Nick Cohen talks about cancel culture with leading philosopher & author Professor A.C.Grayling @acgrayling

This is the first part of a 2-part interview with Professor Grayling.

Emboldened by Trump, Brexit & Trump, a Radical Right on-the-rampage seeks to justify its own prejudices and failures by labelling its opponents as "woke". A.C. Grayling tells Nick, "the term political correctness was a pejorative term as woke has become now in the vocabulary of the right..."

A.C. Grayling says there's nothing new about discriminatory cancelling, adding cancellation is really one of the major forces of recent history, saying "one group trying to cancel another...

By means of wars or pogroms or, you know, exclusions or, or oppressive laws and so on...it is just the story of history.

"We look for example, at the phenomenon of caste in India, and we see that as a massive systematic and systemic is history long cancellation of whole groups of people."

Social media has made it easier for the authoritarians of both left and right to cancel & penalise people for expressing their views. He adds, "apart from all the other reasons why allowing free expression is so important. Without it, you can't have a process at law. You can't recuse and defend, you can't have politics. You can't propose policies or, or analyse them and challenge them.

"You can't have an education system if you can't freely pass on information and analyse it and discuss it."

Nick Cohen's @NichCohen4 latest Substack column Writing from London on politics and culture from the UK and beyond.

A.C. Grayling's book Discriminations: Making peace in the culture wars is now out as paperback.

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