who have kneeled to protest police brutality at football games have seen their careers explode, you know, or people who have, you know, women who have challenged Mr Peterson has been pounded by threats and trolls and misogynists.
Invective thinking, Jordan, we're gonna have three minutes up on the screen there.
Please respond to what you've heard.
Well, I guess I I would like to set out a challenge in somewhat the same format is Mr Friday two people on the moderate left.
I mean, I've studied totalitarian ism for a very long time, both on the left and on the right, in various forms, and I think we've done a pretty decent job of determining when right wing beliefs become dangerous.
I think that they become dangerous wind.
The people who stand on the right evoke notions of racial superior superiority or ethnic superiority.
Something like that.
It's fairly easy to draw box around them and place them to one side and necessary.
And I think we've done a pretty good job of that.
What I failed to see happening on the left and this is with regards to the sensible left because such a thing exists is for the same thing to happen with regards to the radical leftists.
Okay, so here's an open question.
If it's not diversity, inclusivity and equity as a triumvirate that mark out the to excessive left and with equity defined by the way not as equality of opportunity, which is an absolutely laudable goal, but as equality of outcome, which is how it's defined.
Then exactly how do we demarcate the two extreme left?
What do we do?
We say, Well, there's no such thing as the two extreme left.
Well, that's certainly something that characterized much of intellectual thinking for the 20th century, as our high order intellectuals, especially in place like places like France, did everything they could to bend over backwards to ignore absolutely everything that was happening in the catastrophic left world in the Soviet Union and Maoist China.
Not least, we've done a terrible job of determining how to demarcate what's useful from the left from what's pathological.
And so it's perfectly okay for someone to criticize my attempts to identify something like a boundary.
We could say diversity, inclusivity and equity, especially equity, which is in fact equality of outcome, which is an absolutely abhorrent notion.
If you know anything about history, you know that, and I'm perfectly willing to hear some reasonable alternatives.
But what I hear continually from people on the left, first of all, as my opponents did, to construe every argument that is possibly able to be construed on the axis of group identification.
And it failed to different to fail to help the rest of us differentiate the reasonable left, which stands for the oppressed, necessarily from the pathological left that's capable of unbelievable destruction and what I see happening in the university campuses in particular where the leftists absolutely predominate.
And that's certainly not my imagination.
That's that's well documented by perfectly reasonable people like Jonathan.
Height is an absolute failure to make precisely that distinction.
And I see the same thing echoed tonight.
Thank you, Michael.
Give us your rebuttal.
Amused about here in Peterson land, I feel free.
You're already I don't know what mythological collective Mr Peterson refers to.
I'm part of the left.
Their cantankerous, when they have a firing squad is usually in a semi circle.
Part of the skepticism of rationality was predicated upon the Enlightenment project, which says we're no longer gonna be subordinate to skepticism, to superstition.
We're going to think, and we're gonna think Well, Thomas Jefferson was one of the great arbiters of rationality, but he was also a man who was a slave owner.
How do you reconcile that?
That's the complication I'm speaking about.
That's not either, or that's not a collective identity.
Thomas Jefferson believed in a collective identity.
That is during the day.
At night, he gets a Luther Vandross Saul's.
I went out to the slave quarter and engaged in sexual relations and had many Children with Sally Hemings.
His loins trumped his logic.
And when he hit talks about postmodernism, I don't know who he's talking about.
I teach postmodernism.
It's kind of fun.
Jacques Derrida, just to say his name is beautiful.
Michelle Fuko, Michelle Fickle, talked about the insurrection of subject.
Hated knowledge is people who have been marginalized now beginning to speak.
The subaltern is Guidry.
Stephen talks about it in post colonial theory.
The reason these people grew up and grew into existence and head of voices because they were denied.
As Miss Goldberg said, Our group identity was foisted upon us.
We were not seen as individuals.
Babe Ruth, when he broke the home run home run record, he didn't bat against all best ballplayers.
He bet it against the best white ball players.
When it's been rigged in your favor from the very beginning, it's hard for you to understand how much you've been rigged.
You're born on third base.
Think you hit a triple at the Toronto Blue Jays game, and here we are, deriving our sense of identity from the very culture that we ignore.
Look at the indigenous names and the first nation names.
Toronto.
Saskatchewan went up a Tim Hortons, but I'll tell you, there's an envy off the kind of freedom and liberty that people of color and other minorities bring because we bring the depth of knowledge in our body.
There's a kind of jealousy event.
As the greatest living Canadian philosopher Aubrey Drake Graham says, jealousy is just loving hate at the same time.
And so for me, I think it's necessary.
I agree with Mr Fried.
We shouldn't be nasty and combative, and yet I don't see nastiness and combativeness from people.
I see them making a desire toe have their individual identities respected.
When I get shut down for no other reason that I'm black when I get categorized for no other reason than my color, I am living in a culture that refuses to see me as a great individual.
Well, yeah, it's interesting to hear that there doesn't seem to be a problem, but I think we all instinctively know that there is some kind of problem.
There isn't censorship, of course, not in the way that there is in Russia.
I've bean to Russia.
I faced off with a deeply homophobic, unpleasant man, and there's political correctness in Russia.
It's just political correctness on the right, and that's what I grew up with, political correctness, which meant that you couldn't say certain things on television couldn't say fuck, for example on television because it was incorrect to do so.
And as always, the same reason was that someone would appear and say, I'm not shocked, Of course.
No, I'm not shocked.
I'm not offended.
I'm offended on behalf of others.
Young, impressionable plastic minds, the vulnerable.
And that's not good enough.
It's It's so often people that say, You see, I don't mind being called a faggot or a kike what everybody or mad person?
Because I got mental health issues.
I don't mind people insulting me and people say, Well, that's all right for you, Stephen, because you know you're strong.
I I don't feel particularly strong on I don't know that I like being called a faggot in the kite, particularly.
But I don't believe that the advances in my culture that have allowed me to marry is I have now bean for three years to someone of my gender.
I don't believe they are a result of political correctness on maybe believe, correct, mrs actually just some sort of live trout that the harder we squeeze it, the further it goes away.
Andi, you will be saying I'm not talking about the greatness you're talking about social justice, with which I agree with what they want to call it.
Identity, politics or the history of your people.
My people, My people were slaves as well.
Both the British were slaves of Romans, and the Jews were slaves of the Egyptians.
All human beings have bean slaves at some point, and we all in that sense, share that knowledge of how important it is to speak up.
But Russell means who was a friend of mine, who was the man who founded the American Indian movement?
He said, Auf Gott said, Common Indian or a Lakota Sioux or Russell.
I don't care what you call me.
It's how we're treated that matters until I'm really addressing a more popular idea.
Um, also a tree in Barrow, Alaska, and the new Piatt said.
Call me an Eskimo.
It's obviously easier for you because you keep mispronouncing in nuclear.
Um, in the words do matter just end with a quick story.
Gate Rights came about giving them because we slowly and persistently knocked on the door of people in power.
We didn't shout.
We didn't scream.
People like Ian McKellen eventually got to see the prime minister on when the queen signed in the royal assent.
She has two for the bill allowing equality of marriage, she said.
Lord, you know, I couldn't imagine this in 1953 really is extraordinary.
Isn't it just wonderful and handed it over Now?
It's a nice story, and I hope it's true.
But it's nothing to do with political correctness is to do with human decency.
It's that simple.
Yeah, so some great rebuttals.
They're strong opening statements.
Let's move now into the moderated cross examination portion of this debate and get both sides engaging on some of the key issues here.
And I think what we've heard here is a bit of attention.
Let's draw it out a bit more Between the rights of groups to feel included, toe have, in your words, Michelle the opportunity for individuality and a belief on the other side that there's something that threat here when these groups are overly privileged through affirmative action or other outcome oriented processes.
So Michael, to start with you, why why isn't there just harm that's done?
Two groups by privileging their group identity, whether it be a group identity of race or gender, and not immediately treating them as individuals in the way that Jordan and Stephen would like to see you see them first.
Well, a couple of things.
First of all, there was no arbitrary and random distinction that people of color and other minority groups made.
When I talked about the invention of race, the invention of gender, the invention of group think that was not done by those groups that have been so named as Miss, Goldberg said.
So first of all, you've got to acknowledge the historical evolution of that reality, and the concept of group identity did not begin with them.
It began with a group that didn't have to announce its identity.
When you are in control, you don't have to announce who you are so that many white brothers and sisters don't see themselves as one among many other ethnicities or groups what they see themselves as.
I'm just American, I'm Canadian.
Can't you be like us?
Can't you transcend those narrow group identification is, And yet those group identification Sze have been imprinted upon them by the very people who now, because their their group power has been challenged, let's make no mistake about it.
There's a challenge.
I agree with Mr Fry in a kind of Neverland, of how sweet it would be to have a kingly and queenly metaphor about how it get resolved.
That ain't the real deal, homey and in the real world.
And it and in the real world, their stuff at stake, what's at stake, their bodies, what's at stake or people's lives, what's at stake.
People are still being lynched, killed what's at stake.
People because of their sexuality and their racial identity is still being harmed.
So I'm suggesting to you, it's not that we are against being treated as individuals.
That's what we're crying for.
Please don't see me as a member of a group that you think is a thug, a ***, a nihilist, a pathological person.
See me as an individual who embodies the reality is we're about out in by saying this.
What Michelle said is extremely important.
The people who have individual rights didn't have to fight for them in the same manner that people of color and others have had to.
When Mr Fry talked about enslavement, he named them read Orlando Patterson's comparative history of race and slavery over 28 civilizations.
The Greeks did not have the same kind of slavery that Americans.
It was chattel slavery in Greece.
You could buy back your your your freedom.
You could teach the Children of the people who enslaves you.
And because of your display of prodigious intellect, you could secure your freedom.
That was not the case.
You were punished and killed for literacy in America.
So my point simply is.
This is that I am all for the celebration of broader identities.
And I think that often those who are minorities and others are not celebrated for the degree that we are in by saying that in America we have of the Confederate flag, I don't know if you look for me with that, we have a Confederate flag.
We have white guys, mostly in the South, but others as well, flying most Confederate flags that are part of the South that refused to cede its legitimate conquests.
At the hands of the North, there has been a politics of resentment.
Every you talk about politics of identity wearing that flag, not the American flag.
They're not American.
They are celebrating a succession, a move away from America and a man named Colin Kaepernick, who was a football player, saying, I want to bring Beauty to that flag has been denied opportunity.
So we have to really set the terms of debate in order before we weigh.
Proceed, Jordan, Let's have you jump in on this idea of what you see is the pernicious danger of group think when it comes to ethnicity when it comes to gender, Why do you think that?
That's one of the primal sins in your view of political correctness?
Well, I think it's one of the primal sins of identity politics, players on the left and the right.
Just to be clear about that personally, since this has got personal at times, I'm no fan of the identity Arian, right?
I think that anybody who plays a game a conceptual game where group identity comes first and foremost, risks an exacerbation of tribalism.
It doesn't matter whether it's on the left to the right, Um, with regards to the idea of group rights.
Well, there's a fundamental and this is something we've fallen into terribly in Canada, not least because we had to contend with the threat of Quebec separatism, but the The idea of group rights is extraordinarily problematic because the that the obverse of the coin of individual rights, his individual responsibilities and you can hold on individual responsible and an individual can be responsible.
And so that's partly why individuals have rights.
But groups.
How do you hold a group responsible?
I mean, the whole idea is not it's not a good idea.
Toe hold a group responsible it.
First of all, it flies in the face of the idea of the sort of justice systems that we've laid out in the West that are essentially predicated first on the assumption of individual innocents, but also on the possibility of individual guilt, not group guilt.
We saw what happened in the 20th century many, many times when the idea of group guilt was, was it it was enabled to get a foothold.
Let's say in the polity and in the justice system was absolutely catastrophic.
And so Okay, fine group rights.
Well, what are you gonna How are you going to contend with the alternative to that?
The opposite of that or that.