A.C. Grayling: The anti-wokeists are guilty of a massive cancelling endeavour

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25-03-2025

When it comes to 'campaigns of cancellation', there is no better current example than Meghan Markle, says A.C. Grayling. 'The attempt to cancel Meghan Markle was and is huge. I mean, there are so many different media outlets and groups in society that are really dumping on her.'
There's something very amusing about her name in his mouth. After all, this is Prof A.C. Grayling, philosopher and bestselling author of Philosophy and Life: Exploring the Great Questions of How to Live. For the past hour, we have been ricocheting from the origins of Christianity and the Roman emperor Theodosius to Holocaust denial. Then, out of nowhere, up pops the royal Kardashian, her name carefully enunciated.
'Now, I'm completely neutral on her score, since I really don't know all the details,' the 75-year-old goes on when I ask what he thinks the reasons behind this cancellation campaign may be. Because as someone who has 'dumped on her' more than once, I'm thinking some of them may be valid. 'It's not impossible to exclude the racial thing,' he says. 'The idea that people don't want a woman of colour in the Royal family, while others didn't like the way she behaved.' Indeed. 'People are very possessive over the Royal family. There's a standard of purity which has to be met, because it preserves the heart of things. Then, if it's penetrated by someone deemed to be a little bit too woke…'
He breaks off with a low chuckle, perhaps at how distant all that royal stuff feels from the gorgeous Left Bank apartment in which we are sitting, drinking coffee from tiny colourful cups. This Saint-Germain flat has been the Francophile's home on and off for the past three years. Like the philosopher, who is dressed down today in a hooded top, casual trousers and stripy socks – it's cosy and unpretentious. The sitting room-cum-study is book-lined, sheepskin rugs cover the armchairs, and there's a piano in the corner that he likes to play daily.
Ask him whether he's happier here than in London (where he still owns a property in Bloomsbury), and he shrugs: 'Well, this is where I write.' Which might very well answer the question. His desk overlooks one of the city's prettiest squares (featured extensively in Emily in Paris), and aside from the church bells and cooing doves, it's blissfully quiet.
'Listen,' he resumes, 'I don't know what it is about her personally that seems so abrasive and barbative to people. I cited her as an example of a massive cancelling endeavour on the part of the anti-wokeists to make a point.' Which is? 'That if that amount of attention were directed at something truly awful like white supremacists? Then there would at least be a bit of a balance, wouldn't there?'
It's a point he expands upon in his forthcoming book, Discriminations: Making Peace in the Culture Wars. A timely examination of the incendiary debate around culture, the book takes us on a journey through the history of cancellation, from Ancient Greek 'ostracism' through to witch trials, then to the Second World War. Like all Grayling's works – and he has written over 30 on philosophy, religion and current affairs – this one is thought-provoking and meticulously researched, so that even when you disagree with his stances (he thinks cancellations can often not only be just, but necessary), you can't deny that the arguments are firmly backed up.
Grayling admits in the book's preface that his sympathies, 'both intellectually and emotionally, lie in the woke direction'. Working on the basis that woke causes are just and that to be against discrimination is a no-brainer, Discriminations concentrates chiefly on the 'woke wars' themselves, and how alarming the pushback is. 'We see it now in spades,' he says, 'with the Trump administration really just dumping on diversity, equity and inclusion [DEI] thinking.'
'DEI absolutely has to stay,' he insists. 'Even if people find it very tiresome to be told by their organisations that they have to do this thing, if they can recognise that it's important, it's very salutary.' The pushback, he explains, is actually 'proof progress has been made. A really interesting product of the success of 'the woke cause'. Because as layers of discrimination are peeled away, deeper layers [of discrimination] are exposed.' Slavery might be over, he argues in the book, 'but racism in both systemic and subtler forms persists. Overt sexism might have diminished, but structural barriers to equality for women in public and economic life continue.'
The Meghan phenomenon – where a person or issue becomes emblematic of everything people loathe about wokeism, thereby incurring a disproportionate amount of vitriol – is one of the most obvious manifestations of that pushback, he says. 'You've got the same extraordinary thing happening with the transgender issue,' he goes on, adding that although there are more 'pressing' issues, such as the climate catastrophe and women still lagging way behind men, a debate about 'between 0.5 to 1% of the world's population' takes up an enormous amount of oxygen.
Although Grayling is quite right about us sometimes focusing on the wrong things, I would argue that seemingly trivial things can also, on occasion, be emblematic of much larger cultural shifts. That the gender-neutral loo debate, for example, is about deeply concerning issues – not least, female safety. Given the word 'woman' has become unacceptable in some quarters, doesn't it make sense that 'people who menstruate' feel they are in danger of being eradicated?
'When you are trying to discredit a person or cause,' says Grayling. 'You first ridicule what people say – so 'women with penises' and so on.' In his mind, the trans community has been chosen as a target simply 'because it's so easy to attack'. How so? 'Because they are so vulnerable, and if you want to discredit all the woke causes, you pick the most vulnerable and use it [to that aim]. You generalise by saying that it's woke to be pro-transgender and that woke in general is bad'. However small the global statistics seem, he goes on, 'there are, by the way, 48,000 of them in the United Kingdom, which is quite a significant number. A very small number of those will be pretendians who just want to get into women's changing rooms.'
He will agree that often 'it's the people in the stands, like at a football match', who are stoking divisions and that social media plays a huge responsibility. As a father of four – with two children, Joylon, 48, and Georgina, 52, from his first marriage to Gabrielle Smyth and a daughter, Madeleine, 25, and stepson, Luke, 29, from his 18-year second marriage to bestselling novelist Katie Hickman – 'I have seen the difference in children who grew up in the age of the screen,' he says. 'Social media in particular has proved to be a toxin.' Largely because 'since all communication has to be short, it's like a referendum question every time, with everything over simplified, and people disappearing down these social media silos that only reinforce division.'
When I later ask his views on JK Rowling, Grayling says: 'That is what happens when these people who began really moderately, like her, by saying: 'Look, I'm very sympathetic to pushback becomes so unpleasant: you do become more entrenched and extreme. We see people who don't feel comfortable with the gender they were assigned, but I'm worried about the place of women in all this', but then people really have a go at them. They cancel them and stop buying their books.' Grayling fully accepts that this form of cancellation is wrong. 'Because there was a phase where Rowling repeatedly attempted to explain exactly what she meant, but people just kept on saying she was horrible.'
He also agrees that in our arguments on this issue, we need to differentiate between trans adults and the pushing of trans ideologies on kids. On the day we meet, it has been reported that Health Secretary Wes Streeting is refusing to intervene over NHS plans to test puberty blockers on children, and when I point out that there isn't a sane person in the world who would agree with the stand-alone idea of medical experimentation on children, Grayling nods vigorously. 'You're quite right. These issues need to be separated. There's a parallel between being sympathetic and having an open mind. You want an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out. You can be very sympathetic to a cause but still see that you need to think very clearly about all the implications.'
The 'peace' he offers up so tantalisingly in the title of his book – how can it be achieved? 'If you could say 'let's just respect people's individual human rights', all discrimination would simply cease,' he maintains. 'The 'woke wars' are a conflict between the rights of those whose rights are not being fully respected (and hence suffer the consequences of this) and those whose interests are, or are perceived to be threatened [by according respect to those rights].'
The writer's sympathies make a lot of sense when you consider his background. Born in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Grayling spent the entirety of his childhood in Africa, where his father worked as a banker. 'My own mother was an emphatic racist,' he writes in Discriminations, but 'because I was brought up by Africans, most dear to me among them 'Johnny' Penza and his first wife Besta, who cared for me when I was little and with whom I spent much of my time, the adverse treatment they experienced troubled me profoundly, and the sentiments thus engendered have not changed.'
It would take four days by train for him and his older brother, John – now 80 and a retired brewer – to get back home from their Cape Town boarding school, 'which meant that we didn't see our parents very often.' When he was home, Grayling tells me that he was 'conscious of the fact that the people in the nice part of the house, where there was food and warmth and laughter, all had black skin. And the people in the cold, silent part of the house where they kept shushing us all had white skin.' Understandably, this 'reinforced my whole attitude to life and discrimination', he says.
At 19, not long after Grayling came to live in the UK, attending Sussex University, he suffered a dual tragedy that also had a huge impact on his life and beliefs. His 27-year-old sister, Jennifer, was found murdered in Johannesburg, and his mother then had a fatal heart attack after identifying her daughter's body. 'For a long time, I never used to talk about it,' he told The Telegraph in 2016, 'because I felt faintly embarrassed about having such an awful tragedy happen in my family. When I did open up, I found to my surprise how easily upset I am about it even after many, many years.' Although he had been attracted to Humanism from the age of 14, these tragedies 'confirmed' the philosophy for him, he tells me. Most appealing, he says, 'was this idea that you approach human beings, no matter what they are or where they come from with sympathy – unless or until they behave badly. As Emerson said: 'We should give people the same advantage that we give a painting, the advantage of a good light.'
Having lectured in philosophy at Bedford College-London (now Royal Holloway), St. Anne's College-Oxford and Birkbeck College-University of London, he then founded the Northeastern University London (formerly New College of the Humanities) in 2012.
The idea of a for-profit private university (then charging £18,000 a year) proved controversial, with academics branding the idea 'odious' and students shouting down the author at public events. One room, in a central London bookshop even needed to be evacuated after a smoke bomb was lit. 'I was more hurt than surprised,' says Grayling, 'because I thought my bona fides (among those academic colleagues who took exception) were enough for it to be regarded as a sincere effort - as it quickly proved itself to be by its success.'
It would be hard to argue with that. 'Whereas there were 50 students when we first opened the doors, there are now 3000, and we have vastly expanded our range.'
Many of his books have also been polemical, not least his Good Book (2011), a kind of re-written, secular Bible. Some have even been banned in places like the UAE. But today, he is serene, even a little proud of his latest censorship.
'I've actually been kicked off X,' he tells me. 'Yes, I reposted a tweet about Musk and corruption at the end of January, and then when I couldn't get into my account and contacted them, they told me I'd been banned.' Quite a badge of honour, I would think. 'I suppose it really is,' he agrees.
Ask him what his predictions are, given the new world order, and he gives a weary sigh. 'Who was it who said that prophecy is always a risky business, especially if it's about the future? Things are so disrupted now. Here we are in March, and already the world order has been turned on its head. Now, look what's happened because of Trump and Putin. We're having to increase defence spending from 1.5% to maybe 3 or even 4%. That's a vast sum of money, which could be used for health and education and foreign aid – and it's forcing us to go back to bad old ways. This is what bad people do to the world.'
As a remain campaigner he does think 'the Ukraine emergency has brought the UK back to being much closer to the EU and puts a bit of a wind behind us rejoining.' Because of his campaigning, he knows a number of people on the European side, 'and I know that Europe is mad keen to have us back.'
I should let Grayling get back to his writing – he has another book, on the rise of authoritarianism and the dangers of democracy coming out at the end of the year – but before I do, I have to ask about a throwaway comment he made in the Guardian, last year, when asked who he might most like to punch.
'Oh, I would still punch Boris,' he assures me, with a laugh. 'And it's not totally unimaginable that he might be able to worm his way back,' he groans. 'I mean, imagine if he were captured by Reform, and Farage could bear to share the limelight with anybody else. You could see that kind of scenario happening.' Why does he object to him so strongly, out of interest? 'He's a liar and a self-interested, bloviating narcissist who paid no attention to matters of policy. I think he's a very bad person. Completely amoral. Amoral people say that they will do things and don't. He's a petty individual, as well, and he knows that he's in danger of being found out all the time. He has, in fact, been found out.'
By this point, we're both laughing. Why not tell me how he really feels? And the main points of difference between Johnson and Trump, I push? After all, they are often compared to one another in character. 'The key difference is that Boris has charm – quite a lot of charm, unfortunately. Whereas Trump has no charm at all.'
I'm still chuckling when I make my way down the narrow stairs onto the streets of Paris. One of the key tenets of Grayling's writings has always been 'how to live a good life.' It seems that he, at least, has succeeded.
A C Grayling talks to Stephen Law, 'Discriminations: Making Peace in the Culture Wars' at Oxford Literary Festival, in partnership with The Telegraph, on Wednesday 2 April. Tickets: oxfordliteraryfestival.org; Telegraph readers can save 20 per cent with the code 25TEL20. Discriminations: Making Peace in the Culture Wars by A C Grayling is published by on 3 April (Oneworld, £12.99)
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