I have views and opinions, just like anyone else. Some of my opinions are contentious in today’s Britain, for example my opinion that Britons are badly served by the National Health Service and that we would be better off breaking the link between government and health management. Government should merely pay for healthcare and have independent organisations provide healthcare and give to patients much more choice than they have at present .

However I understand that I have to defend my views in open debate if I am to persuade others to agree with me. I can’t overly appeal to emotion, I have to point to examples of waste and inefficiency in the current NHS set up and also cite data to show that the NHS is not as effective or have as good outcomes as the health services of other nations.

What I can’t do is scream and shout and demand that my opponents are silenced or cancelled. That course of action would not be working from a position of strength but instead a position of weakness. If I demanded that everyone who wanted the current set up to continue and who believed differently from me, should be forbidden to discuss and put forward their belief in the benefits of a state owned and run healthcare system and that they should be called a ‘bigot’, then I would be wrong to do so. In that case I would be following this course of action in order to protect a weak argument from challenge.

This article is not about my views on healthcare, but instead my views above are expressed in this article to provide an analogy. It is a particularly good analogy for the ‘woke’ cult, that dominates not just universities but nearly all aspects of our public life. We have a situation where a small group who hold views that they do not want challenged, possibly because they don’t want those ideas tested in open debate, are silencing those with whom they disagree. It is quite possible that the woke cult do not want their ideas debated or challenged because they realise that their arguments may be weak either in whole or in part and in order to defend indefensible ideas they cancel or censor their opponents.

My view on the weakness at the heart of the woke cult is shared by Douglas Murray in a recent article on the Unherd website. In this article he discusses how an academic who wanted to give a lecture on how genetics determines many social outcomes. In Mr Murray’s article, entitled ‘Why is the Woke Cult so scared?’ Mr Murray outlines the experience of an academic who found himself cancelled by the woke mob of the University of Glasgow because he alluded in the title of his lecture to the book ‘The Bell Curve’, by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, a book that is hated by the Left even though many may not have read it.

Mr Murray went on to explain how the woke mob at the university erupted at the idea that a lecture would reference in its title a controversial book and some of them screamed that the academic, Professor Gregory Clark, was a ‘eugenicist’. The woke mob at the University called for the cancellation of Professor Clark, despite the woke mob having no other information about the proposed lecture than its title ‘“For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls: A Lineage of 400,000 Individuals 1750-2020 Shows Genetics Determines Most Social Outcomes”.

The woke mob had no solid information that Professor Clark was going to promote eugenics nor that he agreed with Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein, but that didn’t stop the outrage. Like many others, I abhor eugenics mostly because when it has been practised in the past it has led humanity down really dangerous and dark paths and that path has been trodden by those of both the Left and the Right of the political spectrum.

What’s worrying about this particular cancellation is that Professor Clark was cancelled not on the grounds of the content of his lecture, but merely on the title. Is this where we have got to now in the West, in our universities, where people can be unpersoned merely because of a title? It’s as stupid a move as judging a book by its cover art.

What has happened at Glasgow according to Douglas Murray is that the left are showing that they are scared. For decades the Left has pushed the idea that we are all born with equal abilities and that any failure is due to societal issues such as poverty, racism, sexism or a lack of opportunity. It’s a big challenge to these views of the Left to hear views that suggest that outcomes may be beyond societies control and that there may well be a genetic component to outcomes. It does undermine somewhat the idea pushed by the Left that society can be perfected and that all humanity can be made equal by way of a socialist state. Douglas Murray stated that this mantra chanted by the Left that society can be perfected if enough collective effort is engaged in, is behind much of the Left’s policies these days, including its obsession with transgenderism.

Douglas Murray said:

The fact that this mantra prevails goes a long way to explaining why transgenderism has become such a focal point in the culture wars in recent years. For if you are able to move between the sexes at will, then it’s only natural to conclude that nothing about the situation we are born into can or should limit us. You may have been born with male chromosomes and have male genitalia, but if you wish to become a woman any day then you can. And vice versa. Whether you are male or female isn’t determined — it’s something you can choose.

Douglas Murray raised the possibility that the lecture by Professor Clark was cancelled because university authorities were frightened of the potential violence that can and does come from woke mobs. However Mr Murray also pointed out that the Left may also be worried about the challenge to their ideas posed by a talk that suggests that outcomes might be outside our control and not amenable to change via collective effort.

Mr Murray referenced the fear of the violence of the woke mob and added:

But this approach fails to explain why a talk that references Murray and Herrnstein’s book would inspire such vitriol in the first place. The university was not simply concerned that the content of Clark’s lecture may have been racist. It is about something far more profound: the fear that he would touch on another aspect of the The Bell Curve’s thought that goes against the emerging ideology of the time. The reason why so much energy is dedicated to shutting down any discussion of the issues addressed by Murray and Herrnstein in their book is that, just like with transgenderism, it raises an undeniably fearful spectre — the possibility that our life-outcomes are to a great extent reliant on factors over which we have no control.

I tend to believe that eugenics and associated ideas such as some races are more stupid than others are bad ideas. Eugenics and associated ideas are down there with other bad ideas like Holocaust Denial, pseudo-science, racial supremacy, ancient aliens, flat earth and the belief in Satanic Ritual Abuse. However the way to deal with bad ideas is to debate with the proponents of them, to counter their bad ideas with better ideas and better concepts. The Left on the hand want to silence bad ideas either through force, as with the woke mobs, or via legislation as with ‘hate speech’ laws. This cancelling of Professor Clark does not look like the work of those who are able and prepared to defend their ideas in open and informed debate, but by a group who are frightened of what might happen if their ideas were challenged.

Douglas Murray continued:

Of course, there are dangerous avenues in discussions over the relationship between race and IQ. Eugenics poses one of the worst moral nightmares imaginable. But there are only two things you can do to tackle it. The first is to shut down all debate; a prospect incompatible with modern democracy. The other is to allow responsible discussion of it, along with many other uncomfortable subjects. And if this cannot take place in a university, it is hard to know if it can take place at all.

Douglas Murray is one hundred percent correct here. There are moral nightmares to be had in some of these areas of potential discussion but if we are to defeat or challenge ideas about race and IQ or other uncomfortable or questionable issues, then there is a need for a responsible debate about them. Our universities should be and used to be places where all manner of ideas, some kooky some less so, could be discussed. That our universities have in recent decades become places where a monothought clique holds sway, not only impoverishes these universities but impoverishes society as a whole. Debate is necessary for a society to grow and advance even if these debates and the matters raised in them are uncomfortable or difficult. As I’ve said so often on here before, you don’t make bad ideas or bad people go away by censoring them, you make bad ideas and discredit the bad people behind them by dragging these people and ideas out into the open and intellectually spanking them.

The woke cult seems powerful but is weak because it doesn’t want their ideas challenged. That should be the most appropriate lesson to take away from both the behaviour of the students of the University of Glasgow and Mr Murray’s Unherd piece. The woke cult is weaker than they seem on the face of it and they are scared of having their ideas put to any form of challenge therefore they go out of their way to avoid having their ideas challenged. Maybe if we all call for open debates when it comes to contentious subjects then the woke mob will crumble like a sandcastle when the tide comes in?

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Postscript: Some readers may be interested in this. It’s a reminder from the Guardian that eugenics has not been a pseudo-science primarily of the Right but of the Left. Many of the giants of Leftist thought were eugenicists as Jonathan Freedland points out

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/from-the-archive-blog/2019/may/01/eugenics-founding-fathers-british-socialism-archive-1997