A.C. Grayling on culture wars and the age-old cycle of ‘cancellation'

NZ Herald

15-05-2025

Discriminations – Making Peace in the Culture Wars is the latest work by British philosopher A.C. Grayling, where he delves into some of the biggest issues of our time.
Grayling, who is in New Zealand for the Auckland Writers Festival, told The Front Page 'wokeism' is a term that applies to a state of mind about fighting against discrimination.
'It's about making society a fair place. People use this word, 'woke', as a kind of term of abuse, very disparaging, and very contemptuous. But it has an honourable ancestry.
'It comes from the African American patois, talking about the fact that although there are very obvious forms of discrimination (you can't get any more obvious than slavery), there are also lots of hidden forms of racism.
'So to be alert, to be awake, to be woke to the fact that you are going to be encountering all sorts of resistance to your chance just to be accepted and to have a fair place.
'Anti-woke is about protecting interests, not about protecting rights. Because if you are in a privileged position in society, you have privileged access to all the top-quality social goods of health, education, and opportunities in economics, you don't want other people getting into your club. So you push back against it,' he said.
Examples of 'cancellations' are peppered throughout history, Grayling argues. Some are justified, like incarceration after a law is broken, others are not, like some social media pile-ons.
War (' war is one group trying to cancel another group'), the downfall of now-convicted sex pest Harvey Weinstein, or the ostracisation of 19th-century playwright Oscar Wilde for his sexual proclivities are all examples of different cancellations over time. Some considered 'right', some 'wrong'.
What 'culture wars' come down to is human rights, Grayling said, and he uses the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden to land this point as he is an 'extremely unappealing candidate for being treated in accordance with human rights ideas'.
'Because human rights say everybody has a right to a fair trial. Everybody has a right to a defence to be heard. Everybody has a right when arrested and charged with a crime to be treated with a degree of respect and deference, and not to be subjected to arbitrary punishment.
'Now, Osama bin Laden was shot dead and dropped into the Arabian Gulf – for good, pragmatic reasons. Because if he had been arrested and taken to Guantanamo Bay, he might have continued to be a focus of attention on the part of supporters.
'From a long-term point of view, from the point of view of trying to respect due process and individual human rights, it would've served the world better if the United States – which after all used to set itself up before Trump as a place of law, civil liberties, and human rights – if they had respected those constraints.
'It's harder to do. It's hard work to do that. It's disgusting to have to do it with somebody like Osama bin Laden. But in the end, it would've been better than to engage in an extrajudicial killing,' he said.
The debate around 'culture wars' re-ignited in New Zealand recently when the coalition Government disestablished the Māori Health Authority and introduced the Treaty Principles Bill, which sought to make it so there were 'equal rights for all New Zealanders'.
'To treat people equally is not always to treat them fairly,' Grayling writes.
Take an Olympic athlete who needed 5000 calories a day and a little old lady who needed 1500 calories a day, he said. '[If] you forced them to eat the same number of calories, say 3000 a day each, you're unfair to both.'
A.C. Grayling will be appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival from May 13–18. For more information and tickets, visit www.writersfestival.co.nz or buy tickets at the venue box office.