PHILOSOPHY
Discriminations: Making Peace in the Culture Wars
A.C. Grayling
One World, $32.99
Philosopher and social commentator A. C. Grayling is, if nothing else, relentlessly prolific. Since the early 1980s he has written (and co-authored), scores of books, many of them dealing with questions of ethics and morality in public life.
To be fair, he is somewhat skittish on the subject of “morality”, and for good reason: as a loaded word, “morality” carries more cultural baggage than any airline would let you stuff into an overhead locker.
But when it comes to ethics, and the distinction between what is inherently fair, as distinct from being deemed right or wrong by self-appointed moral arbiters, he is erudite, forensic, and convincing.
In Discriminations, he weighs into what he describes as “the culture wars”. One only has to think of the hijacking, recasting and sarcastic denigration by the political right of the word “woke” to see this unseemly stoush from Grayling’s ringside seat. So successful has been the belittling of “woke”, both as a word and an aspiration, that even those on the left, who see a wider awareness of entrenched disadvantage and discrimination as their raison d’etre, are now rarely heard or read using it.
Perhaps this is unsurprising. Despite its worthy origins in American abolitionist movements in the 19th century, and revival during the first Black Lives Matter protests a decade ago, woke has become a clumsy, catch-all agenda with a whiff of self-righteous exclusivity about it.
Philosopher and author A.C Grayling.
In Discriminations, Grayling dissects the evolution of cultural warfare (in which the celebration/denigration of a woke world view is but one battle among many), and makes a sensible, if optimistic, case for an armistice of sorts. The “culture wars”, “cancel culture”, and the lack of accountability enjoyed by cyberbullies are, to Grayling, all manifestations of a collapse of the notion of common courtesy.
Civilised debate (a rare enough mode of discourse at the best of times) has, in our electronic era, degenerated into a cacophony of catcalling and dog whistling. Grayling laments that “in the first third of the 21st century, the application of human rights protections in matters of race, reproductive rights, sexuality, sex and gender should be uncontroversial, but they are not”.
