Kevin Donnelly - Cancel Culture: Where to Next?

Folks, thanks for coming along tonight, those in the room and those who have joined us via Zoom. This is the second function we've had here at Terrace 47 on Phillips Street since the pandemic commenced early last year. We've got Kevin Donnelly, who makes a welcome return to the Sydney Institute. Last week we had Meredith Bergman and Nadia Wheatley talking on radicals, and today we've got Kevin Donnelly talking on things other than radicals, or possibly about radicals. So he's here on the occasion of the launch of his most recent book, 'Cancel Culture and the Left's Long March'. Cancel culture is an expression that has become increasingly common over the last year or two. Normally people talk about political correctness, or being indoctrinated, or left-wing propaganda, but right-wing propaganda for that matter. Cancel culture has been an expression that is very much in the news over the last 12 months in particular. Now whether it was Cheers being labelled racist, Australia Day condemned as Invasion Day, Captain Cook's statue being defaced, Bill Leak – whose son Johannes does very good cartoons for The Australian – but Bill Leak you might remember was vilified and attacked for telling the truth about, as he saw it, remote regional indigenous communities. The latest example, and I mentioned briefly last week, was the revised national curriculum. I'll give you one example, and there are many but time won't allow: students are now being told in history to study, quote, 'the impact of invasion, colonisation, dispossession of lands by Europeans on the First Nations peoples of Australia, such as frontier warfare, genocide, removal of land, relocation to protectorates, reserves, missions.' It's what Geoffrey Blainey once called the black armband view of history. Now, I'd be the first to admit that after reading some biographies of Macquarie and Flinders – who obviously circumnavigated Australia – after reading some of the history with the First Fleet in particular, and since, there have been examples, and we have to accept that it wasn't all roses as we say. But what's happening now is the pendulum has swung so far to what I call the cultural left, or a black armband view, that I think we're in serious trouble. People talk about cancel culture, but it's vital to understand that it's only the most recent manifestation of what people call neo-Marxist ideology. There's general agreement now that this neo-Marxist view, involving critical literacy and the long march, can be traced back to the Frankfurt School in Germany during the early twenties. The Italian philosopher Augusto del Noce, I'll quote from him, he argues the Frankfurt School embraced a revolutionary stance committed to liberation from authority, theological or human, transcendent or empirical. Michael Gove, the Conservative member of parliament in England, and the American Roger Kimball, both point to this Frankfurt School as a tipping point in terms of what is now called the culture wars. Because instead of the Marxist approach of overthrowing capitalism by looking at the modes and means of production, it became a cultural war. These academics started to realize that the revolution would never occur in the West. If people were never going to storm the barricades, what was the most effective way to achieve what some see as a socialist utopia? The argument can go back to Antonio Gramsci, the Italian, in the Prison Notebooks, but more recently during the 70s, Rudi Dutschke, the German student activist, talking about the long march, the culture wars. So if you can infiltrate and take control of the media, schools, universities, even the church and family, over time you can achieve what the socialist or the cultural left sees as the abolition of capitalism, overthrowing the status quo, and arriving at this so-called utopia. When you look at the theories or political philosophy behind this approach, one of them – Gramsci really introduced this – is the idea of cultural hegemony. Althusser talked about the ideological state apparatus, and what they meant was that capitalist society can only reproduce itself by controlling how people think, by indoctrinating people. Their view is that capitalism has to be overthrown, and the way to do that is to take the long march. They also talk about false consciousness. If you're actually happy working and being paid and raising a family, if you're happy being, as my wife was, giving up her teaching career to raise a family and to be a mother and a wife, then it's only false consciousness. If Julia, my wife, only realized that she was a victim of an oppressive, patriarchal, binary, Eurocentric system, she would understand what had really happened. Luckily she didn't read this stuff back then. In part due to the cultural revolution of the late 60s – and some of you, if you're old enough, might remember being at university back then when we stormed the admin, it was Woodstock, the music festival, make love not war, moratoriums with Jim Cairns out there in Sydney and Melbourne – it was a great time to be alive. As Wordsworth says, 'To be young was very heaven.' It was a revolutionary period during the 60s and 70s. But if you combine neo-Marxism with the rise of theories like deconstruction, postmodernism, radical gender theory, feminism, post-colonialism, then you get a rainbow alliance that coalesces, and their intention is to overthrow the status quo and mandate a new age of a Marxist, neo-Marxist utopia. The targets are Western culture, Western civilization, Judeo-Christianity. Michael Gove talks about identity politics coming to the fore, the idea of victimhood, identity politics. People start identifying no longer, as Martin Luther King Jr. suggested, by the quality of their character, but people are now identified by their gender, race, whatever it might be. As somebody who taught for 18 years in schools and is now at a university, one of the things I found most depressing is that rationality and reason no longer apply. It's no longer about logic or being empirical. The idea of 'I think, therefore I am' has been replaced by 'I feel, therefore I'm right.' It's more about subjectivism, relativism. When I did postgraduate work, I tried to read Foucault, Derrida, and Roland Barthes, and the idea that words have no inherent meaning, they're only signifiers. How you interpret the text, whether it's Shakespeare or David Malouf, is up to you. There is no author, the author is dead. There is no objectivity in terms of what the text is saying, it's all subjective. Worse even, Camille Paglia – the American, non-gendered, non-binary person as she now calls itself – I'll quote from her: she says 'an ethical chaos where intolerance masquerades as tolerance, and where individual liberty is crushed by the tyranny of the group.' We've seen that again and again over the last four or five years, whether it was Bill Leak, whether it was Bari Weiss in New York resigning from the New York Times for not being comfortable with her views. It's happening again and again. The interesting thing is that I first wrote about cancel culture or political correctness over 26 years ago when I went to America to a think tank conference. There was a very funny dictionary of political correctness, and back in the day you could laugh about it. A manhole – you couldn't call it a manhole structure, it had to be a personnel structure. You were never drunk or intoxicated, you were chemically inconvenienced. Some of it was quite unusual. You couldn't be short or tall, you had to be vertically challenged or horizontally challenged. Some of it was quite humorous at the time, and Bill Leake and Johannes often parody and satirize it. But it's got to a stage now where if you criticize multiculturalism, as I am, you're attacked as xenophobic or racist. If you argue that marriage is between a man and a woman, as Margaret Court did, you're condemned as heteronormative, homophobic, and worst of all, Christian. One of the things that troubles me as well is that now it's almost a fatwa, an attack against Christianity. If you defend Western civilization, you're Eurocentric and a white supremacist. The interesting thing here, if you go back to Geoffrey Blainey being run out of Melbourne Uni all those years ago, it's something that has been there for a fair while. Fred Hollows, for example, was condemned over 30 years ago for suggesting – well, I won't go into it, but he was in trouble as well. Germaine Greer has been no-platformed for criticizing transgenderism. Barry Humphries – the Melbourne Comedy Festival best prize was the Barry Humphries Award, and that's been removed, abolished, because Barry again questioned transgenderism. He argued a man would always be a man, a woman would always be a woman. Other examples: more recently, 200 academics argued that establishing a Ramsay Centre to study Western civilization would promote, quote, 'a conservative, culturally essentialist, Eurocentric vision.' Universities now have diversity toolkits, safe spaces, trigger warnings to ensure woke students are protected and safeguarded. There are a multitude of examples. Moby Dick can't be studied in American colleges because it's about killing whales. Conrad's 'N***** of the Narcissus' obviously can't be read because of the title. When I was raising my kids, I used to love reading them Cinderella and Snow White. That is now verboten because it privileges heteronormativity, which is about the love between a woman and a man. Society is riven with structural sexism. Women must have the freedom to go wherever they want at whatever time of day, whatever the situation, and even Camille Paglia disagrees with that because she argues a man or a woman should not put themselves at risk. If you're out at three or four in the morning and you've been drinking a bit too much and you're going through a secluded dark spot you don't know, you have to be very careful. Maybe you don't do it. Last week, in Sydney and Melbourne, boys were made to stand up in front of the school and apologize to the girls for being male. That's how far we've come. I'll give you two examples. One is Safe Schools, the gender fluidity program arguing that gender is fluid and limitless. It was justified as anti-bullying, and what troubled me was that Labor and Liberal governments funded it. But if you have read Roz Ward, who designed it, one of the designers, she argued at a socialist conference in Sydney, and I'll quote her: 'Safe Schools is not about bullying, it's about Marxism, providing a theory and practice of genuine human liberation. Safe Schools is about supporting gender and sexual diversity, not about stopping bullying.' Her argument is clear. You couldn't get a clearer statement about what the intention is. Other examples: as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement in America, the University of Leicester now condemns Western science as, quote, 'inherently white.' Students are told science is 'a fundamental contributor to European imperialism and a major beneficiary of its injustices.' The argument is you don't study Western science anymore. At Sydney University, a number of academics argue you can't study Western civilization because it, quote, 'replicates and reinforces the concept of whiteness, leading to racism, sexism, classism, historical injustice, and prejudice based on religion.' These people are being paid by the taxpayer, as I said, under Labor and Liberal governments, to work in our universities. Now, I'll finish with something Bob Santamaria told me: 'Don't keep looking at the problem, think about the solution.' So what's to be done? We need to call out political correctness and have the courage to be true to our beliefs. I'm happy to have disagreement, controversy, debate, or discussion, but conservatives need to be more forceful in articulating what we value. I've been reading about the early settlement in Sydney, and walked around just before and saw the obelisk and Macquarie there where they used that to set the roads the mileage out into the – I won't call it wilderness because obviously it wasn't a wilderness, people lived here, and we have to acknowledge that the First Nations, as they're called even though they were never nations – they were tribes, and in fact they're guilty of cultural appropriation. I'm not sure if you know that, but it was the Canadian indigenous people who started using that word 'nation.' Anyway, we have to call it out when we see it. We have to reassert the primacy of rational debate based on reason and logic. We need to mobilize like-minded people. I just gave a talk today at the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilization, and I'm very happy to be here tonight talking to you people. We need to get out there in the public square. The minute you vacate the public square and leave it to the opposition, you've lost the battle. It's as simple as that. That's why I write for various newspapers and do TV. The other thing we need to employ is humor, irony, and satire. I used to love teaching Jonathan Swift when I was a teacher in a school. I'd read the kids Swift's approach – he couched his proposal as saving the Irish, the best way to stop the famine. I used to read that to the Year 10 class, and it involved a heinous act of using babies, and I won't go into it, but it was appalling. It was satire, it was irony. Swift was making the point that the British government at the time was allowing thousands of people to die because of the famine, and so he took it to that degree where you think 'oh my god, how could that happen?' But in fact it was happening. When you look at the last federal election, what Scott Morrison called 'the quiet Australians' – everybody I spoke to in the media and among political journalists thought that Labor would win. But when you look at north of Brisbane in terms of the swing towards the Liberal government and the Nationals, western Sydney, parts of Melbourne, there was actually a bit of a turning point. People – and I still have a great belief in the Australian people – they generally have their feet on the ground. They want to get on with life. They don't like being indoctrinated or told what to think. If you look at that result, I think it was quite good. Most recently, the ABC did a survey, 'Australia Talks', where 68% of ABC listeners and viewers – and you wouldn't think this – said they were fed up with political correctness, and 52% were Labor voters, and many of them were young. My view is we have to call out what the issue is. Cancel culture is the current description, but the challenge is to think where did it come from, what's underpinning it, what's the purpose, the intention. We then need to call that out and argue a counter case. I'm not saying everybody has to. We don't need an Orwellian situation of groupthink and language control. I'm a great believer in diversity of opinion. But if you do feel that it's the wrong way to go, you have to call it out and keep coming to events like this. Thank you.