Q&A: Woke wars and cancel culture - a sitdown with A.C. Grayling

BRUSSELS - Philosopher A.C. Grayling says anti-discrimination campaigners should reclaim the word 'woke' from extremists who willfully stoke divisions in society for their own political gain.

Polarisation - over touchstone issues from climate change to choice of gender - is nothing new, said Grayling, just part of a long-running cycle of progress followed by pushback that began post-war with the civil rights and feminist movements.

"It's the same story, different rhetoric," the British philosopher said in an interview.

"Those of us who are against discrimination should reclaim the word 'woke' and wear it with pride," he told Context.

Division over immigration, abortion and LGBTQ+ rights - to name but three topics - have spiked and spilled into mainstream politics, fuelling a fierce backlash against minority gains and equal rights, particularly in the United States and Britain.

Since U.S. President Donald Trump's re-election, the White House has reversed a raft of policies on contentious areas spanning transgender rights, climate change and foreign aid.

Look across the Atlantic to European nations such as Hungary, Poland and Slovakia and feminist goals and LGBTQ+ rights have similarly stalled or regressed.

Grayling, whose latest book explores "making peace in the culture wars", sat down to share his views with Context.

In your book, you defend 'wokeness' but not necessarily the methods of all its activists. Where did 'woke' go wrong?

I regard myself as woke, but I have criticisms to make about some of the techniques that the more vigorous activists use, like 'cancel culture' and 'no platforming', because that is a violation of freedom of expression.

It's very important to have a more measured, more rational debate about these things. If we all respected (the) human rights of others, then a huge tranche of problems in the world would simply disappear.

It is of tremendous use to populist politicians to find something to blame. Immigrants are the usual suspects, and cultural elites - and then there is a very particular example of this, the transgender issue.

Trans rights has emerged as one of the most toxic Western debates. Why is that - and how can it be diffused?

A huge amount of money, time and effort and organised campaigning has gone into making the transgender issue a huge issue out of all proportion to the tiny number of people who are actually trans.

All throughout history, governments have attempted to distract or weaken their opponents by riling up rivalries in society. If you get your enemy fighting itself, it's a big win for you.

What's happened in feminism is that it has started to fight with itself over the trans women issue. U.S. wokists should be conscious of that fact, and find ways to prevent our own interests being undermined by that strategy.

How is the rise of AI increasing polarisation ?

It's by no means the only part of the story. Inequality is very toxic and existed before the internet.

With social media, the anxiety generated by rising inequality has found a medium of expression. It's as if you're putting water into a hose pipe, then you squeeze it, putting more pressure and the jet of water that comes out is even more forceful. That's what social media has done to all these opinions. And now humans are leaving the social media space, it's being taken over by bots, language models which have learned from previous debate, and so the character of it is changing in ways that are bound to be negative.

Can moderate dialogue prevail over social-media algorithms?

I have a rather pessimistic view about it.

When these things come into play, there seems to be an unhappy tendency for them to exacerbate the bad rather than the good. Russian bots will generate both sides of the argument in order to heat up the argument. That's what happened in the transgender debate. It's made worse by the fact that DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), gay rights, everything can be blackened by the smoke that comes out of that fire.

Could the culture wars break democracy as we know it?

I certainly hope not and culture wars by themselves probably wouldn't. It's true that (progress is) stalling because it's been given a body blow. But this is a very difficult genie to put back in the bottle. One has to see it is a larger time frame. The worst that people can do is think 'Oh God, we've been defeated, it's going to be so difficult' and lose the energy. Where questions about optimism and pessimism arise, there's never any alternative to optimism. The end always has to be a society which is equitable.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

(Reporting by Joanna Gill in Brussels. Editing by Lyndsay Griffiths)