(Note: This is the unedited text of the talk)

Alan has told me firmly, on no fewer than three occasions, that my talk does not need to refer to his work at all — that it can be entirely about my own. I have confirmed, three times, that I understand this. At no point did I commit to complying.

I have spent the last seventeen years tracing the evolution of postmodern thought into what contemporary theorists call Critical Social Justice and the majority of people refer to as ‘woke.’ I went to university as a mature student in 2009. Before that, my writing had been done largely as a sceptic and a critic of religion and faith-based epistemology. My concerns with religion were primarily epistemological and ethical. I could see no good reason to believe that claims about a god or an afterlife were true, and that seemed to me to matter. Furthermore, many religious doctrines appeared illiberal — they provided little basis for individual liberty, equality, tolerance, or autonomy.

I was a liberal humanist, an empiricist and a rationalist.

When I joined an undergrad programme as a literature student and later specialised in Late Medieval to Early Modern Studies, it had never occurred to me that those subjects might be opposed in any way to science, evidence, or reason. Yet postmodernism appeared in my very first semester, along with various “ways of reading” — theoretical lenses, which functioned as structured introductions to confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. I quickly became concerned.

I was informed that we should, in fact, abandon the very idea that objective truth could ever be established. What we regard as truth, I was told, is merely a product of white, Western, masculinist ways of thinking. Science was a central target of this critique and was held to be deeply complicit in racism, colonialism, sexism, and homophobia.

My first exam required me to demonstrate that I understood why liberal humanism had failed and why critical theories were superior.

When asked to write a paper demonstrating how postmodern theory could illuminate literary texts, I asked — rather desperately — whether I might instead write a critique of postmodernism. We reached a compromise. Half the paper could be a critique; the other half could demonstrate the theory in practice. So I set out to find the best critiques of postmodernism I could. The first half of my paper was essentially a protest explaining why everything that followed would, unfortunately, be nonsense.

The second half focused on the work of Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard. The first half relied heavily on Jean Bricmont and Alan Sokal. The latter gentlemen saved my sanity from the former.

I then switched my attention from the epistemological and ethical problems in religion to those in postmodernism. Intellectual Impostures was my starting point. It was particularly valuable to me because it was written by left-wing, materialist liberals. Like me.

One passage proved especially valuable, and it is the one I have cited frequently in the seventeen years since:

Specific scepticism should not be confused with radical scepticism. It is important to distinguish carefully between two different types of critiques of the sciences: those that are opposed to a particular theory and are based on specific arguments, and those that repeat in one form or another the traditional arguments of radical scepticism. The former critiques can be interesting but can also be refuted, while the latter are irrefutable but uninteresting — because of their universality. And it is crucial not to mix the two sorts of arguments: for if one wants to contribute to science, be it natural or social, one must abandon radical doubts concerning the viability of logic or the possibility of knowing the world through observation and/or experiment.

That distinction — between specific and radical scepticism — I would argue maps directly onto the fault line at the heart of everything I want to talk about.

The methods of science and the stance of the postmodernists begin from the same fundamental premise. Both accept that we cannot, and should not, ever be entirely certain that we have obtained objective truth. It is what they do next that differs fundamentally.

In science, the warning against certainty is rooted in the principle of fallibility: the importance of always remembering that we might be wrong. This, of course, relies on the assumption that it is possible — and indeed desirable — to be right. Science therefore develops methods for minimising wrongness: reducing human bias and error, testing hypotheses, attempting falsification, requiring replication. Science takes the warning about certainty very seriously. But it does not dwell in uncertainty. It accepts that we cannot ever be absolutely sure that anything is true — we could all be brains in jars — and then it gets on with trying to find out what is true anyway. As Sokal and Bricmont put it: accepting that reality exists is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.

Postmodernists take the same premise in the opposite direction. We cannot be certain of having obtained objective truth. Therefore, trying to ascertain it is futile, naïve, and itself evidence of being trapped within white, Western, imperialist, masculinist ways of knowing. Instead, we should embrace uncertainty. We should wallow around in it. Deconstruct everything.

What interests postmodern theorists is taking the radically skeptical stance that objective knowledge is unobtainable and then theorising about how the knowledge we assume we possess came to be socially constructed in the first place. Which power structures does it serve? Who decided that certain ways of knowing and certain truth claims count as legitimate?

At the root of the postmodern framework — which can appear extraordinarily sophisticated, thanks largely to its obscure language — is a remarkably simple set of assumptions about knowledge, power, and language. Knowledge is a construct of oppressive power, perpetuated through language. The powerful create categories and concepts which serve their own interests, encode them in language, and then, through their use by everyday people, they are used to oppress others. To become aware of this process and dismantle the underlying power structures is what it means to be Critical — with a capital C.

In Cynical Theories, we broke this down into two core principles. The postmodern knowledge principle: radical scepticism about whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable, combined with a commitment to cultural constructivism. And the postmodern political principle: the belief that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies which determine what can be known and how.

Running through both are four major themes. The blurring of boundaries — radical scepticism that any categories or concepts we hold convey anything real. The power of language — the idea that everything is ultimately constructed in language, so that control of language can control reality. Cultural relativism — the view that we are all products of our culture and cannot analyse one from the standpoint of another. And the loss of the individual and the universal — we are not individuals evaluating things for ourselves; we are mediated through culture in ways determined by our position in relation to power.

A useful example comes from David Detmer’s book Challenging Postmodernism. He describes asking a postmodern theorist, Laurie Calhoun, whether we could at least agree that giraffes are bigger than ants. She replied that we could not and that this is an article of areligious faith in our culture.. What she meant was that the statement depends upon culturally constructed understandings of what “bigger” means. If size were conceptualised differently — not primarily about mass — then ants might be considered bigger than giraffes. Nor can we resolve the matter by asking whether giraffes have greater mass than ants, because that too depends upon culturally contingent categories and concepts.

This really is radical scepticism. It does, however, tend to falter when confronted with reality. We all know which one we would rather have step on our foot.

This deconstructive approach could not continue indefinitely. Around 1989, a new generation of theorists emerged across a range of disciplines. They argued that while postmodernism had been useful in demonstrating that everything was socially constructed, simply deconstructing everything was not especially useful if one wanted to bring about social change. It was no good for activism.

In postcolonial theory, Linda Hutcheon argued that deconstruction alone was insufficient. If anything was to be achieved, concepts of knowledge, history, and truth had to be reconstructed in the voice of the subaltern. In queer theory, Judith Butler embraced the poststructuralist dissolution of categories but transformed this into a form of positive activism — the constructs remained socially produced, but the imperative was to subvert them. Similarly, Kimberlé Crenshaw argued within Critical Race Theory that although postmodernism was useful for revealing the socially constructed nature of identity categories, systems of oppression were real. If concepts of oppression were themselves only social constructs, how could oppression ever be challenged?

We called this development Applied Postmodernism. This new wave further justified a return to accepting some things as true by adapting Gayatri Spivak’s concept of strategic essentialism for the purposes of identity politics.

This enabled theorists to walk a careful line. Essentialism — the belief that categories such as sex, race, and sexuality possess some inherent and stable meaning — remained suspect. But if those categories were employed strategically and politically, they could be used to claim an authentic voice and a form of identity-based knowledge: standpoint epistemology. Activists could thereby have both radical social constructivism and an apparently objective foundation from which to pursue activism. We could consider this a shift from radical skepticism to strategic skepticism.

This, of course, means that the authentic voices of any group deemed marginalised are those which adhere to critical theory. Those who disagree, and most members of any such group do disagree, are simply not yet awakened to the discourses of oppressive power they have bought into. Some of the most incredulous and indignant people I have spoken to over the years have been Indian, Nigerian, and Pakistani mathematicians, scientists, doctors, and engineers who travelled to the UK to fill a STEM skills gap, only to be told that science is a white, Western, imperialist way of knowing and not for them. I have spoken to so many of them that I eventually wrote a template letter to enable them to request clarification that they, as migrants, are expected to assimilate to this decidedly Western ideology. Trying to thread that needle tends to make DEI departments’ heads explode.

Once identity and power had been rendered objectively real and subjected to simplified postmodern analysis, these theories rapidly escaped the confines of academia. They became user-friendly. Because Applied Postmodern Theory explicitly applied postmodern ideas to identity politics, it was soon adopted by scholars interested in a wide range of identities — race, sex, gender, sexuality, religion, immigration status, physical or mental ability, and body size.

The opposition to science and material reality in these theories becomes most concretely alarming in disability activism and fat activism. Both have been integrated into the intersectional framework and adopted much of the Applied Postmodern approach, according to which disabled people and fat people who adhere to the theories possess forms of embodied knowledge more valuable than scientific knowledge. Scholars and activists in these fields argue that understanding disability or obesity as physical conditions to be treated or corrected is itself a social construct — produced by systemic ableism and fatphobia.

I recently recorded a podcast with James Morris of the ReNeural Project. Profoundly impacted by cerebral palsy, which requires him to use a wheelchair and communicate via a voice app, James has campaigned for biomedical advances that could potentially cure cerebral palsy in future generations. He was found by disability activists who informed him that his socialisation into ableist discourses made him believe it would have been better not to have cerebral palsy and his campaigns amounted to advocacy to genocide. So vitriolic were the attacks on him that he was quite shaken. Nevertheless, he persists. Other non-CSJ disability campaigners have been intimidated out of advocating for scientific research.

At the same time as these ideas became user friendly the expressions of them were also hardening into absolute certainty. The belief that we have all been socialised into unconsciously accepting white supremacist, patriarchal, imperialistic, cisheteronormative, ableist, and fatphobic narratives — and are constantly perpetuating oppression by the way we think and speak unless we do the work of dismantling these biases — is simply regarded as a reality. It is imperative that we all decolonise our epistemology, dismantle our whiteness, detoxify our masculinity, and queer our concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality.

A tradition that began by rejecting grand narratives ultimately produced one of its own: an overarching account of how society works, how knowledge is produced, why injustice persists, and how to address it. The parallel with religion can be made too much of. But there do seem to be very similar social and psychological drivers at play. The authoritarian impulse from both can, I think, be best understood as what tends to happen when a group of humans become convinced that they can see an important truth that most people cannot, and that making them see it is for their own good and the good of all society.

This reification of postmodern concepts — from largely aimless deconstructive methods into a strategic essentialism and then into the unapologetic essentialism of identity politics and the absolute certainty of Critical Social Justice — is perhaps most clearly illustrated by what happened in queer theory. Gender, sexuality, and even sex are all social constructs whose boundaries need to be blurred to liberate the same-sex attracted and the gender non-conforming. But a self-professed gender identity is simultaneously one hundred percent authoritative and metaphysically solid — because trans-identified individuals are the most marginalised. If you don’t accept that, it is because you have accepted knowledge provided to you from ‘biopower’ — meaning biology — and you must now submit to the retraining of your unconscious biases and adjust your language accordingly. This strand of activism has produced the most high-profile justifications for no-platforming, disciplinary action, and explicit threats of violence for non-compliance, on the grounds that to allow dissenting positions to exist and be spoken is to maintain systems of oppressive power that deny trans people the right to exist. We again hear references to genocide.

The postmodernists were not wrong to say that uncritical acceptance of metanarratives is bad. They were wrong to speak as though they were the first to recognise this, and wrong to believe that their methods offered anything useful in addressing it. Pointing out that humans are prone to narrative and motivated reasoning is not a novel insight. What is novel — and genuinely revolutionary — is finding methods that systematically work against that tendency. What is it that can mitigate our tendency to create narratives and then try to live in them and instead actually discover what is true? History is quite clear on this. It is not radical skepticism, or strategic skepticism but specific scepticism accompanied by an expectation that arguments will be evidenced and reasoned and arguers will be open to critique and correction. It is the fruits of the Enlightenent: empiricism, reason, liberalism.

As someone who studied England from 1300 to 1700, I am not supposed to use the term ‘the dark ages’ or describe them as dark and if I do some medievalist will point me indignantly at ploughs and watermills. But comparatively speaking on the level of advancing methods of critical inquiry or moral philosophy, things were pretty dark well into the high and late medieval period. The combined forces of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment resulted in what can only be described as a revolution in how we acquire knowledge and an explosion of what we know.

I undertook one project examining the evolution of the understanding of female anatomy. From the time of Galen in the second century until the arrival of Vesalius and the empirical revolution in the mid-seventeenth century, there was almost no evolution at all in Europe. University-trained physicians were still understanding female reproductive anatomy according to the theorising of a man who had, 1500 years earlier, once dissected a female dog. The Muslim world had been doing rather better than Christendom during the high medieval period, and I had the pleasure of reading a wonderful exchange between Muslim and Christian scholars in which the former attempted to convince the latter that the clitoris probably exists to make women want to have sex and produce children. The Christian scholars refuted this indignantly, because they knew that lust was a sin and God would not have created an organ for this purpose. They concluded that women peed through it. This was not a sound epistemology.

By the fifteenth century, it was starting to be recognised that largely illiterate barber-surgeons were producing better outcomes for their patients than university-trained physicians, and the reasons for this were starting to be discussed. It was because they were not bound by received wisdom and had the freedom to experiment by trial and error and pass on information about what worked. I produced an edition of a 1540 anatomy sheet, created right at the beginning of the revolution that would explode in that decade. At the start of that period it was still believed that menstrual blood came from the liver and that women had sperm. A year later, Dr Gabriele Falloppio would remedy this by discovering the tubes that would forever bear his name and accurately hypothesising their function.

We were now marching toward the Enlightenment. And the development of human rights and individual liberty was not separable from that epistemological revolution. The methods that told us to look at the world as it actually is, rather than as authority or tradition or ideology told us it must be, were the same methods that ultimately told us that women were not intellectually inferior, that homosexuality was not a disorder, that there are no superior and inferior races. This happened slowly, fitfully, and imperfectly. But it happened.

One of the things I find least forgivable in the postmodern tradition is the insistence that belief in Enlightenment rationalism and the development of liberalism is naïve and idealistic. It is not. The method used to discredit it is consistent: take science, and liberalism at their origins and insist that those origins define them, while entirely ignoring what happens when their methods are actually applied. Isaac Newton spent a considerable amount of time studying alchemy. Why does this not trouble us more? Because the physics he also spent considerable time pioneering has told us there is no basis for alchemy. He could not have known that at the start — he helped create the framework that would later allow us to know it. Darwin believed that women were intellectually inferior, a hypothesis drawn from the society he lived in. Science disproves that. The first sexologists classified homosexuality as a disorder — a considerable improvement on treating it as a sin deserving punishment, but obviously not good enough. After nearly four thousand years of negative views of homosexuality within the Judeo-Christian tradition, science and liberal culture arrived at a consensus, within decades, that homosexual is simply something some people are, and that anyone with a problem with this should get over it.

If we want to talk about what has most effectively dismantled metanarratives, we cannot find anything more powerful than the development of science, reason and a liberal culture which enabled the critique of all by all. Specific scepticism.

For a long time, counter-Enlightenment forces came primarily from the reactionary right — traditionalists who wanted to hold on to faith and tradition-based ways of knowing. We might call them the pre-modernists: those who want to turn the clock back to a time before all of this happened and inhabit a fantasy world that never existed.

Left-wing intellectuals and progressives were, mostly, the defenders of the Enlightenment. Marxists tried — wrongly, and sometimes catastrophically — to be scientific. They were modernists. It has been said that Marxists are wrong while postmodernists are not even wrong. They refute the epistemic criteria by which things can be wrong.

To support liberalism, science, empiricism, and rationalism is, in one very fundamental sense, to be progressive. It is to wish to see progress in knowledge, ethics, and individual liberty as something to strive for. It is also conservative in that it seeks to conserve the epistemology and principles that enable that. Progressives on the left who embraced postmodernism should now be recognised as deeply regressive. It is not progressive to argue, as postmodern postcolonial scholars do, that science and reason are ways of knowing that belong to white, Western men, while black and brown people from the East have their own ways of knowing rooted in storytelling, myth, tradition, and superstition. That is a colonialist narrative that empirical and liberal ways of knowing were making genuine progress in overcoming. Nor is it progressive to argue that having a work ethic, being literate, and arriving on time are white cultural impositions that should not be expected of black people, as some alleged anti-racists have indeed argued. Nor is it progressive when queer theory activists proclaim that anyone who is feminine is a woman — a direct inversion of the ‘women must be feminine’ essentialism they claimed to be dismantling.

This is all deeply regressive. And it also dropped the ball on holding back the counter-Enlightenment right.

There are some who argue that the post-truth MAGA right is directly intellectually influenced by postmodernism. I am not convinced. Admittedly the Christian Nationalist, Stephen Wolfe, has explicitly borrowed ideas from critical race theory but the illiberal right tends, when it borrows from theory at all, to reach for the Frankfurt School rather than for Foucault and Derrida. Chris Rufo has unapologetically published a book arguing for the use of Gramscian cultural strategy to control narratives and embed conservative narratives in institutions — which is at least intellectually honest, if alarming. But what the postmodern left has primarily done is not to create the post-truth right. What it has done is weaken the defences against it.

When the left attacks science, it does its own harm and it also makes science vulnerable to attacks from the right — whether that is creationism, vaccine denial, or the terrifying spectacle of MAHA health policy. When lived experience is established as a legitimate epistemological category that overrides evidence, it becomes available to everyone. I can now be told, with equal confidence, that lived experience confirms that police are systematically lynching black Americans on a daily basis, and that lived experience confirms that immigration has made London far more dangerous now than it was in the 1990s. Both claims are false. Both are asserted with the confidence of the oppressed speaking truth to power. The methodology is identical. The content is simply tailored to the preferred political narrative of the speaker.

This is what strategic skepticism produceswhen it escapes academic theory and becomes the default epistemology of political culture. Not liberation. Not the dismantling of oppressive metanarratives. But a world in which reality is decided by whoever shouts their narrative loudest, and in which the tools for adjudicating between claims have been deliberately dismantled.

We need another Enlightenment. Or, more precisely, we need to defend the one we have.

We need liberals, empiricists, and rationalists on the right to push back the post-truth pre-modernists on their own side. And we need liberals, empiricists, and rationalists on the left to push back the postmodernists on theirs. Above all, we need to recognise that science, evidence, and reason, the fruits of the Enlightenment, and the corresponding project of liberal democracy, are a higher-order value than any particular political positioning, and that defending them is likewise both conservative and progressive.

I don’t know anyone who has done this better, more consistently, or with greater intellectual integrity than Alan Sokal. I began my intellectual journey, as an undergraduate, by reading his work. I would have been astonished and delighted then to know I would one day call him both mentor and friend.

(Audio version here)

In a recent post, responds to a critic who asks whether she could soften the wording of her gender-critical stickers in order to reach more people. They carry messages such as, “HUMANS CANNOT CHANGE SEX,” “NO ONE IS BORN IN THE WRONG BODY,” and “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A ‘TRANS’ CHILD.” Rose makes two points, both of which I agree with. First, she argues that there is no meaningful way to sugar-coat these statements. They cannot be softened without becoming different claims, and she should be free to express precisely the point she intends to make. Second, she argues that presenting a gentler or more conciliatory message to authoritarian gender identity ideologues is no more likely to be received well than stating one's position bluntly. The evidence strongly supports this. Many people have expressed polite disagreement with gender identity beliefs only to be met with vitriolic abuse and demands that they be punished.

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In support of her last statement, Rose refers to J.K. Rowling’s experiences of vitriolic abuse from activists despite her ‘kind, considerate and gentle’ approach to them. She writes,

She went out of her way to sweeten the message that men cannot somehow magically become women - And look at how she’s been treated by “trans” ideologues for the last six years.

What have we learned from that?

You might as well just tell the truth.

I agree with Rose that Rowling’s approach did not seem to make authoritarian activists any more reasonable at all. Nevertheless, I would push back on “What have we learned from that?” and “You might as well just tell the truth.”

Rowlings first statement was:

Dress however you please

Call yourself whatever you like

Sleep with any consenting adult that will have you.

Live your best life in peace and security.

But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?

#IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill

Firstly, Rose seems to imply that Rowling's original intervention was a gentler way of saying that sex is real. I don't think that's what Rowling was doing at all. Rowling was not advancing a biological claim in that tweet. She was advancing a liberal principle.

Rose, as she explicitly says, is making truth claims about biological sex being real, definitive of whether one is male or female and immutable. Rowling, however, was making a defence of freedom of speech. Her tweet defends people’s right to believe, speak and live as they see fit, provided it does no material harm to anyone else nor denies them the same freedom. Once beliefs are imposed on other people under threat of penalty, the issue ceases to be one of individual liberty. It becomes one of harm and coercion, and liberalism has always recognised that distinction.

Truth claims and principles are categorically different things. Truth claims cannot soften into principles, nor can principles harden into truth claims. They answer different kinds of questions. People may hold the same truth claim while applying very different principles to it, or share the same principles while disagreeing profoundly about what is true.

At the time of Rowling’s first tweet, we did not even know whether she held gender-critical beliefs herself. It is entirely possible to believe that gender identity is more authoritative than biological sex and still object to a woman losing her job for holding the opposite view. A liberal would oppose anyone being dismissed simply for expressing either belief, regardless of which, if any, they personally held.

Let's take another example involving something about which I hold strong views to look at this outside the context of the gender debate. I see no good reason to believe that any god exists and, unless compelling evidence emerges, I will continue to work on the premise that none do. I am also concerned that religious belief—overwhelmingly belief in the Abrahamic God within my own culture—can inspire deeply illiberal attitudes and practices, particularly towards non-believers, women, children and same-sex attracted people. In that respect, my concerns about religion map quite neatly onto concerns about gender identity ideology.

I could say,

Believe in any god you please.

Identify with any religion or denomination you like

Worship in consensual communities of people who share your beliefs.

Live your best life in peace and security.

But impose your beliefs on other people?

#IStandWithApostates #ThisIsNotADrill

I may also argue that no gods exist and openly reject the truth claims of religion. I have done so in the past. But that is a categorically different argument. For me, individual liberty is the higher-order principle. I will defend religious freedom and gladly work alongside religious believers who also defend the right of others not to believe in their god or any god at all. It is not the case that, if enough religious fundamentalists were viciously abusive towards me, I would abandon that liberal principle and simply start telling them that God does not exist and that salvation cannot be attained by believing in the right religion, even though I believe those things to be true.

So I don’t think I “might as well just tell the truth.”

It is not only that truth claims and liberal principles are different kinds of argument. I also think the latter are often the stronger and more persuasive. I would love for nobody to believe in God, but I do not imagine that simply asserting his non-existence will persuade believers or win much sympathy from society more broadly. People have been insisting that their own religious beliefs are true and arguing over them for millennia. Defending everyone’s right to believe what they wish and live accordingly, free from discrimination or harassment, while insisting that they not harm others or coerce them into affirming those beliefs, is a much more compelling proposition. Religious believers who are not authoritarian zealots can happily endorse that principle alongside non-believers, and we need not be conciliatory towards those who reject it. It also resonates with the liberally minded majority, who are not deeply invested in theological disputes and mostly just want people to be left alone unless they are harming someone else.

I think the same is true of debates around gender identity. I suspect that competing groups of activists simply asserting the truth claims “Trans women are women” or “Trans women are men” have relatively little effect on the opinions of society as a whole. What seems to have resonated much more widely are arguments grounded in liberal principles of freedom, fairness and the prevention of harm. I have argued before that I believe a strong case can be made that the entry of J.K. Rowling into the debate and her reasonable, liberal arguments were deeply influential on making the general population aware of the nature of the problem in a way that made them sympathetic to the cause.

These statements and this stance and this much-loved bestselling author became focal points of the Gender Critical Feminist movement to the point where billboards in support of the Gender Critical view simply said “I <heart> J.K.Rowling” (and were also identified as transphobic and removed by authorities captured by the Critical Social Justice movement). So reasonable and liberal was this stance that it mobilised people outside the movement who had also grown increasingly alarmed by the authoritarian CSJ movement. They began to recognise that the Gender Critical movement was the most organised, committed and, likely, effective, way to push back CSJ at least in the realm of Trans Activism, and give it their support.

…

The line really had been crossed between believing, speaking and living as one sees fit and causing material harm to others and interfering with their freedom to do the same. Placing women in a position where a sex offender can self-identify as a woman and gain access to places where women are vulnerable ranging from changing rooms to shelters to prisons does cause material harm to women. Nobody has to believe that trans women are inherently sexually predatory to acknowledge this reality. Material harm is also caused when a female athlete loses her winning place and potential scholarships, sporting career or financial reward because somebody with the benefits of male puberty competes against her (or charges into her). The rallying cry of “Let Women Speak!” was particularly powerful to the liberal mind and so liberals on the left, right and centre increasingly began to demand that right.

Because so many people are fundamentally liberal in the sense of “anti-authoritarian” and because the cause was presented to them as fundamentally liberal, thus quelling fears of appearing to be prejudiced against a minority group, the Gender Critical Movement gained critical support.

I think Rose is absolutely right about one thing. Authoritarian trans activists are no more likely to be persuaded by compassionate, liberal arguments than by blunt, factual ones if those arguments reject the claim that trans women are women in every respect and every context. Someone who affirms the right of trans people to identify and dress as they choose, while arguing that concerns about safety, fairness or freedom of belief justify limits in particular contexts, is still likely to be vilified by zealous activists.

The wider public, however, is a very different audience. Most people are not especially interested in debates about gender, but they do care about fairness, freedom and the protection of vulnerable people. They object both to discrimination against minority groups, including trans-identified people, and to authoritarian attempts to silence disagreement or policies they believe threaten the safety of women and children. YouGov polls show a dramatic increase in awareness of trans issues and a decided shift towards concern in public attitudes over the last eight years, including among women and young people who have been the most sympathetic to trans causes.

Now a new YouGov study, the fourth in a series reaching back to 2018, shows an increased scepticism towards transgender rights across the board – and particularly in the two and a half years since our previous wave of this study.

Notable in this most recent study – conducted in mid-December – is the growing resistance on transgender rights among those groups that are typically more permissive on the issue, like women and young people.

In fact, the only question on which women now take the permissive view on transgender rights is saying that people should be able to change their gender socially, although at 55% this still represents an eight point drop since the 2022 survey.

Although YouGov frames these findings as growing scepticism towards "trans rights", the largest shifts in public opinion have occurred in areas where many people perceive a potential for harm. Support has grown for protecting women's spaces and sports, while opposition to the medicalisation of children and to legal transition has increased. By contrast, the public remains considerably more accepting of social transition, provided it does not entail any of those policies, although support for this has also declined somewhat.

There are, of course, a number of ways to interpret this shift, including the distinction many respondents appear to draw between social transition (allowing people to dress as they please and call themselves whatever they like) and legal transition (granting access to spaces and categories on the basis of gender identity rather than biological sex). One plausible interpretation is that these distinctions reflect a broadly liberal public instinct. Many people appear willing to support trans-identified people living as they choose while becoming increasingly reluctant to endorse policies they believe create risks for women and children or require others to affirm beliefs they do not share. I think that interpretation is consistent both with the polling data and with the kinds of arguments that have proved most publicly persuasive over the last several years.

That is why I ultimately part company with Rose. She is surely right that authoritarian activists are no more likely to be persuaded by liberal arguments than by blunt factual ones. The most important question, however, I would argue, is not how to persuade a small (but highly vocal) band of zealous ideologues. It is how to persuade everyone else, so that they do not tolerate this behaviour from the ideologues in the mistaken belief that they are simply protecting the interests of a vulnerable minority.

Liberal principles have a unique advantage here. They do not require people to have thought deeply about or formulated a strong position on the issue of ‘gender’ before deciding where they stand. They ask a much more general question, one that most people have already considered and upon which they already know where they stand: should people be free to live and present according to their own beliefs where this materially impacts only themselves, while being prevented from harming others or coercing them to affirm those beliefs? Many more people who are not especially invested in debates about gender are likely to answer 'yes' to that question than to commit themselves to defending a particular truth claim about gender. That is why principles are often more persuasive than truth claims: they do not require people to agree on what is true, or even to have a settled view about it, only on how people should treat one another despite disagreeing about it. In the context of religion, this is the principle of secularism that allows people of different faiths and none to co-exist peacefully.

That was the argument Rowling made first. It remains, I think, the strongest argument of all. So how would I answer Rose's question, "What have we learned from that?" We have learned that this is how you win. Not by persuading the committed ideologues, who were never going to be persuaded anyway, but by persuading everyone else. Defend people's freedom to dress as they please and identify as they wish. Draw a firm line where claims about identity begin to endanger women and children or coerce other people into affirming beliefs they do not share. That is a position millions of people can recognise as fair, even if they have never formulated a strong opinion about gender itself. Keep telling the truth about biological sex, certainly. But never underestimate the importance of the liberal principles that keep debate open and allow that truth to prevail.

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In a recent post, responds to a critic who asks whether she could soften the wording of her gender-critical stickers in order to reach more people. They carry messages such as, “HUMANS CANNOT CHANGE SEX,” “NO ONE IS BORN IN THE WRONG BODY,” and “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A ‘TRANS’ CHILD.” Rose makes two points, both of which I agree with. First, she ar…

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The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has over 6500 subscribers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.8% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2026 is to increase that to 7%. This would enable me to write full-time for my own substack! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

(Note: This piece was written before Heather Herbert was arrested and charged. I have left the argument substantially unchanged because its primary focus is the distinction between the legal framework governing free speech and the ethical principle of free speech).

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Heather Herbert, a trans-identified MtF web developer and activist at the University of Aberdeen, posted on Bluesky in response to the news of Ann Widdecombe’s murder saying, “Some good news for once. I hope it was an extremely painful death. I hope she was handcuffed to the bed as she screamed in agony.” This disgusting comment, so revealing of the callous and sadistic mentality of a trans activist who clearly believed this would not undermine his status in his peer group, led to anger, revulsion and outrage. It also led to large numbers of individuals demanding that Herbert be fired including Reform MSP, Mark Simpson, who described it as “hate speech” requiring disciplinary action from the university.

Herbert has now been arrested and charged for his speech. Prior to this, I objected to attempts to have him fired via political mob-pressure on principle.

Writing before Herbert's arrest, Kevin Lister, a maths teacher who lost his job for refusing to honour a trans-identified student's pronouns, responded in the way a liberal should. He defended the free speech of a trans activist whose movement had championed the very principles that contributed to his dismissal and had done so in a highly authoritarian way. I greatly admire Mr. Lister for that consistency. It would have been easy for someone with his experiences to become authoritarian in turn—or simply remain silent and enjoy the schadenfreude—but he did neither. Lister wrote:

This has got nothing to do with Aberdeen University, I don't even know why they are investigating it.

He should not be sacked for his vile and ignorant posts because to do so continues the terrible attacks on free speech that are happening in the UK.

Instead he should be free to demonstrate his ignorant and self centred behaviours. The only things Aberdeen University should be interested in is that he is not allowed into women's spaces and he is not allowed to compel anyone's speech such that they must use his language.

Equally, staff and students at Aberdeen University should be entitled to express their views on what they want to see happen to him without fear of reprisal.

This is at the core of my coming case at the Upper Tribunal against the DBS.

I have been kept on the Children's Barred List for posting concerns on social media about the sexualisation of the class room, buying babies on line, and the social transitioning of children.

If Aberdeen University fire him for expressing his views, however distasteful they are, then we are even more firmly on the path to increasing restrictions of free speech and governance by the mob.

A terrible emerging reaction to the Ann Widdecombe murder is to use it to impose more restrictions on free speech and to accept the police and the government manipulating the agenda to control our thoughts.

That is what we should be most fearful about.

Bravo, sir! This is the way.

A reply to Mr. Lister from a large account named UKVillaFan with the biography “Sex is binary; gender identity is not real but an unfalsifiable construct of queer theory” made a common and repeated category error.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how ‘free speech’ functions. The idea that we all have the right to say anything we like, to express any opinion in any way we choose, is a complete fiction.

Freedom of expression is not an absolute right but a qualified one. That means it has limits. This is explicit in the wording of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. I encourage you to read both the Convention and the Human Rights Act 1998 for the details.

The framework of ‘human rights’ is the curtailing of state power against individual citizens. It is not generally a mechanism for controlling interpersonal relationships or those between employee and employer or individual and organisation.

Whilst states can, and the UK does, legislate in the ‘rights’ field to prevent unlawful discrimination, such rules are limited in nature. Contract law and defamation issues will override ‘freedom of expression’ most of the time.

The University will have a policy about employee social media usage and perceived impacts on its reputation as an organisation. Breach of any such policy could lead to disciplinary action and this would not be a breach of the employees right to freedom of expression unless the speech used is specifically protected (for example, expressing a protected belief under the Equality Act). Even if the underlying political disagreement were a protected belief, employers can still limit manifestations that are violent, harassing, or reputationally damaging.

It should go without saying that wishing someone’s death to have been the result of violent torture is not a protected belief.

Whether Aberdeen disciplines him or not has zero to do with a supposed expansion of state control over speech and it is ridiculous to make such a conflation. The state isn’t even an actor in this scenario at this stage. This is about his employment contract.

…

UKVillaFan conflated laws around freedom of speech with the ethical principle of freedom of speech. This happens so frequently that it seems worth using this particularly good example to break this down. Laws, regulations and policies tell us what is while ethical principles provide justifications for what should be.

Laws controlling or protecting speech have varied considerably over time and space but have historically mostly mandated affirmation of monarchical, dynastic, theocratic or regime authority. More recently, in the West, they have protected individuals from such state control. Knowing what they are is important if one wishes to avoid being arrested or to pursue a denial of freedom in a court of law but they tell us nothing about whether or not the law is ethical or reasonable. Everybody can think of some law, regulation or policy that has existed in some time or place that they believe should not have and needed to be resisted.

The principle of free speech is a central tenet of philosophical liberalism. It takes a stance that individuals should have the freedom to hold and express their own views both as an individual liberty and because this enables challenging authority, correcting error, advancing knowledge and resolving conflicts. It makes no truth claims about what is but argues for what should be. Consequently, the liberal principle of freedom of speech is most commonly invoked when that freedom is being denied in some context. The context can vary widely because the principle is held not only in relation to freedom from state coercion but much more broadly as a positive good. It applies on all levels - governmental, institutional, social and individual.

John Stuart Mill is arguably the most influential liberal philosopher on the subject of freedom of speech and he stresses its relevance in the social realm very clearly in On Liberty. Writing in 1859, he could be speaking about what came to be known as Cancel Culture in the last decade,

Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.

To fully intuitively grasp the difference between laws/regulations/policies and ethical principles (what is and what should be), consider the following statement:

“Women have the right to individual autonomy.”

What does this mean?

It could be a truth claim referring to the laws of a time and place in which women have the right to make their own decisions without requiring the permission of men. The passing of various acts into law could be cited to support the claim that this is a right women have.

It could also be an assertion of an ethical principle. If said by a First Wave feminist demanding the right to vote or own property or a Second Wave feminist demanding the right to take out mortgages or loans in her own name or by somebody living under male guardianship laws in the Middle East right now, that’s almost certainly what it would be. It is not a claim that women already possess the right of autonomy in law, but an assertion that they have the moral right to autonomy. You could not show any of those women the law stating that they do not, in fact, have that right and expect them to say, “Oh, my mistake. Carry on, then.”

This is also how defenders of free speech on principle work. When they say that people are being denied freedom of speech, they do not typically mean that the right already exists in law or regulations or policies, but that it should ethically do so and that they will fight for it to do so.

This is where the disconnect between Kevin Lister and UKVillaFan occurs. Lister is clearly referring to the principle of free speech and taking an ethical stance about what should be protected when he says,

He should not be sacked for his vile and ignorant posts because to do so continues the terrible attacks on free speech that are happening in the UK.

and

If Aberdeen University fire him for expressing his views, however distasteful they are, then we are even more firmly on the path to increasing restrictions of free speech and governance by the mob.

When UKVillaFan responds asserting that Lister is “fundamentally misunderstanding” how free speech functions, she is the one fundamentally misunderstanding that it is a principle being defended, not the current status quo which frequently denies people that freedom (even though Lister says he opposes that quite clearly).

UKVillaFan’s objections fall into three categories.

First, she points out that existing law places limits on freedom of expression. Well, quite. This is precisely what liberals are concerned about. The central liberal tenet is “Let people believe, speak, live as they see fit provided this does no material harm to anyone else, nor denies them the same freedoms.” Current restrictions on freedom of speech go way beyond this. Pointing out that restrictions already exist is no more an answer to somebody defending the principle of free speech than pointing out that women legally lack the vote would have been an answer to women saying this is indefensible. It describes the status quo rather than engaging with the principle.

Second, she argues that employers are entitled to enforce contractual obligations and protect their reputations and notes that not all forms of expression are legally protected and that employers may discipline speech which is not. Again, this describes the current legal position rather than engaging with whether that position is ethically tenable. It does not answer the ethical question of whether employers ought to use those powers to punish the expression of political opinions, however abhorrent, when those opinions do not interfere with an employee’s ability to perform their job.

Recent history should make us cautious about granting employers uncritical approval to police opinion in the name of reputation. During the height of ‘woke’ Cancel Culture, activists repeatedly demanded disciplinary action against academics, teachers, journalists and ordinary employees whose views they regarded as offensive. “Reputational damage” became whatever a sufficiently organised online mob could persuade an employer it was. Likewise, concepts such as “harassment” and even “violence” were expanded to encompass disagreement itself. We heard that “white silence is violence,” that disbelief in gender identity denies people’s right to exist and that criticism of the ideology of Islam is the same thing as hatred and harassment of Muslim people. Once concepts of violence and harassment become this elastic, they are easily turned against whichever dissenting viewpoint is currently unpopular with the dominant moral orthodoxy.

This is also why I find the concept of “protected beliefs” illiberal. Liberalism does not accept that only certain beliefs deserve protection while others may legitimately be suppressed. All beliefs should be allowed expression and all should be open to criticism in the public sphere. (Employers can reasonably make policies about not pushing religious or political views on others while at work, but instead focusing on the work). The appropriate response to bad ideas is to challenge, ridicule and defeat them, not to create categories of officially acceptable opinion.

Finally, UKVillaFan argues that this case has nothing to do with state censorship because Aberdeen University is acting as an employer rather than as the government. As a legal observation, that is correct. As a response to the broader argument about free speech, however, it once again misses the point.

Liberal defences of free speech have never been concerned solely with protection from criminal prosecution. Liberals typically believe that freedom of expression should be defended consistently across society: not only in law, but within universities and institutions of knowledge production, and, where relevant within operational parameters, in workplaces and among professional bodies. It is a general good to create a culture where views we strongly disagree with are criticised or ignored rather than punished. Those who believe mob outrage pressuring employment consequences are entirely separate from broader cultural norms and state or police interference in free speech must have the right to make this argument. People who remember ‘woke’ Cancel Culture correlating with people being taken in for questioning by police for saying gender identity isn’t real or immigration is a problem and suspect that may not have been a coincidence will likely remain unconvinced.

(Update: Herbert has now been arrested and charged in connection with his speech, despite Police Scotland initially stating that "no criminality" had been established. This adds weight to the argument that campaigns for institutional punishment and state intervention cannot be regarded as wholly unrelated phenomena. We cannot be certain that the police's decision to undertake "additional enquiries" was directly caused by demands from right-wing activists and Reform politicians for Herbert to be punished. It is possible that evidence has emerged which has not yet been made public and which links Herbert directly to criminal conduct or unlawful incitement. Nevertheless, in the absence of any such evidence being disclosed, it remains plausible that the shift in the police's assessment—from "non-criminal" to criminal—was influenced, at least in part, by public pressure. Unlike the United States, UK offences relating to malicious communications and the stirring up of hatred often require contextual judgments that can make them particularly susceptible to public and political pressure. UKVillaFan’s assertion that it is “ridiculous” to “make such a conflation” between calls to punish individuals professionally for their speech and an ‘expansion of state control over speech’ may be somewhat naive).

Whether or not Herbert's arrest ultimately proves justified, however, it does not alter the central philosophical point. It is essential to understand the distinction between descriptions of what is (law) and arguments for what ought to be (ethics). Lister was not claiming that Aberdeen University lacks the legal power to investigate Herbert. He was arguing that it ought not to exercise that power, because a society committed to freedom of expression should be reluctant to punish people for expressing political opinions, however vile. That is an ethical argument about the kind of society we should aspire to create, not a misunderstanding of the law as it currently stands.

UKVillaFan's response is therefore best understood not as a rebuttal of Lister's position but as an explanation of how the current legal framework permits, and the cultural climate encourages the very practices he (and I) believe ought to change.

It is unclear whether UKVillaFan recognises that all these arguments can be and have been used to penalise, silence, no-platform and take disciplinary action against gender critical feminists like herself. My own organisation, Counterweight, supported just over 400 people either facing disciplinary action or afraid they would do so if they declined to affirm beliefs in gender identity. Even if she believes that this can no longer happen due to gender critical views now being a protected belief, surely she must remember that gender critical feminists spent years showing why these arguments are unsound and enable ideological capture and authoritarianism. Those arguments did not suddenly become sound because they are now being deployed against somebody whose politics she opposes. They remain unsound because they continue to justify ideological conformity enforced through institutional power. This is what Lister understands. As he said, “That is what we should be most fearful about.”

The important issue to those who defend individual liberty is not whether Aberdeen is legally entitled to investigate Herbert or whether the police have the legal power to arrest him. It is whether they are ethically justified in doing so and whether such investigations into speech with a view to punishment are compatible with the kind of society we want to live in. From a liberal perspective, the answer to this question is ‘No.” Penalties for speech in employment should be based on a very high threshold related to an employee's ability to perform their role safely and professionally, not on organised campaigns of public outrage. Likewise, the police must be required to demonstrate that speech is directly causal of material harm to be justified in arresting anyone for it.

It is in all of our interests to resist a culture in which any moral orthodoxy can gain cultural prestige and influence and collectively pressure employers, universities, institutions, the police and the state to punish expression they find appalling. Even those who don’t support freedom of belief and speech for its own sake should recognise that the tables can turn and the beliefs deemed abhorrent become their own. Gender critical feminists, of all people, should know this better than anyone.

(Note: This piece was written before Heather Herbert was arrested and charged. I have left the argument substantially unchanged because its primary focus is the distinction between the legal framework governing free speech and the ethical principle of …

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Let's Talk Neurosense: the psychology of neurodiversity

S2 E5 Power, knowledge and language in neurodiversity with Helen Pluckrose

Have you noticed that the way some people talk about neurodiversity has changed? Have you heard that diagnostic language is violent, that neurodivergent people are oppressed by neuronormative standards and that it’s ableist to suggest that it’s preferable to be non-disabled, if that’s an option? Have you noticed strange similarities in the way that disa…

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25 days ago · 16 likes · 2 comments · Dani Drinkwater

Their description of the conversation:

”Have you noticed that the way some people talk about neurodiversity has changed? Have you heard that diagnostic language is violent, that neurodivergent people are oppressed by neuronormative standards and that it’s ableist to suggest that it’s preferable to be non-disabled, if that’s an option? Have you noticed strange similarities in the way that disability, race and gender are discussed, and wondered why that might be?

Our guest this week is Helen Pluckrose, a social and cultural commentator and co-author of the bestselling book, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity - and Why This Harms Everybody and she’s here to explain what’s going on from her perspective.

In this fascinating interview Helen explains how the dogma of critical social justice theory has spread through disability studies and affects the way that many think about and research neurodiversity. She traces the evolution of these ideas from postmodernism to activist academic circles today - and from there into online conversations. We discuss the kernels of truth which underpin these narratives, and why she thinks that activist scholarship has the potential to do harm. We bring it back to neurodiversity and what this means in real life.

Helen has many bold and interesting ideas and we can’t wait to hear what you make of them.”

(Audio version here)

A quick note: this piece was originally written as an overview of the current discourse around "wokeness" for another publication. As a result, it's more formal and literature-review-like than what I usually publish here, but I thought readers here might find it useful nonetheless.

There is a growing consensus that the peak of what became known as “wokeness” has passed. At its height in 2020, following the Black Lives Matter protests, support for Critical Social Justice beliefs surged across mainstream media, social media, corporations, universities, charities and public institutions. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives proliferated, ‘anti-racist’ reading lists became ubiquitous, and organisations rushed to signal their commitment. Six years later, media attention has diminished, major corporations have rolled back DEI commitments, resistance to the movement has generated its own institutions, networks and intellectual spaces and the public mood is both fatigued and resentful. Donald Trump has returned to the White House, right-wing populist movements have gained ground internationally, and many commentators now speak confidently of the death of wokeness.

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For those of us who have criticised the movement from principles concerned with truth, free inquiry and individual liberty, however, the situation requires closer analysis and is contested. Three questions produce particular disagreement. First, is ‘woke’ actually dead? Second, if it is in decline, what caused that decline? Third, given the rise of increasingly illiberal tendencies on the political right, should liberals continue to criticise it at all?

Much of this disagreement arises because people are not talking about the same thing when they talk about “wokeness.” Some mean a political movement, others a set of institutional practices, a cultural moment, or a broader tendency towards ideological thinking. People can therefore observe the same phenomenon yet reach very different conclusions about its condition, causes and significance.

The term “woke” is most commonly used to describe the Critical Social Justice (CSJ) movement. Its beliefs are rooted in critical theories such as postcolonial theory, queer theory and critical race theory, which themselves draw upon postmodern concepts of knowledge, power and language. According to this framework, knowledge is socially constructed in the service of identity-based power rather than objectively discovered. Dominant groups, particularly white, Western, heterosexual, ‘cisgender’ and able-bodied men, determine which forms of knowledge are regarded as legitimate. These dominant discourses shape how society understands the world and thereby create and perpetuate systems of oppression such as racism, patriarchy and transphobia.

Because people are socialised into these discourses, they are held to be largely unaware of their own participation in oppressive systems. Those who have adopted CSJ theories, especially members of marginalised groups, are regarded as uniquely able to perceive and expose these invisible structures (hence, ‘woke.’) Disagreement, criticism or questions about any of this are understood as evidence of ignorance or resistance to recognising one’s own complicity and desire to preserve one’s own privilege. Allowing dissenting views to be believed or spoken is to enable the discourses to continue to construct the oppressive systems and is akin to violence against marginalised groups. Dissenting beliefs must be corrected with education in CSJ theories and unconscious bias training, all must admit their complicity in oppressive systems, dissenting speech must be silenced or punished, and dissenters must be removed from positions of authority and visibility.

It is this specific manifestation of wokeness that appears to be in decline. What is less clear is whether the epistemological and ethical assumptions that underpinned it have declined as well. The prioritisation of ideological narratives over evidence, the tendency to divide society into competing identity groups, the attraction of conspiracy-like explanations of social problems, and the desire to enforce ideological conformity have by no means disappeared. In fact, they appear to have migrated into new political contexts. Those committed to truth as correspondence with reality, together with freedom of belief, freedom of speech and viewpoint diversity, therefore have work still to do. Liberals on the left must continue to oppose illiberalism on the left, while liberal conservatives must do the same on the right.

The bigger issue is not whether one particular ideological movement has won or lost, but whether liberal societies remain capable of defending the values of truth-seeking, free inquiry and individual liberty against recurring forms of authoritarianism and resistance to reality, however they may manifest.

Is Woke Dead?

When discussing the demise of ‘woke,’ the fundamental question is, “Is wokeness actually dying?” Sociologists and other empirical researchers have provided evidence of wokeness having been in decline since 2021. Large corporations have backed out of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, DEI roles have been cut, support for the Black Lives Matter movement has fallen, and language associated with the movement has become markedly less common across corporate communications, mainstream media and social media. These broad trends, however, sit alongside continued reports from within institutions, particularly those concerned with knowledge production, of DEI policies and ideological enforcement remaining firmly in place. In the past month alone, I have advised people working in universities, schools, libraries, charities, social work and clinical psychology. Meanwhile, surveys of students and academics suggest that ideologically biased and censorious attitudes within institutions of knowledge production have, if anything, continued to increase.

Cultural critics have been widely diverse in their analyses of the demise of woke. Some, like Piers Morgan, have argued that wokeness is over, defeated by a resurgence of common sense resistance and demonstrated by the election of Donald Trump. For Nellie Bowles, wokeness has not died and the reason its activism is less prominent now is because it has won and been institutionalised. To Musa al-Gharbi, we have never been woke and, far from being a progressive movement, the phenomenon was yet another iteration of neoliberal elitism benefitting the knowledge production classes. James Marriot’s argument is that it was only ever a fad which few people were ever genuinely committed to and we should now worry about what the next fad will be. Daniël Eloff and Tyler Cowen are concerned that wokeness merely laid the groundwork for radical left-wing economic (rather than identitarian) activism. Eloff is also concerned about mirroring illiberal views arising on the right, as is Michelle Goldburg. The phenomenon of a rising ‘woke right’ informed and emboldened by the woke left and using much of the same postmodern/post-truth framework has been argued to negate any complacency about the death of woke by critics including Neil Shenvi, James Lindsay, Andrew Doyle, Konstantin Kisin, and Jonathan Rauch.

To understand how such disparate and conflicting views could all be held by people looking at the same phenomenon, we need to consider the variety of lenses through which ‘wokeness’ can be perceived. Morgan’s confidence that it has been defeated relies upon looking at it as a cultural/electoral phenomenon and the role this arguably played in the shift to the political right. Bowles is looking at it as an institutional phenomenon when she argues that woke ideas have been normalised. Al-Gharbi is thinking in terms of an ongoing class phenomenon in which the economically privileged continue to exploit the working class. Marriot, Eloff, Cowen and Goldburg are considering it as a cultural phenomenon rooted in ideas, discourses, tribes and factions and the potential for escalation and backlash. Those who consider ‘wokeness’ as a phenomenon manifesting on both left and right are considering it primarily as an epistemic and ethical phenomenon and, in this reading, there is little light to be seen between the postmodern left and the post-truth right.

Some of the confusion in broader public discourse also stems from treating “woke” as synonymous with “left-wing” or “progressive.” If that is what we mean, then asking whether wokeness is dying becomes almost meaningless. A healthy democracy depends upon the productive push and pull between principled left-wing and right-wing economic and social policy and between the drive to conserve (conservatism) and the drive to progress (progressivism). The important issue, I would argue, is whether these ‘sides’ are, in fact, principled and healthy.

I would argue that “woke” is best understood not as a synonym for progressivism but as an epistemological and ethical framework. It favours ideological narratives over objective truth, interprets society primarily through systems of identity-based oppression, divides people into moral categories of oppressors and oppressed, seeks to tie everybody into its own concept of a common good via censorship, shaming and cancellation and is ultimately fundamentally opposed to the Enlightenment evidence and reason and individual liberty ethos of the West.

Wokeness, in the form of the Critical Social Justice movement is, indeed, past its peak. It continues to influence many institutions, but it has lost much of its prestige and now faces sustained opposition. The epistemological and ethical assumptions that underpinned it, however, have shown no comparable decline. We have not seen a renewed confidence in objective knowledge reached through evidence and reason, a reduction in identity-based grievance or conspiratorial thinking, or a stronger commitment to pluralism, viewpoint diversity and individual liberty. Many factions across the political spectrum continue to see themselves as uniquely able to perceive hidden systems of power and to regard it as their duty to awaken everyone else to them.

Critical Social Justice is one manifestation of a much older and broader human tendency to privilege ideological narratives over evidence, and while that manifestation has weakened, the tendency itself remains vigorous. If wokeness is understood as a broader tendency to privilege conspiratorial, identity-based ideological narratives over evidence and liberal principles, its obituary has been written far too soon.

.

If we accept that left-wing wokeness (CSJ) is in demise, who is responsible for that and how did it happen?

If Critical Social Justice is only one manifestation of a broader tendency, the next question becomes why and how this particular manifestation lost its dominance.

Arguments about who killed wokeness are typically highly dependent on the position of the accuser/celebrator and whether or not they believe its demise to be a good thing. For those who believe it to be a positive development, the argument is typically that the woke killed wokeness. They were so unreasonable and authoritarian that the normal, reasonable and principled people (generally their own tribe) said “enough” and reacted against it. The backlash was straightforwardly a reaction to excess.

For those who regard the decline of wokeness as regrettable or believe it has enabled the rise of an illiberal right, the woke themselves are often held to bear little responsibility for their own unpopularity. Instead, culpability is placed elsewhere. The culprits might be fascistic discourses on the right demonizing a fundamentally well-intentioned movement for social justice. It could be the conservative anti-woke (MAGA or otherwise), appealing to the uninformed masses by making evidenced-based arguments about illiberal things they were doing when they should have been more worried about Trump. They might be non-woke economic leftists and socialists objecting to the woke focus on identity politics dividing the working class rather than maintaining solidarity against the right. They might be apathetic white boomers who never fully embraced racial equality, sexual equality or acceptance of homosexuality, and for whom only a relatively small increase in activist demands was enough to provoke renewed resistance. A particularly common refrain is that it was the fault of defenders of free speech who thereby enabled ‘anti-woke’ critique to thrive and emboldened an illiberal right.

The downfall of wokeness was indeed brought about, in significant part, by the excesses of the Critical Social Justice movement itself. At the same time, opposition to wokeness emerged from across the political spectrum. These two facts are not contradictory. Rather, they are connected. The irrationalism, authoritarianism, and purity politics of the movement alienated almost everyone who did not already subscribe to it.

“Almost everyone” necessarily included a remarkably diverse coalition: the extreme right, traditional conservatives, the MAGA right, socialists and economic leftists, weary centrists, and liberals committed to individual liberty, viewpoint diversity, and freedom of speech. This fact is significant because it reminds us that the category “anti-woke” is not a coherent political movement. It is simply a term for people opposed to one thing. As with any coalition defined primarily by what it opposes, its members differ profoundly in what they endorse and want to put in its place.

The extreme right—those who openly embrace racism, sexism, homophobia, Christian nationalism and other forms of authoritarian identitarianism—naturally oppose left-wing wokeness while rejecting the foundations of secular liberal democracy as well. Their authoritarianism, conspiratorial thinking and obsession with oppressive systems of power closely mirror those of the woke left, which is why they are often described as the “woke right.” They cannot be said in any meaningful way to be an antidote to wokeness. Even among less extreme anti-woke factions on the right, alternatives can seem to offer more of the same. Some figures on the MAGA right, such as Chris Rufo, have openly advocated using critical theory to gain institutional power and narrative control. Others have simply embraced forms of post-truth populism that elevate politically useful narratives above objective truth and consistent principle. Meanwhile, the revolutionary socialist left often rejects wokeness as a neoliberal distraction from class politics, yet its preferred alternative is frequently no less hostile to liberal values. These movements differ from one another in significant ways and are often bitter enemies. What they have in common is not a shared vision of society but a common hostility to liberalism. They are competing authoritarianisms.

This is why the most important fault line is not between woke and anti-woke. It is between liberalism and authoritarianism.

The strongest and potentially most durable component of the anti-woke coalition is therefore the liberal one. It includes people on the left, right, and centre, as well as many who feel politically homeless. They may disagree profoundly about economics, culture, religion, or the role of government, but they share a commitment to freedom of expression, viewpoint diversity, due process, equal treatment under the law, individual rights, and the pursuit of truth through open inquiry. Authoritarian movements cannot form stable alliances because each seeks to impose its own vision of truth and power. Liberalism, by contrast, provides a framework within which people with fundamentally different visions of the good life can coexist, compete, and cooperate without coercion.

The decline of wokeness remains incomplete and its demise is by no means assured. The movement lost legitimacy primarily because of its own excesses, yet excesses on the illiberal right could generate a counter-backlash that restores some of its appeal. More importantly, the surge of conspiratorial thinking, tribalism and post-truth politics on the right demonstrates that the decline of one manifestation of these tendencies does not resolve the larger problem.

The appropriate response is therefore neither a reflexive defence of wokeness nor an uncritical embrace of the anti-woke. It is a consistent commitment to the empirical, rational and liberal underpinnings of Western modernity wherever truth is devalued and individual liberty is denied.

Should we stop kicking wokeness while it is down?

The final question is, if the Critical Social Justice movement is dead, dying or has at least been neutralised, shouldn’t we now focus exclusively on the illiberalism emerging on the right? This is a question I am frequently asked by liberals on the left who believe my critiques of the woke left were both valid and necessary but worry that continuing to focus on it now that it is in decline diverts attention from the populist and woke right. Some also fear that continued criticism of wokeness risks legitimising or providing ammunition for right-wing illiberalism.

This concern deserves to be taken seriously and relates to the concept of “both-sidesism.” I understand the criticism. “Both-sidesism” describes the tendency to maintain an appearance of balance by criticising both sides of a conflict even when one side presents a substantially greater threat. At best, this represents a failure to triage effectively. At worst, it creates a false equivalence that normalises genuinely dangerous illiberalism by treating it as morally comparable to less serious or less immediate concerns.

Liberals are particularly vulnerable to being accused of both-sidesism because our primary concern is consistent opposition to authoritarianism. We are liable to being condemned by illiberal factions on the right for not supporting authoritarian approaches to eradicating wokeness, while illiberal factions on the left accuse us of enabling the rise of the right by not giving the left’s authoritarianism a free pass.

I would like to defend a version of what is often dismissed as “both-sidesism” by reframing it. I agree that adopting a simple “you’re just as bad as each other” position is rarely helpful. In a political environment defined by two broad camps, however, there is a need for people within each camp to criticise both sides. It is not enough merely to criticise the illiberalism that makes the other side bad. We must also confront the illiberalism that prevents our own side from being good. I have always approached political criticism in this spirit. As someone on the left, I am therefore naturally more inclined to focus on those illiberal tendencies within the left that prevent it from fulfilling its traditional purpose and from inspiring the confidence it needs to earn public support.

The importance of internal critique in making one’s own side as principled, persuasive and worthy of support as possible is frequently underappreciated by political partisans. This has certainly been the case with recent left-wing critiques of liberal anti-woke voices. Jan-Werner Muller made the argument that the left should not trust the liberal anti-woke because their drive to find fault with both sides creates a false equivalence which enabled the rise of Trump. Similarly, Jason Stanley blamed the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) for fostering a moral panic about wokeness on university campuses and enabling Trump’s crackdown on academic freedom. Meanwhile, David Klion insisted that the signatories of the Harper’s Letter in defence of free speech should all “examine their role in helping to build a broad elite consensus that has functioned mainly to legitimize Trump’s actions.” [xxix]

All of these arguments depend upon the assumption that, had liberals on the left refrained from criticising illiberalism on the left, support for illiberal anti-woke movements would not have emerged. This is both implausible and psychologically naive. It effectively removes agency from the woke themselves and assumes that the public would simply not have noticed the excesses that generated the backlash. Does denial of a problem within a group ever work to convince anyone outside it? Are those on the left currently convinced by those on the right shutting down criticism of MAGA with accusations that perceiving any is Trump Derangement Syndrome and everything is just fine or does this make the problem seem more intractable? Has anybody concerned by Islamic extremism ever been convinced by being told they are mistaken and Islam is actually a religion of peace or does this just convince them that those who could address the problem are not going to and solutions will need to be external and radical? In each case, refusing to acknowledge genuine problems within one’s own political or ideological community does not reassure sceptics. It persuades them that reform from within is impossible.

Would it really have been better if criticism of left-wing illiberalism had been left entirely to the illiberal right? Would that criticism have been more accurate, more principled, or less likely to produce a reactionary backlash? Is it not more plausible that, had more liberals on the left been willing to challenge authoritarian tendencies within their own institutions and movements, they might have helped marginalise them before they became politically explosive? Far from causing the anti-woke backlash, liberal criticism may have represented the best chance of preventing it.

This, I would argue, remains the best course of action for those on the left. British liberals on the left should continue criticising illiberalism on the left and trying to marginalise it in left-wing political discourse. This is much more likely to increase public confidence in the left than simply pointing out the illiberalism within parties like Reform and Restore while denying that shutting down criticism of immigration policies and silencing gender critical feminists on the grounds of racism, Islamophobia and transphobia contributed to their rise.

Likewise, American liberals on the left would do well not to spend the period before the next election exclusively highlighting illiberalism on the right but also engage in the internal critique that can decentre it from their own political discourse and rebuild a genuinely liberal left. That is what has the potential to create a party that Americans committed to truth and liberty can support not merely as the lesser of two evils, but as a positive good.

The failure of enough liberals on the left to confront authoritarian tendencies within the woke movement—instead minimising or excusing them in the name of solidarity against the right—backfired spectacularly. That experience should serve as a warning to liberals on the right not to make the same mistake. Too many already respond to evidence of right-wing illiberalism—threats to constitutional freedoms and democratic processes, censorship, public shaming, demands for dismissals and an enthusiasm for cancellation—by deflecting to the authoritarianism of the left and its continued influence within institutions as a reason not to address problems on their own side. They would do better to confront those tendencies now than allow them to grow unchecked, further undermine truth and freedom, and ultimately provoke another powerful backlash that could restore some future variation of wokeness.

The priority for liberals on both the left and the right should not be simply to react to the illiberalism of the other side. That is certainly important, but we cannot build a more truth-centred, liberal society merely by pointing out what makes our opponents bad. We must also confront what prevents our own side from being as principled, persuasive and worthy of support as it could be. A healthy society is one in which both sides strive not only to expose the failings of their opponents but to make themselves more liberal, more trustworthy and more deserving of public confidence.

The answers to all three questions are more complicated than much of the current discourse allows.

Critical Social Justice is clearly in decline, but the epistemological and ethical habits that sustained it are not. Nor was its decline simply a story of anti-woke victory. The coalition that opposed it contains liberals and authoritarians alike, making the most important political divide not between woke and anti-woke, but between liberalism and authoritarianism.

The lesson is therefore larger than the rise and fall of any single movement. Liberal societies cannot rely on one authoritarianism to defeat another. They depend instead upon people across the political spectrum being willing to defend truth, free inquiry and individual liberty consistently, including by confronting illiberalism within their own political tribes.

The long-term goal cannot be simply to defeat one authoritarian ideology or movement after another, but to preserve the epistemic commitments and liberal conditions that allow peaceful disagreement, self-correction and truth-seeking, and in which authoritarianism repeatedly fails because liberal principles repeatedly prevail.

The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has over 6500 subscribers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

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A quick note: this piece was originally written as an overview of the current discourse around “wokeness” for another publication. As a result, it’s more formal and literature-review-like than what I usually publish here, but I thought readers here might find it useful nonetheless.

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(Audio version here)

The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has over 6500 subscribers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.8% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2026 is to increase that to 7%. This would enable me to write full-time for my own substack! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

I have a longstanding tradition with my American followers on Twitter. For the last fifteen years, every Fourth of July, I have posted some variation of the above meme. I am then immediately deluged with memes of eagles freedoming superciliously, tea being thrown into harbours, and men in star-spangled underpants behaving ill-advisedly in hurricanes.

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Every year, I feign disgust at Independence Day, when Americans celebrate having thrown off British rule and established themselves as an independent state. Every year, Americans feign continued resistance by gleefully and inventively showering me with memes celebrating that victory. I thoroughly enjoy it.

I am a proudly patriotic Briton who celebrates the Fourth of July. Why?

All too often, people criticise liberalism as weak and ineffective. They imagine it to be defined by endless discussion: talking about ideas rather than acting decisively. This is a profound misunderstanding. Liberalism is defined by the pursuit of freedom—individual liberty, freedom from arbitrary state interference, free speech, free enterprise, government by the consent of the governed, and the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

These principles were not established through polite debate. Liberalism was forged in centuries of struggle against illegitimate authority: battles to limit the power of rulers, secure representation in government, and establish the freedom of individuals to choose their own paths without coercion. If liberalism can now seem characterised by arguments over how best to preserve and extend these freedoms, it is because those earlier struggles were, to a remarkable extent, successful. Liberal democracy became established as the framework within which such debates could take place.

That was not always so. Those freedoms had to be fought for, and nowhere was that struggle more clearly articulated or more decisively realised than in the revolution that founded the United States of America.

One particularly valuable overview of liberalism for its sheer intuitive graspability is Adam Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. In it, Gopnik includes a feature of liberalism as a preference for reform over revolution. Unlike theocratic or communist regimes, liberalism does not seek to overthrow societal systems and impose new regimes on citizens by fiat. It seeks to effect societal change by the will of the people as established through democratic processes.

This preference does not foreclose the possibility of revolution, however. In order for the will of the people to be expressed, a liberal order in which they can do that has to have been established. To paraphrase Gopnik, revolution is entirely compatible with liberalism when:

1. Its goal is liberal (the expansion of freedom);

2. Its aims are specific rather than simply to destroy the existing order;

3. Those aims could, in principle, be achieved through democratic processes; and

4. Those democratic processes are unavailable.

The American War of Independence exemplifies this.

1. It sought freedom from external colonial rule.

2. It sought to establish an independent liberal order based on self-government.

3. Those goals could almost certainly have been achieved democratically had the colonies possessed democratic institutions through which to pursue them.

4. They did not.

This was a thoroughly liberal revolution.

Does the establishment of liberal principles as the foundation of a society mean that it will immediately become perfectly liberal and remain so forever? Clearly not. The principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were drawn directly from the philosophy of Locke, Paine and other Enlightenment thinkers, much of it developed in Britain. Britain, meanwhile, continued to colonise so many other countries that there is now an Independence Day celebrated somewhere in the former British Empire roughly every six days. America, despite establishing itself on the principle that it is self-evident that all people are created equal and endowed with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, took considerable time to recognise that black Americans are people to whom this applies.

There are many, particularly on the identitarian left, who point to this reality and conclude that liberalism is itself oppressive. This is mistaken. The coexistence of liberal principles and illiberal practices is a reality that our deeply imperfect species will likely always have to contend with. The crucial point is that liberal principles provide the means by which those practices can be recognised, criticised and reformed. Slavery, colonialism, feudal class structures, patriarchy and the persecution of religious and sexual minorities were not inventions of liberalism. They always existed. Liberalism provided the moral and political framework by which they could be identified as illiberal and increasingly recognised as intolerable.

Those of us who now live in liberal democracies are the heirs to, and beneficiaries of, this philosophical tradition and system of government. We are the current custodians of liberalism, and it is our responsibility to understand, value and uphold the principles that have done so much to advance human freedom, human rights and knowledge. We must remain vigilant against state overreach and against the rise of illiberal ideologies that seek to undermine our shared philosophical inheritance, and we must be prepared to oppose them consistently and decisively, especially when those illiberal currents emerge among our own tribes.

Celebrating Independence Day, for me, is a celebration of those enduring liberal principles and of the continuing commitment to defend them. As a patriotic Brit currently visiting America, I am delighted to be able to go out and celebrate it with you today.

Happy Independence Day. Long may the experiment in liberty continue.

I have a longstanding tradition with my American followers on Twitter. For the last fifteen years, every Fourth of July, I have posted some variation of the above meme. I am then immediately deluged with memes of eagles freedoming superciliously, tea being thrown into harbours, and men in star-spangled underpants behaving ill-advisedly in hurricanes.

Eve…

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Here is Peter’s description:


”Helen Pluckrose joins me to discuss how liberalism was lost and why free speech, individual liberty and viewpoint diversity need to be defended from both the authoritarian left and the authoritarian right.

Helen explains why liberalism does not mean “left wing”, why it is better understood as the opposite of authoritarianism, and how critical social justice, identity politics and language policing have changed the way people think, speak and behave. We discuss the rise of woke ideology, DEI, equality vs equity, trans rights, queer theory, free speech, institutional capture and why suppressing ideas usually makes them more powerful.

We also get into whether Britain needs a liberal revolution, how the anti-woke movement can become authoritarian itself, and why the future may depend on liberals on the left and right defending freedom within their own tribes.”

(Audio Version here)

In comments on my last piece, a few people pointed out that I had not addressed the repeated (true) claim made by Americans that more Europeans die from heat exhaustion than Americans do by firearm. I shall now do so and I shall attempt to steelman rationales for this comparison.

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I should note that my original piece acknowledged two debates going on around air conditioning. One concerns public infrastructure and policy: care homes, hospitals, schools and planning regulation, and the other concerns private individuals using their individual liberty to make individual decisions about their own health and safety based largely on cultural attitudes and personal economics. Criticisms of governmental policy making it difficult or expensive to own AC and failing to provide it to vulnerable people at high risk of heat exhaustion are warranted and generally conducted seriously and thoughtfully. People who are concerned with that debate are not generally trying to make arguments comparing heat deaths to gun deaths. There is no comparable issue of the US government making it difficult for people not to own guns thereby significantly increasing their risk of being shot. Americans who make the comparison between heat deaths and gun deaths overwhelmingly defend the right to bear arms on the grounds of individual liberty and are annoyed by Europeans who have been critical of this. This, then, is a debate on the level of individual liberty and transatlantic resentment and I shall address them both

The main reason I did not address this statement is because it is nonsense. Arguments about heat deaths and gun deaths involve different material circumstances, principles and ethical rationales. To say, “More people die of heat in Europe than by guns in America. Therefore, if you care about gun deaths in America, you must also care about the state of air conditioning in Europe” makes as much sense as saying “More people die in car accidents in America than of tuberculosis in Europe. Therefore, if you care about eradicating TB in Europe, you must also care about the state of US road safety.” None. These are not related. It could be useful to look at why more people die of TB in Europe than America or of car accidents in America than Europe with a view to pinpointing the problem but comparing them to each other is deflective whataboutism that helps nothing and no-one. It is actually perfectly reasonable to care about any of these issues specifically and on their own terms without justifying it with reference to anything else.

The most obvious explanation for why more Americans die by firearm than Europeans is because more Americans have firearms than Europeans. Likewise, the reason more Europeans die of heat than Americans is almost certainly because fewer of them have air conditioning than Americans.

It is possible that someone with a radically statist view who cares nothing for individual liberty could see them as the same kind of problem. Let’s say somebody held the view that all untimely deaths are bad and that the state has a responsibility to prevent anything that causes large numbers of them. This person could then coherently argue that the US has a responsibility to ban guns and Europe has a responsibility to compel people to have air conditioning using the same ethical rationale.

The thing is…..Americans making this argument do not seem to have this view. On the contrary, they seem overwhelmingly to be in support of the right to own guns even while being utterly contemptuous of the right not to own air-conditioning. This could be hypocrisy and a lack of consistent principle and when accompanied by arguments that Europe has an absolute moral imperative to adopt ubiquitous AC immediately to prevent any more heat deaths, it’s hard to see it as anything else.

However, this position becomes more coherent and consistent if we reverse it and understand it not as saying, “You must impose AC on your citizens to save lives but our governments must not impose gun control on us for the same reason” but as “If you accept that your citizens must have the liberty not to install air conditioning even though people die as a result, you should accept that our citizens must have the liberty to bear arms even though people die as a result.”

Does this argument work?

Only so far. We are still comparing different ethical questions in relation to individual liberty. Liberalism, has at its centre, the stance “Let people believe, speak, live as they see fit provided it harms no-one else nor denies them the same freedoms.” The decision not to install air-conditioning does not result in harm to anyone else or deny them any freedoms. (An exception could be made in relation to people who have the guardianship of somebody who is vulnerable to heat exhaustion). The decision to own guns does account for a significant numbers of deaths of other people whose freedom to remain alive is then denied. (Exceptions can be made here in cases of self-defence).

Liberal arguments apply to both, however, and foreground individual liberty in each case. The freedom rights that are involved are respectively the liberty to make suboptimal lifestyle choices that can be hazardous to one’s own health but harm nobody else vs the liberty to do something which is statistically dangerous to others but which, with good intentions and conscientiousness, need not be.

The freedom not to have air conditioning belongs in a category with other lifestyle choices that can impact health negatively. It belongs on a shelf with smoking, drinking heavily, being obese or leading a sedentary lifestyle. People can legitimately make decisions about their own health which weigh up their enjoyment of these things against their longevity and wellbeing. They may decide to take some risks with them in their youths when their bodies are more forgiving and then be more health-conscious as they get older. Or they may say, as my father did, “I would rather have a shorter life with Whisky and cigars in it than a longer one without.” Either way, it is their decision and the principles of individual liberty defend their autonomy to make that decision. This is relatively simple.

The freedom to own guns belongs in a category with other liberties whose exercise is closely intertwined with wider systems capable of producing significant harm or coercion, even though conscientious individuals may exercise those liberties without harming anyone. It belongs on a shelf with recreational drugs, sex work and ‘modesty’ veiling. People can source recreational drugs responsibly (not from violent organised crime gangs) and take them responsibly (e.g., not driving or caring for children under the influence of them) and in ways that do not lead to addiction and the potential for addiction-fuelled crime and violence. They can engage in sex work voluntarily and as a free choice made from options available to them without participating in and enabling a violent, coercive sex industry and sex trafficking. They can choose to veil due to their personal religious convictions while not being compelled to do so by anybody else or endorsing a belief system which compels other women to do so. People can buy guns legally while being justly confident in their own mental stability and anger management and having no criminal intent, ensure that they are trained to use them safely and lock them away responsibly. They can also argue reasonably for the positive good of being able to defend themselves and their families and that they should be allowed to take their own risk of shooting themselves in the heat of an altercation or having their gun taken and used against them.

The examples are deliberately varied because they are supported and opposed by different political tribes. Some conservatives who defend gun ownership on grounds of individual liberty support bans on sex work or restrictions on modesty veiling. Some progressives who defend the latter on the grounds of individual choice oppose the former. The point is not that these issues are morally equivalent but that they raise the same underlying liberal question: when should individual liberty give way to concerns about harm, coercion and aggregate social outcomes?

Liberals who argue for individual liberty in the cases above typically do so with the reasoning that responsible, conscientious individuals should be able to make their own choices when it comes to drug consumption, sex work, modesty veiling or gun ownership because they can and will do so without harming others. They argue that conscientious individuals exercising free choice should not be held responsible for the criminal and coercive choices of others. They object to blanket bans which prioritise aggregate reductions in harm over preserving individual autonomy and responsibility, and argue that a healthy society is one that puts resources into detecting and punishing people who harm and coerce others rather than policing those who do not.

The primary argument against this is statistical and utilitarian. It argues that so much misery, suffering, coercion and death result from any of these practices that the only effective way to minimise this at all is to ban it so that people defying those bans can be identified and intervened upon. (This is contested in various ways specific to each issue). Such bans would, they acknowledge, also impact people who harm and coerce no-one but their individual autonomy should not be valued more highly than the lives, safety and freedom of those who become the victims of violence and coercion through no fault of their own. “You need to see the bigger picture” they will often say to defenders of the Second Amendment. “We are” they typically respond, “It’s that the state should not be enabled to disarm its citizens.”

This issue of thinking statistically in a utilitarian way - the greatest good for the greatest number - vs upholding individual liberty at all costs is a perpetual source of legitimate dispute among liberals (and more widely) and appears in many contexts. This is a particular issue, for example, when it comes to immigration. Can we both acknowledge that some cultures statistically have a high degree of values incompatible with those of liberal democracies and evaluate people from those cultures as individuals rather than enacting blanket bans? The answer to that is probably, “Yes, but it takes a lot more time and money which are important factors when it comes to policy and expenditure of taxpayers’ money.” The ‘purest’ liberal/libertarian stance would be to prioritise individual liberty in all cases, however, and penalise harshly those who abuse that freedom.

I, myself, am glad not to have had to evaluate this when it comes to gun ownership in the UK, due to the lack of any significant movement demanding the right to bear arms. Our rate of death by firearm is low due to the lack of guns in the UK. This pragmatic rationale cannot be straightforwardly transplanted to the United States, however, and people who attempt to do so are not engaging with material reality. There is a significant movement of people who will defend the right to bear arms and there are already more guns than people in America. I have yet to see a good response to an argument frequently made by defenders of the 2nd Amendment, “If we criminalised gun ownership, the only people who own guns will be criminals.” This does not seem like an optimal state of affairs. This right to own guns is therefore significantly more complicated than the right not to own air conditioning but the staunchest defenders of individual liberty will defend both.

A few Americans who addressed this comparison in my comments said that the issue was not really that some of their compatriots thought the right to own guns and the right not to own air conditioning were comparable issues that called upon the same principles and ethical reasoning. It is much more ‘vibes’ based. Many Americans have encountered Europeans who took a smug, condescending attitude towards America’s gun crime problem and used this as a justification to denigrate the nation as a whole and to define its national character as violent, primitive and generally less sophisticated and civilised than Europe. This has naturally caused resentment and, in an era of anti-European sentiment and narratives coming from the Trump administration and influential figures like Elon Musk, a drive to return the favour and characterise Europe as the primitive, uncivilised region with a low valuation on human life has intensified.

This would certainly explain the tone I described as ‘personally aggrieved’ and some arguments which seemed to regard the low uptake of AC in Europe as a personal insult to Americans. If anti-European sentiment is expressed as a resentful and defensive response to perceived anti-American sentiment, it also does not have to be reasonable, relevant or make logical sense. It manifests much more like a personal argument between two individuals, possibly a couple, throwing whatever resentments they have at each other - “You never ask about my day!” “Yeah? Well, you never pick up your socks!”

To be clear, far from all American criticisms of European attitudes to air-conditioning should be understood as this kind of childish ‘tit-for-tat’ behaviour. Concerns that Europe has an unhealthy attitude towards energy consumption or is failing to appreciate the risks of a rising temperature can and have been made reasonably in a way that does not denigrate the entire continent as a ‘primitive shithole.’ So have reasonable concerns about America’s gun control policies. It should also be acknowledged that most criticisms of either come from inhabitants of the countries themselves.

It is important to remember that the internet is not representative of the average person and that we humans have a strong negativity bias: we notice and remember insults directed at us far more readily than compliments. Europeans who speak slightingly of Americans certainly exist. They are arseholes failing to appreciate a nation that represents one of history's greatest liberal democratic experiments and has made extraordinary contributions to science, technology, philosophy and culture. Americans who speak slightingly of Europeans certainly exist too. They are assholes failing to appreciate the continent that gave birth to the Enlightenment and liberal philosophy and continues to make remarkable contributions to both intellectual and cultural life. In reality, both America and Europe are imperfect, occasionally eccentric places populated overwhelmingly by ordinary, friendly people who have far more in common than online arguments would suggest.

Most Americans are not obsessed with European air conditioning, just as most Europeans are not obsessed with American gun crime. The internet amplifies the loudest, most resentful voices and our tendency to notice negative input more than positive can cause them to feel as though they are the opinion of entire nations. They are not. Serious discussions about energy policy, public health and gun ownership are all worth having. They simply become harder when they are reduced to national point-scoring exercises designed to make the other side appear less civilised. If we care about solving problems rather than winning arguments, we should resist the temptation to turn every difference between countries into another front in an endless culture war.

In truth, we're all a bit weird, mostly friendly, and fortunate to belong to societies that have contributed enormously to the development of liberal civilisation. It would be a shame to manufacture another culture-war grievance between them over air conditioning.

The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has over 6500 subscribers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.8% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2026 is to increase that to 7%. This would enable me to write full-time for my own substack! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

In comments on my last piece, a few people pointed out that I had not addressed the repeated (true) claim made by Americans that more Europeans die from heat exhaustion than Americans do by firearm. I shall now do so and I shall attempt to steelman rationales for this comparison.

I should note that my original piece acknow…

Read more

(Audio version here)

The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has over 6500 subscribers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.8% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2026 is to increase that to 7%. This would enable me to write full-time for my own substack! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

“Americans appearing personally aggrieved by Europeans not routinely having air conditioning” discourse is happening on X again. There are certainly grounds for serious discussions about whether the continent (and my own island of Britain) should work to change this norm. Some people are addressing this issue of how Europe became the world champion of heat deaths seriously and thoughtfully. Much popular discourse on social media, however, is neither.

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When I first encountered this, I was confused by it. At first glance, the rhetoric was very similar to that used by people who argued that everybody needed to wear a mask to protect elderly people from Covid. It asserted a collective responsibility to take on a safety mindset to protect the most vulnerable people and was accompanied by accusations of callous indifference to the elderly against anybody who dissented. This kind of scandalised scolding (separate to reasoned arguments about the effectiveness or not of masks for infection control) was very much associated with the progressive left whose political philosophy is commonly in favour of such social responsibility.

However, the language generally indicated that most of these Americans were conservatives or libertarians. When I asked people accusing me (as a European) of being happy to let elderly people die whether they believed the elderly (typically slowest to be receptive to technology which was not a feature of their youth) should be compelled to install air-conditioning, they did not typically go this far. Likewise, when I asked if they felt the same need for a collective health drive about other risky things Europeans are more likely to do to themselves than Americans like smoking and drinking regularly, they appeared to believe people could make their own decisions about those. This is interesting. It seems as though personal decisions about whether to install A/C or not should fall into this category, as people choosing not to install air conditioning for themselves do not prevent anybody else from doing so.

There are really two debates here. One concerns public infrastructure: care homes, hospitals, schools and planning regulation. The other concerns private individuals deciding what to spend their own money on. I think these questions should be separated and answered very differently. This is not typically happening in online discourse which largely features individuals yelling at other individuals across the Atlantic for wanting to kill their grannies or for being technologically primitive or somehow insulting America for not having the same attitude to A/C that is common in the States.

Reasonable arguments can and have been made about state legislation in various countries making it difficult or expensive for people to install air conditioning if they wish to do so. These fall into two main categories - energy consumption and architectural preservation. Only in Switzerland is there a ban on air conditioning without medical need but Spain, Italy, France and Greece have requirements for public spaces to set it no lower than the mid-twenties. Meanwhile, Italy, France and the UK have bans on air-conditioning units being mounted on the facades of historic buildings. Nevertheless, most people can buy air-conditioning units for their own homes if they want to and this does not necessarily require bolting ugly boxes to historically-prized architecture. I have an A/C unit cooling my medium sized sitting room right now and the hose feeds through the window.

Good arguments can also be made that air conditioning should be made available to elderly and disabled people who cannot afford to buy it or simply removing red tape that prevents market forces from making it cheaper. The rationale here is the same as ensuring that the elderly have heating in the winter. It only costs about £10 a day to rent an air conditioning unit. This could routinely be subsidised for those vulnerable to heat exhaustion and would reduce the burden on the NHS responding to emergencies. A particularly strong case can be made for mandating the inclusion of A/C in care homes and hospitals and also in social housing. It would not be illiberal either to expect new builds to have air conditioning as standard in the way they have radiators. People who do not wish to use it need not do so.

Condemnation of air conditioning on the grounds of energy consumption and the potential contribution of this to climate change and associated policy positions are frequently cited as objectionable. However, I’d suggest this is part of a larger argument about energy which should not be a moralistic one at all but a practical assessment of whether it is preferable to conserve energy or generate it via nuclear power, solar panels and wind farms. I have not yet seen a good argument against nuclear energy. recently addressed the energy qualm well,

The practical fixes for deadly heat are straightforward: do what the Americans are doing. Reform the energy ratings so they stop penalising air conditioners. Streamline the permits for built-in cooling. Retrofit every care home and hospital ward. Open publicly accessible cooling centres. And accelerate the build-out of clean, reliable electricity—because a Frenchman relaxing in a spacious air-conditioned villa, drawing on nuclear power, still emits less carbon than a frugal German drawing from a coal-fired grid. Grid management beats self-flagellation.

Nevertheless, I am deeply sceptical that the majority of European individuals who do not install A/C decide against this on grounds of climate anxiety. My own observation is the same as Adrien’s here:

This is also supported, in the UK, by attitudes towards both air conditioning and climate change. Gen Z are more likely to worry about climate change than Boomers but are also most likely to see A/C as an essential while Boomers are the least likely to think it necessary or desirable. This does seem to suggest that the primary issue is one of cultural norms that have not yet changed in favour of A/C rather than environmental concern. (They are changing, though, in the UK with ownership of an A/C unit doubling in the last three years). Boudry acknowledges this cultural factor and Noah Smith also argues for it explicitly, saying,

Even if climate is the official, intellectual reason for Europe refusing live-saving AC, the idea that AC goes against Europe’s traditional culture is probably an important underlying motivator.

Smith is intolerant of this,

Absorption of foreign technology simply makes the difference between a poor society and a rich one — between a technologically advanced society and a backward one. Most countries have their blind spots here, but Europe’s spasmodic rejection of air conditioning is far more costly than most.

We are back to the original ‘harm’ argument and this is where liberal principles come into play when applied to individuals. If it can be demonstrated that some lifestyle choices are unhealthy and can lead to preventable deaths, should pressure be brought upon individuals to do otherwise, by either government or social pressure? Are those who smoke, drink heavily, overeat, lead sedentary lives or decline vaccinations or cancer screenings or to install adequate heating or cooling devices in their homes behaving in ways that justify intervention by the state or by social pressure. I’d argue that the answer to that is ‘no.’

Arguments from liberal principles would be that the state must not make it difficult or impossible for anybody to make the choices which are best for their health, but neither should they force them into complying with them. Nobody should be forced into programmes to quit smoking or drinking or compelled to use a GLP-1 or join the gym, have their prostate or cervix checked or to install technology they don’t want in their own homes. Many liberals who believe the state has some responsibility to provide information (rather than just the negative rights of not interfering with them as some libertarians argue should be their limitation) would argue that this should include educational resources on health issues. I would agree with this. If anybody does not yet know the harms of any of the above, we should improve our educational system. I think we do already do convey adequate health warnings, however.

Liberalism supports removing barriers and then letting people make their own decisions. It also advocates for the ability to argue against bad ideas in the strongest terms that do not include penalising, mobbing or canceling people for dissenting from them. This is how we replace bad ideas with better ones and change culture. People must therefore be able to make strong arguments that society would be better and more healthy if we had a more positive view generally about air conditioning. This is not something anybody I know would find terribly interesting and voluntarily attend a debate on, but people must be able to argue for this. I do not currently see anything preventing them from doing so. The lack of enthusiasm to get into debates about air conditioning appears to be mostly due to a lack of interest.

What is the cultural basis of a disinterest in air conditioning? For many, there is something unappealing in regulating the temperature of one’s home entirely. We tend to like to be able to feel our seasons.

In my own country of England, which I shall now narrow down to, we even enjoy complaining about the cold or the heat. Complaining about the weather is, in fact, a primary form of social bonding for us that is deeply culturally entrenched. When a heat wave hits, we are overjoyed for a few days and have barbecues and walk around in shorts, resembling lobsters. We then begin to complain that it is unbearable and just ‘too much.’ The government puts out heat warnings and recommends against travel unless absolutely essential. We check on our elderly neighbours and complain enjoyably to others to whom we may not otherwise speak, and declare ourselves to be melting. Australia typically points and laughs.

When it snows, we are seldom prepared for this, but a kind of “Blitz Mentality” sets in where we stock up on essentials and accept that the trains won’t run for a few days while the government puts out messages saying this was unexpected (even though it happens most years) and to keep calm and carry on. We check on our elderly neighbours and marvel at the white stuff settling and generally behave as though a zombie apocalypse has occurred, but one that’s, nevertheless, quite fun. Canada watches on, bemused, but is too polite to say anything.

It is common for Americans deploring the European disinterest in A/C to say something like, “We’re sick of seeing you complaining about the heat but doing nothing about it.” They are, however, generally missing the point. While some serious and genuinely anxious conversations do go on about the heat, there is also frequently a sense of solidarity and community which can arise when the weather is either hot enough or cold enough to hinder normal daily functioning and produce a temporary ‘crisis’. This doesn’t happen very often or for very long, but when it does, it provides the opportunity for a collective moan and also a form of community stoicism. The meme “I don’t want to fix it. I want to complain about it” would be applicable here, but it serves a more pro-social function than the desire to be unhappy and resentful in some way. This is a particularly good description from .

Of course, very reasonable arguments can be made that this is silly and does not, in any way, compensate for lost working hours or learning hours and is just generally highly inefficient. It is. We enjoy it, anyway. Of course, we do not enjoy elderly people becoming seriously unwell or dying and we might well try to persuade those whom we love that their time for taking a strange pride and enjoyment in stoicism and “Blitz mentality” is over and to rent Air Con for a week or so. Anyway, Americans can try to convince Brits to dispense with this strange cultural custom and we can agree that it makes absolutely no sense on the level of efficiency. We still might not make it a priority.

The issue of priorities here are also key on a purely practical level. When asked why they won’t install air conditioning, Brits are prone to saying “It costs too much and it’s not worth it for a couple of weeks a year.” This balance might change if heat waves become longer and hotter, but, for the most part, this really is the rationale. This often leads some Americans to declare that we must all be very poor to forego basic technology that would keep us cool as needed.

“There are better ways to spend the money” really is what it comes down to. What is happening in this conversation, (aside from Eddie being bizarrely angry and rude and Simon being almost supernaturally patient), is an entirely different concept of priorities. Eddie cannot imagine not having A/C and thinks that for himself to go without it, he’d have to be very poor. Simon only feels uncomfortably hot enough to think he’d like one for about 10 days a year and he’d rather spend his money on something else. He goes on to explain that if he ever really felt a need to cool himself for those ten days, he would rent a unit for about £80 and this would be more cost effective than having one installed.

My gym membership costs £35 a month and so is a similar regular expenditure. This is worth it to me because I enjoy going to the gym and do so three times a week. If someone who did not feel a great need for the benefit of gym access and would only go about 10 times a year, decided this expense was not warranted, this would be a reasonable cost/benefit analysis. If I said “If you can’t afford £35 a month, your country is a shithole,” I would be entirely misunderstanding the calculation going on here and could be reasonably accused of lacking in theory of mind.

What is most interesting to me and what led me to write this piece is why Eddie is so personally aggrieved about somebody in another country having a different set of personal priorities to him. This is a common tone we encounter online from a small subset of Americans. (Most of you are lovely). It’s not likely that this is purely due to Americans feeling uncomfortable when they visit in the summer. Hotels and public attractions generally do have A/C. It seems probable that people doing this are giving the culturally common European indifference towards air conditioning a much more loaded political or philosophical significance than it really has. It is unlikely that many people who decide against spending money on A/C are doing so because of a deep ethical commitment to reducing carbon emissions (they probably have a car) or a Luddite refusal to adopt new or foreign technology (they probably have an iPhone) or that this is an expression of anti-American sentiment.

It is much more likely that Brits do not yet feel a lack of anything essential if they do not have A/C. This is my observation. They are generally quite happy to wait out short hot spells and may even enjoy experiencing them for that short time. It adds variety and an opportunity to experience something collectively and talk about it. When they have a few thousand to spend on their home, they might well prefer to spend it on a new shower or kitchen appliances, flooring, windows or a summer house. One overview of what young homeowners are looking for in a new home found that they were interested in air conditioning in principle but found it unsexy compared to other purchases that improved the look of the property.

We can and should take the heat death rate seriously, particularly in care homes and hospitals and also address any bureaucracy that prevents people who want air conditioning from having it. These are serious issues of harm and freedom. They are not the same thing as individual Brits simply not seeing air conditioning as a priority in their lives.

I predict that these priorities will change. We are seeing an increasing uptake of air conditioning and, in time, it will likely come to feel as essential to comfort as radiators or hot water. Currently, to many Brits, it simply does not, and hectoring them online is unlikely to make them develop a genuine enthusiasm for it. This is not a deeply held political or philosophical stance. It is a lack of interest. Stop being weird.

Correction: I previously attempted to give the dimensions of my sitting room in square feet and got this totally wrong because I am spatially and geometrically challenged. “Medium-sized” will do. Tut.

“Americans appearing personally aggrieved by Europeans not routinely having air conditioning” discourse is happening on X again. There are certainly grounds for serious discussions about whether the continent (and my own island of Britain) should work to change this norm. Some people are addressing this issue of how Eur…

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I am frequently told that the word ‘liberal’ has become so confused and contested, and so deeply associated with the (often illiberal) left in the United States, that attempts to defend it as a distinct philosophical tradition are no longer worthwhile. While I generally agree that it is futile to try to reclaim words to their ‘proper’ meaning, liberalism is not simply a word that can be replaced with another word. It is the term for the cluster of concepts that form the philosophical foundations of modern Western liberal democracies. To explain why I believe it remains essential to preserve the concept of liberalism, it is worth taking a historical and geographical look at how liberalism came to be associated with different political positions in different countries and what would be lost if we abandoned the concept altogether.

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As a general rule, I believe it is futile to try to hold onto words when their meanings have changed in common usage. Language evolves naturally in response to a variety of pressures to serve the purposes of communicating changing ideas and concepts. I have always argued that if this is reflective of a worrying cultural shift, it is better to engage with the ideas and concepts than to try to remedy the problem by insisting on universal recognition of what the word ‘really means.’ At best, the conversation shifts to a discussion of semantics which does not address the core issue. At worst, one ends up looking like an angry, old man yelling “‘Gay’ means ‘happy’, I tell you!”

When it comes to liberalism, however, we are not talking about a word which could potentially be replaced by another word, but about the cluster of concepts underlying the foundation of modern Western liberal democracies. These include individual liberty, universalism, freedom of conscience, free speech, free trade, freedom of inquiry, meritocracy, equality before the law, support for viewpoint diversity as an engine of knowledge production and conflict resolution, a willingness to live and let live provided this does no material harm to others, firm limitations on state power, a preference for reform over revolution and a democratic system which governs by the consent of the governed.

Once we stop using the word ‘liberalism’ to describe this philosophical tradition, we find ourselves having to list all those concepts individually every time. This makes for rather laborious conversation. In practice, it also risks separating these concepts from each other and losing a sense of the cohesive philosophy which binds them together and defines the modern west.

The fact that ‘liberalism’ is used to define such different positions on the left/right political spectrum in different countries is illustrative of the history of this philosophy. When I speak about liberalism in other countries, the part where I clarify what I am not talking about varies widely. In America and parts of Europe, I have to stress that I am not referring to the left. In Australia and other parts of Europe, I must clarify that I do not mean the right. Liberalism does not belong to either the left or the right but uses of its name for such positions are revealing of what its principles were competing against historically in a particular country.

In countries where the main threats to liberty have been monarchy, feudal systems, nationalism, religious conservatism or traditional social hierarchies, liberals have been the people pushing for reform, civil liberties, secularism and democratic rights. Consequently, liberalism became associated with the left. We see this history in France, Spain and Portugal. It is also very much the case now outside the Western world in religiously conservative countries where people push for religious tolerance, women’s rights and the rights of same sex attracted people. The ‘woman, life, freedom’ protests in Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of the Morality Police is very much a liberal protest against state authoritarianism.

In countries where strong socialist or Marxist movements emerged, liberals became the defenders of markets, private property, free trade and constitutional constraints on state power. Consequently, liberalism became associated with the right. We see this in Eastern Europe after communism, in Germany, the Low Countries and much of Latin America. Interestingly, we also see this in Australia where the Liberal Party is the conservative party. This is because Australia was established as a British colony after the major great liberal battles had been won. It never had to oppose a powerful feudal order, monarchy or church. Australia did have to deal with powerful rising Labour Movements and consequently the free trade, free enterprise and minimal government interference elements of liberalism emerged most strongly and associated liberalism with the right.

Both the United States and the United Kingdom are interesting cases within this general pattern. The US - the first country to be explicitly founded on liberal principles following its (liberal) revolution against authoritarian state power from England - has retained a strongly libertarian ethos and deep suspicion of state overreach. America has also never had a significant Marxist electoral force. Both its left-wing and its right-wing currents have supported free trade and free enterprise. It has also retained a significantly stronger cultural influence of Christianity than all the other English-speaking countries and much of the West. Consequently, its political conflict has largely been between religious conservatives and progressives within a capitalist framework. As a result, “liberal” came to be associated with the progressive side of politics, particularly after the New Deal and Civil Rights eras.

The UK, as the home of John Locke who developed the philosophical foundations of liberal government, Adam Smith who articulated economic liberalism, Thomas Paine who argued for democratic liberalism and John Stuart Mill who synthesised liberty, free speech, individuality and representative government, has a history in which liberalism developed as a distinct philosophical tradition separate from left and right-wing politics. Further, it developed into a significant political force of its own creating a three-way political distinction: Labour (socialism and economic redistribution), Conservatives (tradition and social order) and Liberals (individual liberty, constitutionalism and equal rights). Because liberalism existed as its own political tradition, the meaning remained somewhat clearer than it did elsewhere. Unfortunately, because the UK is currently so deeply tuned into US political and cultural debates, we are increasingly hearing ‘liberal’ used to describe the (often illiberal) left.

What these histories demonstrate is that although the word ‘liberalism’ has come to be used to refer to different positions on the political spectrum in different countries, its underlying function has remained remarkably consistent. Whether liberals were opposing monarchies, feudal system, theocratic authoritarianism, nationalist movements, military dictatorships or socialist states, they were engaged in the same fundamental freedom-oriented project. The specific threats to liberty liberals have found themselves opposing have varied according to time and place and, consequently, came to be associated sometimes with the left and sometimes with the right. What remained consistent was its commitment to individual liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom of inquiry, viewpoint diversity, universalism, constitutional constraints on power and democratic government. The history of liberalism is therefore not the history of a particular faction within the left-right spectrum, but of a long chain of people in different times and places committed to a philosophical tradition rooted in protecting people from authoritarian power and enabling people with different ideas and values to live together peacefully within free societies.

This is why I continue to defend the term ‘liberalism’ despite generally being skeptical of attempts to police linguistic change. If liberalism were just a word, it would not matter very much if it drifted in meaning or fell out of use. Words come and go. Concepts evolve.

The problem is that liberalism is the irreplaceable name we have for a coherent philosophical tradition that binds together an array of political, intellectual, economic and social freedoms. These are not simply a collection of attractive but unrelated values that we can pick and choose from. They form a cohesive system. Each principle supports and reinforces the others.

Once we stop thinking in terms of liberalism, it becomes easier to think of these principles as separable. We begin to imagine that we can keep democratic systems while abandoning freedom of speech, or preserve viewpoint diversity while weakening freedom of inquiry, or uphold individual liberty while expanding the powers of the state into the private lives of individuals. Keeping the concept of liberalism intact and true to its philosophical heritage reminds us that these commitments belong together because they emerged together and have historically succeeded together.

This matters because liberalism is not simply one political philosophy among many. It is the philosophical foundation of modern Western liberal democracies. When conservatives speak of defending Western civilisation, this is surely what they are seeking to defend. When progressives speak of hard-won civil rights victories, this is the philosophical tradition to which they are indebted. We cannot have a society in which conservatives lose sight of what they are conserving and progressives fail to recognise what achieves progress. The institutions, rights and freedoms that many of us take for granted did not emerge naturally or inevitably. They were won through centuries of intellectual, political and social struggle against myriad authoritarianisms. Liberalism was the tradition that united these struggles and articulated the principles on which modern democratic societies would be built.

If we lose the concept of liberalism, we lose sight of the philosophy that distinguishes liberal democracy from authoritarianism, democratic citizenship from subjecthood and modernity from the medieval world. We lose the language that enables us to recognise these principles as parts of a coherent whole and to defend them as such. For this reason, ‘liberalism’ is one term I am not prepared to surrender. The word is worth defending because the philosophy it names is worth defending.

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I am frequently told that the word ‘liberal’ has become so confused and contested, and so deeply associated with the (often illiberal) left in the United States, that attempts to defend it as a distinct philosophical tradition are no longer worthwhile. While I generally agree that it is futile to try to reclaim words to their ‘proper’ meaning, liberalis…

Read more

(Audio version here)

The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain has over 6500 subscribers! We are creating a space for liberals who care about what is true on the left, right and centre to come together and talk about how to understand and navigate our current cultural moment with effectiveness and principled consistency.

I think it is important that I keep my writing free. It is paying subscribers who allow me to spend my time writing and keep that writing available to everyone. Currently 3.8% of my readers are paying subscribers. My goal for 2026 is to increase that to 7%. This would enable me to write full-time for my own substack! If you can afford to become a paying subscriber and want to help me do that, thank you! Otherwise, please share!

I have always been argumentative. I discovered that I was quite good at it when I was 8. This was, according to family lore, when I made a case that my teacher could either say “Two wrongs don’t make a right” when I pushed my best friend down a short flight of steps for hitting me with her satchell or she could keep me in at breaktime for said assault, but not both. I don’t remember this and I think it unlikely that I made a sophisticated philosophical argument about concepts of justice vs revenge, but it interested my teacher enough for her to inform my parents of it and suggest that I was generally good at verbal argumentation.

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I remained good at arguing throughout my school days and this was a feature of my reports accompanied by words like ‘difficult’, ‘argumentative’, ‘contrary’ and ‘tiresome.’ My father’s favourite word for it was “bolshie” and he expressed a combination of pride and concern about this. One of the few Serious Conversations we had in my teens was about his concern that being a contrarian was going to hamper me in any career and life generally. He died the year before I was nominated for the Contrarian of the Year Award in 2019, which ultimately went to the great Katharine Birbalsingh.

Nevertheless, he was, in important ways, correct. I was, at this stage, a contrarian. I was somebody who enjoyed verbal contest with authority figures for its own sake. It did not much matter what the rule or claim I was objecting to was and I did not give the rightness or wrongness of it any serious thought. I just wanted to find a way to argue and disconcert whoever I was talking to. I attended a very strict and academically demanding private school which I did not like and this was a source of power. As long as I was polite in my objections and presented them as reasoned arguments or questions that sought clarification, rather than disobedience or rudeness, I could be a consummate pain-in-the-arse without getting into any trouble. My housemaster did get into the habit of ending any address to the class about rules and expectations with an anticipatory, “Shut up, Helen,” but my school disciplinary record was entirely clean.

This tendency of mine to use verbal reasoning as a weapon against those in a position of power or authority over me featured in other areas of my life too. My poor cousin, at four years older than both myself and his sister and considering it his responsibility to prevent us from doing stupid and reckless teenage girl things that we were, in fact, doing, said, “My sister was just mouthy and wouldn’t do what she was told, but you looked like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth and would try to convince me that black was white.”

This was ultimately the problem. What I was doing, in my immature and rebellious years, was engaging in sophistry, being intellectually dishonest and not caring about what was true. I just wanted to win arguments against people who had power over me, get my own way and make the other person - typically a good-faith actor trying to do what was best for me - feel discomfited, confused and not quite sure what had just happened. I had discovered that my main strength was in verbal argumentation, persuasiveness and plausibility and, at that time, I was very much rebelling against authority of any kind and saw this as the best weapon I had in my arsenal. I also thoroughly enjoyed the fight.

I had an epiphany about this when I was 22. I had got a job and left home at 18 and had a mortgage on my own home. I was living alone and had obtained a job in home care where I worked fairly autonomously. I was very much my own boss and rarely found myself in any situations where anybody else had authority over me. My clients were elderly people whose need for personal care put them in a position of vulnerability, so I never argued with any of them even when they were unreasonable and demanding. I wanted them to feel that they were the ones in power for the sake of their own dignity and autonomy. I was their assistant. I also felt no need to do this with partners or friends. Whenever I did encounter anybody in any position of power, however, my hackles still rose and I still tended to argue with any instructions or advice, on principle.

It was a psychologist I was seeing for OCD who pointed this out to me. My arguing was not being terribly helpful to my recovery. She said that my argumentativeness revealed a problem with authority and an attempt to gain some degree of power when I felt myself in a position of powerlessness. I immediately asked her what evidence she had for this as I was not aware of having told her of any relationships I had with anybody in a position of authority. She was surely not referring to herself because she was an employee of the NHS to which I contributed as a taxpayer and consequently, she worked for me. If she did consider herself to be an authority figure in relation to me, could she justify that? What was it about her being a psychologist providing a service to clients that made her feel like she was an authority figure in a way that, say, a hairdresser would not be?

I went home feeling satisfied that I had won that battle because the psychologist had, as I had intended, become discomfited at being asked to justify a stance I had attributed to her which had twisted her position into one she almost certainly did not hold and would not want to ethically defend. She had assured me that we were working together and changed the subject. I was, at first, jubilant, but then began to feel distinctly uncomfortable. An honest part of me suspected that she was right and that I had shut down someone who was trying to help me. I also suspected that I had not only been unjust to her, but had potentially intimidated her. I had shown her that I could, if I so wished, twist her words into expression of classist assumptions of her own superiority and also her power over vulnerable people which, if made in written complaint, could have been taken seriously and been investigated. I had heard her observation as a threat, “I have power over you” and responded to it with one of my own, “No, you don’t. I have power of my own.” I had, in fact, bullied her.

I felt ashamed that I had used a genuine strength in a way I would have condemned had it taken another form and began to journal about this in a honestly introspective way.

If my particular strength had been physical - if I had been six foot four and built like a rugby player - would it have been justifiable to respond to her observation by looming over her, using my strength to intimidate her or physically overpower her in order to get my own way? Clearly not. Most of us recognise immediately that physical power creates responsibilities. The stronger person bears a greater obligation to exercise restraint. The strength need not be physical for this responsibility to apply. It can be social, institutional, financial or intellectual. It can be the ability to dominate a conversation, tie somebody in knots, or persuade an audience that black is white. The form differs. The ethical question remains the same.

What I had done was use a particular verbal acuity and argumentative skill to twist a narrative to make a psychologist trying to help me feel wrong-footed and defensive. I had not been interested in whether her observation was true. I had been interested in shutting her down and winning. Worse, I had wanted to win in a way that demonstrated that I could not be challenged without consequences.

Once I identified this as the source of my moral unease, I could no longer regard verbal reasoning and rhetorical skill as a morally neutral attribute. The ability to construct persuasive cases verbally in real time is a form of power and consequently it can be abused.

It had not occurred to me at that time that I could ever be a bully. I was very young, living alone, working long hours to get by while feeling very vulnerable in ways which were affecting my mental health. I saw myself as the powerless one defending myself against power being used against me (precisely as the psychologist had suggested). My youth, low social status or mental health struggles could absolutely have been used against me to disregard any complaint, including valid ones, but that wasn’t happening. I had been the aggressor in that exchange. My motivations were antagonistic, my epistemology was pragmatic and my principles were non-existant. The problem was not that I was reasoning badly. The reasoning itself was often strong as a piece of verbal argumentation. The problem was that it was twisty rhetorical trickery in service of a self-defensive goal and I would have used any argument that worked, regardless of what was true or principled.

Years later, with a good clinical psychologist, I came to understand where this reflexive opposition to authority came from. Childhood experiences had left me inclined to see authority itself as the threat rather than assessing whether any particular authority was factually correct and acting justly. Schema therapy provided a useful framework for understanding the distorted perceptions at play here. What mattered was not the details, however, but the realisation that I was treating all authority as abusive and responding accordingly.

I had learnt to react against any form of authority indiscriminately and attack it with the only strength I had. But because I was indiscriminate, I was unjust and attacked people who were not attacking me. And because I was using language as a weapon and not a way to determine truth or consider ethics, I was reaching for anything that could make the other person back off rather than addressing what they actually said honestly. This was immature defensive behaviour which needed to be unpicked.

It helped when I spent time considering what this must feel like from the other side. If I twist somebody else’s meaning and attack them in a way that makes them back off and leave me alone, how do they then feel about me? They are likely confused and even hurt because they weren’t looking for an argument or to win anything. It is unlikely, even if they decide not to argue with me again, that they respect me. My arguments were dishonest and manipulative. This could lead someone else to decide against challenging me again, but it could not make them credit anything I say.

Over the course of this journaling process about truth, fairness, authority, intellectual honesty and consistent principles, which took about 18 months in its first intensive burst but has been continuing ever since (and more recently, in public), I gradually came to the conclusion that a distrust of authority and an ability to make strong verbal arguments were a good combination provided they were used thoughtfully. I must not be a reflexive, indiscriminate contrarian but pick my battles wisely and in defence of things that actually matter, not my own ego. The rightful target cannot be any presentation of authority, but abuse of authority, illegitimate authority and authoritarianism. Then when something does need fighting, this must be done honestly and with principle, not in defensive or self-serving ways. The ability to admit when one has been wrong and change one’s mind is also key.

It was this post of ’s referencing C.S. Lewis which made me think of this period in my life.

Indeed! Rationality is not best understood as the ability to make internally coherent, logical arguments well. The person using reason well is not the one who can defend any conclusion or justify any principles. It is the one who cares which conclusion is actually true and can uphold principles consistently across tribes. This is what makes the difference between the effective use of reason and a rationalisation.

A person who is willing to argue brilliantly for any position is like a mercenary. We can admire the skill but not the purpose to which it is put. The mercenary fights for whoever pays him. The indiscriminate sophist argues for whichever conclusion benefits him. These are the opportunistic hoppers upon bandwagons that seem likely to be profitable either financially or in social status. They will switch allegiance as soon as it seems prudent to do so.

A person who is willing to argue brilliantly but without any concern for truth, principle or self-correction in defence of a cause is generally an ideologue. Again, their skills may be impressive but their intellectual dishonesty and ethical inconsistency make productive discussion and conflict resolution extremely difficult and are likely to ultimately discredit their own cause. We need the best arguers for every position to do so in good faith and with an acceptance that some of their ideas might be wrong.

I get very angry when I see mature adults with fully-developed frontal lobes using impressive abilities of verbal reasoning and rhetorical skill to make plausible and persuasive arguments which are nevertheless dishonest and self-serving, whether this is for reasons of self-advancement or ideological commitment. If they have the ability to formulate such sophisticated arguments, they must also be aware of the ways in which they have bent them to be deceptive and inconsistently principled. If not, they have a heightened responsibility to scrutinise their own reasoning and remain alert to the possibility that they are rationalising rather than reasoning. They are using an ability they have to confuse and mislead people of good faith and good will whose strengths lie elsewhere than the argumentative realm. Perhaps, in the case of ideologues, they justify this as being for the greater good of their cause. Nevertheless, it is an abuse of intellectual power and it is unconscionable in the same way an abuse of physical, economic or institutional power is. It puts ego or ideology above the interests of individuals watching such arguments with the intention of evaluating them to form their own conclusions. It contributes to a culture in which a functioning marketplace of ideas is derailed and truth and principle are subordinated to narrative and ideological convenience and in which confusion, misunderstanding and polarisation flourish.

I still enjoy arguing. I still enjoy the process of dismantling bad arguments and challenging authoritarianism. I still think it is absolutely acceptable to be someone who thrives on collaborative conflict and takes pleasure in making strongly critical arguments and in making them persuasive. The issue is not whether we should do that and do it forcefully and take satisfaction in a point hitting home. It is whether we are using that skill in service of what is true and what is consistently principled and whether we are applying the same standards of honesty, consistency and self-scrutiny to our own arguments as we do to those of others.

The difference between good reasoning and self-serving rationalisation is not ability, but integrity.

I have always been argumentative. I discovered that I was quite good at it when I was 8. This was, according to family lore, when I made a case that my teacher could either say “Two wrongs don’t make a right” when I pushed my best friend down a short flight of steps for hitting me with her satchell or she could …

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Arguably the most persistent misunderstanding about free speech is the assumption that defending someone’s right to say something is equivalent to endorsing or approving of what they said. This is false. A commitment to freedom of speech is a political principle about liberty and power. Truth, principles, morals and manners are separate questions.

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When we protect freedom of speech, we are specifically protecting the freedom of individuals to believe and say things that other people think utterly wrong or find appalling. The right of ideas to be spoken only comes into question when someone strongly objects to them on the grounds of truth or ethics. However, we defend freedom of speech because people disagree profoundly about what is true, good, dangerous, blasphemous, hateful or unacceptable. Even when we are convinced that a belief is false or morally wrong, we cannot assume that those in power will always share our judgement. For that reason, a free society must protect the right of dissenters to challenge governments, institutions and prevailing moral orthodoxies.

Yet even people who understand this in principle often experience a degree of moral discomfort. I see this repeatedly when objecting to attempts to censor or punish speech. People who agree that the speech should not be banned nevertheless feel compelled to explain why the belief is mistaken, immoral or offensive. They seem concerned that defending a person’s right to speak will otherwise be mistaken for agreement with what has been said.

Sometimes I feel a little impatient about this and want to say, “You are missing the point. The truth or falsity or the ethics of this specific issue has no bearing on whether or not the speech should be permitted. Please focus on the overarching principle of free speech.” On reflection, however, I think it is both natural and good that people want to discuss the substance of issues themselves rather than the right to hold any view without being penalised for it. This is what we should want to focus on and be able to focus on. The fact that people keep returning to the substance of the issue isn’t evidence that they don’t care about free speech. It’s evidence that free speech is supposed to be a means rather than an end.

Having to continually defend freedom of speech gets in the way of the productive conversations that advance knowledge, enable self-correction and resolve conflict. Every minute spent arguing that someone should be allowed to express a view is a minute not spent examining whether the view is true, false, defensible or objectionable. A healthy culture is one in which people can devote their attention to evaluating ideas rather than debating whether they may be voiced at all.

The liberal goal should therefore be a society in which freedom of speech is so deeply accepted that punishing people for expressing unpopular views is simply not considered an option. Such a culture would not only protect individual liberty. It would free us to focus on the questions that really matter: what is true, what is good and what should be done. To achieve this, we must be able to separate the political principle of free speech from our desire to argue for what is true and good. The first creates the conditions for the second.

A Political Principle About Liberty and Power

The primary reason for protecting freedom of speech is not that people always use it wisely. It is that no government, institution or social faction can be trusted with the power to decide which opinions may be expressed. Even those who do not regard liberty as an intrinsic good should recognise that governments change and cultural orthodoxies shift. Powers granted to suppress today’s heresy may be used tomorrow against beliefs we ourselves hold.

Most people can recognise that human beings have often been mistaken about what is morally acceptable to think and say, and that these mistakes have frequently been enforced through political and cultural power. Taking a broad historical and geographical view makes this clear. During the height of ‘wokeness’, views that could lead to professional or social punishment included “There are only two biological sexes,” “Not all white people are racist,” and “Islam may not be compatible with liberal democracy.” In other times and places, people have been punished for saying “I do not believe God exists,” “I do believe God exists,” “Homosexuality is acceptable,” “Capitalism is beneficial to society,” “Women should be able to hold political power,” or “Interracial marriage should be permitted.”

There are very few people who would not object to being prohibited from expressing at least one of these views. The problem is not simply that some of these beliefs are true and others false. It is that nobody can reliably be trusted to determine which beliefs may be expressed and which must be suppressed.

Liberals who make this argument are often accused of moral or epistemological relativism and believing that all ideas are equally valid. This is a mistake. One can strongly believe there are clearly right and wrong answers to things and clearly better and worse ethical values to hold without being equally confident that the people who accept this will always be in positions of power. The conviction of those who believe, for example, that one religion is factually true and that it is morally imperative to make everyone else affirm it is just as strong as those who believe the earth is roughly spherical and that women are mentally competent adults with an equal right to autonomy as men. Conviction, therefore, is not the safeguard. The safeguard is a political principle that prevents any faction from acquiring the authority to silence dissenting views.

A society committed to freedom of speech accepts a difficult trade-off. Some genuinely repellent speech must remain permissible because the alternative is granting authorities the power to decide which speech is too repellent to be allowed. Accepting this trade-off does not require us to refrain from condemning ideas that are false, harmful or morally unconscionable.

Indeed, one of the advantages of keeping bad ideas visible is that they can be challenged openly. When harmful beliefs are driven underground, they often become poorly understood, romanticised or misrepresented as more reasonable than they are. When they can be expressed in public, they can be examined, criticised and answered. The purpose of free speech is not to protect bad ideas from criticism. It is to ensure that criticism can occur openly and that the strongest arguments prevail through persuasion rather than coercion. This is where truth, principles, morals and manners come in.

Truth, Principles, Morals and Manners

The purpose of freedom of speech is not to create a culture in which everybody has their own truth, anything goes and all moral judgements are suspended. Supporting freedom of speech does not require moral indifference. It does not mean that all speech is equally wise, kind, truthful or admirable.

A liberal society does not abolish moral judgement. It relocates it from the coercive power of the state to the consciences of individuals and the norms of civil society. People remain free to argue vigorously about what is true and false, right and wrong, wise and foolish.

Truth: To establish what is true, we need institutions dedicated to discovering truth as that which corresponds with reality. This requires academic freedom, free inquiry, viewpoint diversity, a commitment to evidence and reasoned argument, and a culture in which errors are acknowledged and corrected rather than denied or concealed.

At present, many of these norms are under pressure. Influential strands of academic thought have embraced forms of postmodern scepticism that cast doubt on objective knowledge and treat some claims as beyond legitimate challenge. At the same time, right-wing populist movements have increasingly offered “alternative facts,” emotionally satisfying narratives and a reflexive distrust of expertise. Although these tendencies differ in important ways, both undermine the norms that make truth-seeking possible.

Faced with ideas that appear obviously false and potentially harmful, the temptation is often to suppress them and this impulse is strongest when directed at the ideas of our opponents. As competing ideological camps become increasingly committed to narratives rather than reality, many people find themselves supporting whichever side appears less irrational, unethical or threatening to their own values rather than asking which claims are actually true.

This is not the answer. At a time when competing political factions are increasingly detached from reality, it is more important than ever to care about what is true and to defend the right of dissenters to dissent. To challenge false and harmful ideas, we need those ideas to be openly expressed and answered. More importantly still, we need criticism from within our own movements and political tribes. Without internal dissent, errors are protected from scrutiny and can become entrenched as orthodoxies. Freedom of speech is therefore not merely a liberty to be protected for its own sake. It is one of the primary mechanisms by which individuals and societies distinguish truth from error. It enables us to test our beliefs against criticism and, when they withstand that criticism, to hold them with greater confidence.

As John Stuart Mill wrote,

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

Principles: If we value the ability to argue for our ethical, political, philosophical or religious principles, we should be concerned when particular viewpoints are excluded from mainstream discussion. In recent years, cultural conservatives raising concerns about immigration and the compatibility of some religious beliefs with liberal democratic values, and gender critical feminists arguing for the importance of recognising biological sex, have frequently found themselves excluded from institutional and public forums.

When mainstream spaces close their doors to dissenting perspectives, alternative spaces inevitably emerge. Some remain committed to open discussion and principled disagreement. Others become increasingly insulated from criticism and more vulnerable to radicalisation. As views are driven from shared forums into ideological enclaves, opportunities for challenge, correction and mutual understanding are diminished. It is impossible to know how particular debates might have developed had dissenting viewpoints remained fully represented within mainstream institutions. Nevertheless, there are good reasons to think that open engagement is more likely than exclusion to encourage intellectual accountability, ethical consistency, resistance to extremism and facilitate conflict resolution.

When people are unable to make principled arguments from within their own ethical or political frameworks, those frameworks can become distorted, misunderstood and blended with ideas that are incompatible with them. People gradually lose the ability to articulate the principles underlying their views and instead come to understand themselves primarily in opposition to another tribe. Public discussion then shifts away from reasoned disagreement between people advancing evidence and arguments in good faith. Instead, it becomes a conflict between competing tribes, each advancing narratives, loyalties and selectively applied principles. The goal ceases to be the pursuit of truth or the resolution of disagreement and becomes the defeat of an opposing side. Protecting freedom of speech helps prevent this deterioration. It enables people to articulate, defend and refine their principles in public, subject them to criticism and distinguish them from less coherent or more extreme positions. In doing so, it creates the conditions for the difficult but essential conversations on which a healthy society depends.

Morals: While principles are often carefully reasoned ethical commitments, much of our moral life is more intuitive. People develop feelings about what is good, bad, fair or unfair and seek to understand and articulate those intuitions through discussion with others. This process is important. Most people are not writing philosophical treatises, yet their conversations about what is and is not morally acceptable play a significant role in shaping culture and social norms. When people feel unable to express moral concerns openly, they may begin to self-censor or conceal their true views. This makes it harder not only to communicate their values but also to examine and refine them. Open discussion allows people to test their intuitions, hear opposing perspectives and develop a more coherent understanding of what they believe and why.

Authoritarian movements often seek to control public discourse in the hope of enforcing a particular vision of the common good. Yet people cannot simply be compelled to believe what they are told to believe. When disagreement is suppressed rather than addressed, resentment often grows beneath the surface and more tribal or extremist movements can become increasingly attractive. Protecting freedom of speech therefore serves not only politics and truth-seeking but culture itself. It allows people to explore their values openly, learn from one another and participate in the gradual, organic development of social norms. In doing so, it helps create a society in which disagreement can exist without fear and moral questions can be worked through without coercion.

Manners: Manners exist in relation to this. How should we talk to and treat each other? Do we have a responsibility to be civil and respectful of each other’s dignity? Is this a good strategy for having productive conversations and finding common ground? What behaviours and attitudes should be considered antisocial or just inconsiderate? Is there ever any justification for name-calling or abusive language? Is it worse when somebody in a position of power does this but more acceptable when someone from a marginalised group does it to someone from a dominant one? Is it acceptable to insult or mock somebody’s religion? What about refusing to honour their preferred pronouns or their wish not to be referred to as ‘cis’ or ‘queer?’

Manners matter because they shape the quality of our interactions and the possibility of productive dialogue. Yet freedom of speech requires that people remain free to be rude, offensive or disrespectful, provided they do not cross the line into harassment, intimidation or other forms of coercion. This sometimes leads critics of free speech to assume that its defenders favour a culture of hostility and incivility. In reality, the opposite is often true. Most advocates of free speech value respectful and constructive discussion. They simply recognise that civility is most meaningful when it is chosen rather than imposed. Attempts to police language in the name of protecting feelings have frequently been used to suppress legitimate criticism, shield ideas from scrutiny or compel people to affirm beliefs they do not hold. The question of how we ought to treat one another is therefore best addressed through persuasion, social norms and moral argument rather than coercion. Freedom of speech creates the space in which those conversations can occur.

Freedom of speech is not, in itself, a theory of truth, a set of principles, a concept of morality or a code of manners. It cannot tell us what is true, what is principled, what is good, or how we should treat each other. Those are questions we must answer through continued discussion and debate with each other. What freedom of speech does is defend the conditions in which those conversations can occur. It protects our ability to challenge prevailing orthodoxies, criticise our own side, refine our principles, test our beliefs against evidence and develop our moral intuitions in conversation with others. It allows us to disagree without coercion and to persuade rather than compel.

When freedom of speech is weakened, these important discussions about truth, principles, morals and manners do not disappear. They simply become harder to have honestly. People become more likely to self-censor, retreat into tribes, repeat approved narratives and mistake conformity for consensus. The result is a disregard for truth, poorer ethical consistency, incoherent moral values and political discourse that is belligerent, intolerant and abusive.

Freedom of speech is therefore not the whole of the conversation but it is what makes those broader conversations possible. The political principle exists so that we can argue, openly and without fear, about everything else.

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