Silence is no answer

AC Grayling, British philosopher and indefatigable author, is coming to the Auckland Writers Festival with a new book under his arm. PAUL LITTLE asks him about Discriminations – a sortie on to the battlefield of woke - and hears how to combat the haters.

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If somebody asked you to explain what Discriminations is about, what would you tell them?

It's about the current chapter in the great endeavour to try to combat discriminations of all kinds. So, for example, sexism, racism, ageism, ableism, casteism in India, the transgender issue.

Throughout history, these groups were massively cancelled by all those who had their hands on the levers of power and property.

The whole woke endeavour since the 1960s has actually been pretty successful. One big chapter was the civil rights movement and second-wave feminism in the 60s and 70s. This success has given people more opportunity to try to do more on their own behalf. But the more successful they are, the more vigorously people push back against it. The very word woke, meaning alert to injustice, seems to have undergone a transformation in meaning - it's like a victim of the culture wars itself.

It’s used by anti-wokeists to pour contempt and disdain and hostility on all these different anti-discrimination causes. But really, it’s a word that has a pretty noble ancestry.

To be “woke” to something came out of the African-American experience. African-Americans were being invited to be even more alert to the systematic ways in which racism affected them and was manifested when they went into a bank or tried to rent a flat or to get a job or ride on a bus. There were lots and lots of different ways.

It feels like people are more exercised by these issues than ever, able to find time to be outraged on many fronts at once.