A Free Left Blog

I just wanted to flag up this fascinating conversation between the public psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jordan Peterson on 'the perilous state of the university' and draw out some parallels with my work on diversity and institutions in  The Tribe . Jordan Peterson interviewing Jonathan Haidt on 'the perilous state of the university' The video, which I was drawn to by an effusive tweet from David Goodhart, is more than an hour and a half long. However, unusually for such a thing, I found it didn't drag at all. In fact at the end of it I was left wanting more.  Goodhart picked up on the point the two discussed about how "any good society must be open AND closed", but there is a lot more to chew over. I was perhaps most interested in Haidt's idea of the 'social justice' university that is dedicated to the promotion of social justice and opposing the Right above other considerations - notably the pursuit of truth. This has a lot...

The idea that British foreign policy somehow caused Salman Abedi to go and kill children in Manchester is so stupid that on one level it seems offensive to even discuss it. Yet this idea is strongly present in our public life, promoted by Islamist organisations like CAGE and recycled by countless left-wingers, including – in diluted form – by Jeremy Corbyn in a speech he is to deliver today. As Corbyn will put it, “That assessment in no way reduces the guilt of those who attack our children. Those terrorists will forever be reviled and held to account for their actions.” It is a fair point to make that there is a difference between causation and blame. That basic distinction applies also to immigration, for which we can say runaway housing costs and pressure on public services are partly caused by increased numbers of people but this does not mean that incomers are in any way to blame. The trouble is politically, whereby figures like Corbyn highlighting this link feed...

An ideology is above all a system of belief into which everything must fit and that therefore assumes a sort of ultimate, absolute knowledge .  This attachment to absolute, over-arching knowledge is why adherents so easily slip into authoritarian thought and behaviour. After all, if you know the core truth or the root causes of what is going on, actual truths presenting themselves to you in reality are of relatively little importance; indeed it is surely right to ignore them and concentrate on the more important underlying truth – even (and perhaps especially ) if it contradicts what you can see and hear in reality. From liberal-left practitioners, we can perhaps see this latter tendency most obviously in the reaction to terrorist attacks committed in the name of Islam like those in Paris on Friday night.  The cry goes out that this phenomenon 'is nothing to do with Islam’ or 'has nothing to do with religion’ even when the killers keenly and openly justify t...