The Left, however, also has its blind spots — many of which are apparent in Srinivasan’s essay. Scathing about the new Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act’s attempt to create a culture which promotes academic freedom in UK universities, she barely acknowledges the problems diagnosed by its authors and defenders. Instead, as many a defensive-sounding progressive has implied before her, real cancellation almost never happens in academia — except, of course, where it happens to exactly those people who deserve it (cough).

Despite the occasional admission that campus life these days is becoming censorious and risk-averse, Srinivasan mostly presents the idea of cancel culture as confected by “Right-wing culture warriors”. (Even when you’ve previously written a book on contemporary sexual politics and are now writing about freedom of speech, becoming a culture warrior is still something that only happens to other people, apparently.)

Her framing is depressingly one-dimensional in other ways, too. Nasty Right-wing men twirl their moustaches and prosecute dastardly secret plans under cover of darkness. A bit like a window display in Ann Summers, dog whistles and fig leaves are everywhere you look. The Good Left bites its lip and stares nobly into the middle distance, trying to hold the line on causes such as anti-racism, trans rights and preventing climate change. Meanwhile, lecturers like me, who have experienced strong hostility within universities for expressing controversial academic views, have mistaken our hurt feelings over personal critique for a general social problem.

Indeed, academics like me are presented as somewhat confused about whether our speech has been suppressed at all — for some of us still write for newspapers and talk on television. As is often the case, the putative problem is treated as, at most, one of self-expression. Critics insist: didn’t you get your thoughts out into the world anyway? Well, then, what are you complaining about?

This assumption — that the plausibility of a given narrative about the suppression of an academic’s work is inversely proportional to the total number of her media appearances — ignores the obvious point that a set of ideas can be anathema in one venue and celebrated in another. For instance, as I’ve written before, though welcomed in some media outlets, gender-critical feminists seem to give Guardian and BBC editors a fit of the vapours.

And it’s strange that many progressives refuse to consider this general point. For one of their original critiques of free-speech defences made a somewhat similar observation, albeit about ethnic minorities rather than political ones. They held that such arguments don’t take account of how minorities can be systematically excluded from certain platforms and so don’t get a voice there.

Now, those who think of ideas as operating in a marketplace ruled by the laws of supply and demand might be happy with this. Maybe they think that — a bit like convincing an ice-cream parlour to stock your new brand — if you had really wanted to get your ideas into a particular forum, you should have made them more attractive in the first place. With ideas, though, perhaps unlike with ice cream, it’s not always wise to give the people exactly what they want.

In fact, self-expression or the lack of it is often not the main reason people are interested in academic freedom. The more pressing concern is whether conditions exist in universities that dissuade people from pursuing certain controversial topics out of fear alone. If so, and if those topics matter to society — which they often do, because public controversy is usually a sign of something mattering — then we all have a problem, and it’s one that goes well beyond hurt feelings.

In these cases, faulty beliefs are more likely to develop and spread, public frustration is more likely to proliferate, and policymakers will be more likely to act ineffectively and even harmfully as a result. There is no better example of this than the terrible state of the public conversations on women’s rights in relation to transactivism, and on the medical transition of minors — two conversations that are still very hard to have within UK universities without fear.

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A separate pressing question about academic freedom, also nothing to do with self-expression, is whether the public is getting adequate access to a range of academic voices on controversial issues. This is not because academics need to be treated like rivalrous children, each getting the same number of pats on the head from Mummy and Daddy. It’s because if audiences are not exposed to a wide enough range of viewpoints about a given controversy, they will start to assume that the matter is settled. Worse, they might assume that everyone reasonable agrees the matter is settled, and so dismiss naysayers on the presumed authority of their favourite media sources. And their favourite media sources might be wrong.

Dropping Srinivasan’s emphasis on individual self-expression also has another benefit, in that it allows us to admit there might be circumstances where — perhaps with an initial air of paradox — certain kinds of speech should be regulated in order to avoid a chilling effect. On closer inspection, however, there is nothing paradoxical about suppressing some kinds of speech in order to facilitate others. Speech is one of the main tools used by humans to shut other humans up. There are clearly times when, given the further aim of a relatively open discursive environment, it is appropriate to disincentivise speech that does this.

For instance, unless the moral case is absolutely cut and dried in a way apparent to nearly everybody, I think we should dissuade people from implying, on behalf of supposedly politically neutral university organisations and institutions, that certain conclusions or discussions are ethically unacceptable. Whether it’s a manager writing a politicised tract against Brexit in an email to all staff, or a student tweeting out disgust for some invited speaker in the name of the society for whom he acts as president, the effect on dissenters within the same organisations is nearly always to make it harder for them to disagree with those in charge. (Exceptions might include associations whose explicit aims were to politically agitate in some direction — in which case, they should both make that prior agenda clear to joiners and not go off-piste).

So, unlike Observer columnist Kenan Malik commenting on a similar case a few weeks ago involving the Oxford University’s LGBTQ+ Society — an organisation that the uninitiated might assume was formed only to bring LGBTQ+ students together socially, regardless of political and philosophical commitments — I don’t think that regulating speech-that-chills-the-speech-of-others automatically counts as infringing individuals’ right to expression. The target, after all, is not the speech of individuals as such, but speech made by individuals on behalf of institutions. The individuals concerned are still free to express identical views in a personal capacity elsewhere. The familiar disclaimer “opinions expressed are my own and not that of my employer” is an easy one to adapt here.

Srinivasan, meanwhile, worries that the new Act threatens to undermine the basis of academic judgement itself — because, she says, much of what might look to some as speech suppression in academia is entirely legitimate. Academics, for instance, decide what can and cannot be said in seminars, journals and conferences on the basis of exercising specialist understanding about disciplinary standards and norms. The Act, she suggests, threatens to prevent academics from doing this.

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But here she both overstates and understates the extent of academic competence. She overstates, because sometimes what passes for neutral academic judgement about the application of disciplinary standards is itself a way of suppressing politically unwanted conclusions, unconsciously or otherwise. This is particularly likely in high-stakes debates, where believers are convinced that there would be some terrible real-world consequences, were disbelievers to get the upper hand — climate change or vaccine discourse, for instance. Yet she also understates academic competence, by assuming there is no way of differentiating partisan cases from more neutral applications of disciplinary judgement. I’m sure academics could collectively develop an adequate methodology for this with a bit of thought. After all, they’re supposed to be good at this stuff.

Stepping back, it’s worth considering why discussions about free speech so often involve partisanship, or the projection of it onto others. To me, it seems partly due to two permanent features of human life, no matter what the historical situation.

The first of these is that truth matters to people — or more precisely, falsehood does. False beliefs cause actions to go wrong in various ways and can sometimes lead to disaster as reality suddenly hits you in the face.  So — except in the special case where you positively want to deceive someone for self-interested reasons — we have a general vested interest in stopping false ideas from spreading.

The second fact is that everyone thinks their own beliefs are true, and that negations of their own beliefs are false. You might be able to admit to yourself that, in principle, given human fallibility generally, some unspecified proportion of your beliefs is likely to be false — but admitting this about any one belief in particular would be a short route to ceasing to hold it as a belief altogether.

Taken together, these two features give rise to some of the issues we see across the political spectrum. First, they make it easy to get aerated when you think your own true beliefs are under threat, but hard to summon up enthusiasm for the protection of what you judge are the false beliefs of others. This is why free speech defences are so often self-interested.

Second, because it is hard to enthuse about protecting other people’s false beliefs, people tend to assume that if you are defending free speech about a particular set of beliefs, you probably also secretly hold those beliefs, too. This explains why guilt-by-association so frequently gets employed against defenders of free speech, as if they must be using it as cover for more heinous opinions.

In fact, although it’s hard, it is possible to believe that speech — including academic speech — should mostly be free, without having some controversial position secretly in mind when you do it. The academic freedom of others is not just the freedom to hold conclusions you and your friends like. And we mustn’t let either Right or Left forget this.

Fast forward 31 years, and I’m walking in there again, surrounded by security and being chased by photographers, accidentally dressed like a cut-price Kendall Roy from Succession. The image will make national front pages the next day. (Hilariously for our mutual friends, one of the presumed bodyguards is in fact my fellow philosopher friend Rob.)

Hustled by the Union’s reassuringly military-sounding bursar into a secret upstairs room in the building, I check Twitter. Rishi Sunak has tagged me in a supportive tweet. This will be the least weird thing to happen to me all day.

The morning had not started brilliantly — two consecutive trains cancelled, and I’d had to scramble around to find a local taxi driver who didn’t mind a four-hour round trip to London at short notice. By the time I made it, fairly late, to the driver taking me to Oxford, I had already aged several years.

Looking back, the younger version of me didn’t like the Union much, and I hardly ever went there. An institution completely independent of the wider university, it is mostly devoted to having debates. Back then, I thought it was an intimidating and archaic place, full of strident, cocky types who all wanted to be Prime Minister. I didn’t feel it was really for the likes of shy, awkward, comprehensive-schooled me. I certainly didn’t imagine that I’d one day be interviewed by its president about my views on gender.

I switch up my Kendall-Roy look to business-casual in a tiny bathroom, and then chat to committee members and Union staff. They seem excited but tense; occasionally, one wheels away to talk urgently on the phone. At one point, there is a muttered conversation about the welfare rooms being manned and ready to receive visitors. I wonder if that might be a slightly problematic verb to use.

For a while, as we wait, there is dead silence outside in the street, and I start to suspect that the whole thing is going to be rather anticlimactic. Eventually I hear the familiar sound of chanting outside and feel oddly relieved. At least I know this script — and not only from my former workplace.

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Last November, I participated in a debate at the Oxford Union’s fellow institution, the Cambridge Union. There was a protest, and an attempt at disinvitation there too. So it seems I’m now a veteran of Oxbridge’s least athletic student Varsity match — and though it pains me to do so, I’m afraid I am going to have to declare the Light Blues the winner.

The motion we debated at The Other Place was not about sex and gender at all, but about whether there is a right to offend. Spoiler alert: I was on the side that argued that there is. The atmosphere as I entered that chamber was sombre and tense. Throughout the event, various young people bobbed up and down to denounce me, mostly for things I hadn’t ever said or written and didn’t believe.

Some appeared to think I was arguing that offence was a positive duty rather than a right (I wasn’t). Others didn’t care what I was saying, or indeed what I had ever said, but just wanted to feel the thrill of the pointed finger. In an update to the traditional mediaeval scenario, one organised chap read out his prepared denunciation from an iPad.

Protestors outside could be heard banging drums loudly, providing an unsettling percussive accompaniment to the speeches inside. The volume of drumming and yelling would increase each time I spoke, as coordinating messages flew between audience members and protestors.

Cambridge also provided a stunning bit of theatre: an undercover non-binary student called Kass cunningly disguised as a six-foot-plus man in a tuxedo. The results of Kass’s intervention upon my emotional equilibrium can be seen in the Channel 4 documentary Gender Wars, which coincidentally aired on the same day as the Oxford event.

Under false pretences, Kass had auditioned to speak for my side of the motion, arriving at the Union in full male-associated attire and dining convivially with me first, before sensationally dropping the act in order to denounce me as “disgusting” to everyone in the chamber. And things only went downhill from there. I was the only female speaker in the debate. Standing at full height next to me during their speech, Kass described to the audience how frightening it was to walk about the streets of Cambridge at night thanks to women like me.

In comparison to all this, the Oxford audience this week barely made any effort to make me feel awful. In fact, they offered enthusiastic applause as I entered the room. And in an unprecedented turn of events, many of my main objectors seemed actually to have read my book.

Even the four protestors who tried to create a rumpus inside the building were relatively meek. One stood up and shouted something, then left. Two others also shouted slogans rather apologetically, unfurled a flag, and threw some leaflets before hastily exiting too. The most intrepid of the four, dramatically unveiling a “No More Dead Trans Kids” T-shirt, used superglue to stick one hand to the floor right in front of me, but still complied docilely when five police officers — armed with blue plastic gloves and solvent, a lot of forms to fill in, and some very patient smiles — eventually arrived to sort it all out. The careful act of glueing itself seemed a bit Blue Peter.

After a nervous build-up, I started to enjoy myself, and it appeared to me that others in the chamber did too. There was a full and frank exchange of views, including some robust criticism of my position. Intellectual blows were landed on both sides. The Union President cornered me on an academic study that I didn’t know much about, while I managed to confuse him about which sense of “gender” he meant exactly (though, given the infinite flexibility of the term, who can blame him?). Various students queued up to quiz me on what they perceived to be errors in my reasoning, evidence base or attitude. I answered as best I could.

It seemed to me that the four protestors were not representative. I could be wrong, but I got the feeling that many in the chamber were pushing back against the sort of tired and hyperbolic cliches usually wielded to shut them up. Certainly, there was little apparent sympathy in the room for the superglued superhero, eventually escorted out to the sound of good-natured cheers and some booing. At times, the atmosphere bordered on riotous rather than rioting.

I found all of this quite promising. And even during the earlier Cambridge event, there had been another hopeful sign, not featured in the documentary. When it came to the moment for those in the packed room to file out and vote, the majority voted for our side of the motion, and the existence of a right to offend.

At both Cambridge and Oxford, I also had several enriching encounters with staunch defenders of my right to speak. A lot of these were with young gender-critical feminists, fired up by noticing the obvious inconsistencies and injustices in a supposedly “kind” worldview that tells women to put their own needs last. Some wanted me to sign their copies of my book. Others were keen to tell me their own stories of horrible social shunning for their beliefs.

One first year Cambridge student told me that, after writing a mildly gender-critical blog in defence of me, she had been ostracised and shamed by all the other women in her college year group, as well as by her own tutor. Another story I heard on Tuesday was about a young lesbian who had read my book and watched my talks, decided to defend my free speech publicly, and been kicked out of the Oxford LGBTQ+ student society as a result.

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Other supportive students in Oxford, neither feminist nor anti-feminist, just seemed fed up with being emotionally blackmailed into stifled silence by a small group of childish and histrionic narcissists — among which they doubtless would include the occasional lecturer. And from within each Union, the committee members responsible for inviting me were totally impressive, standing resolute against pressure and showing exemplary resilience in the face of harsh criticism from some peers.

And I’m afraid I have even more disappointing news for those with unhealthy emotional attachments to the present culture wars. There were — indeed, undoubtedly still are — plenty of students who feel like this at my former workplace. I know they are there, either because they told me outright at the time, or because they demonstrated it to me via the open, inquisitive way they conducted themselves in the classroom.

I am sure that such students exist in every single UK university at the moment; I suspect there are thousands of them out there right now, muttering inwardly while listening to ever more dramatic tales of self-centring woe from fellow students, or eye-rolling inwardly as their lecturers give them pious homilies.

These students are a largely untapped asset to the project of detoxifying the current discourse around identity politics. Thanks to their relative youth, they tend to be sensitive, curious, idealistic but not fanatical, and genuinely want to understand the world. But they also want to play — with ideas, with jokes, with each other. Many have sufficiently rebellious or anarchic instincts to shrink from blatant attempts to manipulate and guilt-trip them. They are sick of being imprisoned in other people’s shame, guilt and paranoia. All we have to do is set them free.

This is not the fatuous argument, made by opportunistic identitarians and anti-woke warriors alike, that we should “listen to young people” — usually made while smoothly guiding listeners to exactly those young people whose views happen to coincide with their own. Nor is it the pretence that we oldies should just shut up and listen to young people generally, no matter what they say — as if today’s youth had miraculously gained hitherto unknown oracular powers, what with all that gaming and watching of TikTok videos. Of course, we shouldn’t be shy of arguing robustly with younger generations, when they talk what appears to be nonsense. They can both dish it and take it. The question is: can we?

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In looking at some of the media coverage of my Oxford trip, it’s striking to me that certain journalists’ idea of balanced reporting is to interview, on one hand, Stock the supposedly offensive speaker, and on the other, students who say they feel threatened and frightened by my terrifying words. (The rough format goes as follows. Student: “I just feel exhausted constantly having to justify my existence every day!”. Interviewer: “What do you, Stock, say to the students who feel exhausted having to justify their existence every day?” Me, looking at said students, apparently with enough energy to drum and chant for hours: “Erm … I’m not sure. Maybe get their iron levels checked?”.)

Yet these are not the only students who have interests at stake. There are those who long to have robust arguments and vigorous disagreements with peers and elders, free from the fear that they will say something offensive and be punished accordingly. But these students don’t seem to get interviewed remotely as often. I don’t believe it’s because they wouldn’t speak to the media, in principle. Or at least — I think that if we collectively made it easier for some of them to ask for such things, greater argumentative disinhibition would become a more accepted norm quite fast, and a generation would collectively breathe a sigh of relief.

I don’t know how the younger version of me would look at present committee members, so impressively self-assured and full of vim, but this version of me (the Kendall Roy wannabe, that is) looks on with great affection and respect. In standing firm and holding a space where students are free to engage with big ideas in time-honoured, age-appropriate ways — whether by arguing, shouting, laughing, emoting wildly, or indeed glueing themselves to wooden floors — they are doing the world an enormous service. Perhaps we can relax a bit about the future after all.

In a New Yorker profile published this week, Callard is presented as “often baffled by the human conventions that the rest of us have accepted”. She relates how she and the graduate student first discovered their mutual love when she gave him a cookie in class, and she saw “just this incredibly weird expression on his face. I couldn’t understand that expression. I’d never seen it before.” She asked him why he was making that face. The student declared love as an explanation. Callard considered for a minute, and then told him: “I think I’m in love with you, too.” Next, she went home to tell her parents and husband.

New Yorker subscribers who haven’t encountered philosophers before may wonder whether they have inadvertently opened a satirical short story by mistake — or perhaps at least a story about love among the robots. Callard now feels herself confronted with a forceful moral dilemma: harm her children by seeking divorce, or become a bad person “corrupted by staying in a marriage” while loving someone else. She opts for the former. A mere three weeks after that first fateful cookie, she and her husband are divorced by mutual agreement, and Callard is preparing a talk about her experience for her students entitled “On the Kind of Love Into Which One Falls”. Her husband gives her feedback on her presentation; on the day of the talk, he and her new lover sit “next to each other in the front row”. Callard is delighted to be able to share her newfound wisdom with her students. “I felt like I had all this knowledge. And it was wonderful. It was an opportunity to say something truthful about love.”

The New Yorker article makes all three dramatis personae sound very strange — like puzzled aliens, deliberately exposing themselves to earthling human experiences in order to take the information back home to their planet. They also seem prone to frequent shattering revelations. At one point, the graduate student says of the first time Callard’s sons visited his apartment: “I remember watching them play on the furniture and suddenly realising: this is the point of furniture.”

I recognise this type very well, though. For a long time, courtesy of my former profession, puzzled aliens were my people. For those not versed in the oddities of modern philosophers, a new book, written by fellow initiate and Cambridge philosopher Nikhil Krishnan, serendipitously offers some marvellously entertaining context about the spiritual and intellectual forebears of Callard and co. — and indeed my own.

In Krishnan’s A Terribly Serious Adventure, we meet the eccentric luminaries of the 20th-century Anglo-American philosophical tradition in Britain: G.E. Moore, Gilbert Ryle, J.L. Austin, A.J. Ayer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe, R.M. Hare, Peter Strawson, Bernard Williams, and lots of others too. We learn how, over the course of a century, and though differing profoundly in their ideas otherwise, these thinkers collectively forged a new philosophical methodology. This was “analysis” or “analytical philosophy”, described by Bertrand Russell as “watching an object approaching through a thick fog: at first it is only a vague darkness, but as it approaches articulations appear and one discovers that it is a man or a woman, or a horse or a cow or what not”. The general aim was to clarify and strip down the things we ordinarily say about the world, the more precisely to discern the truth commitments beneath. Essentially, you had to become a puzzled alien on purpose — though some intellects are more suited to this task than others.

After the First World War, a new kind of energy and ambition had begun to infuse students of philosophy in Oxford and Cambridge. Metaphysical idealism, as practiced for years by the likes of F.H. Bradley and T.H. Green, was on its way out — it being hard to maintain that the world is composed only of mind-dependent ideas when you’d personally come up smack bang against tanks and trenches.

Enthused by recent visits to logical positivists in Vienna, younger Oxford men such as Ryle and Ayer started to wonder whether it was possible to dissolve old metaphysical puzzles about reality into nothingness, simply by attending closely to the language in which they were described. Vigorous, ingenious, and with minds like steel traps, a new generation of philosophical upstarts met in tea rooms, pubs, and common rooms to thrash it all out. The aged and reclusive Bradley was reduced to shuffling irrelevantly around Merton College garden, murdering the occasional cat for psychological relief.

Ordinary ways of speaking began to be scrutinised to the point of collapse. Tutorials started to ring to the sound of the soon-to-be familiar demand: “But what exactly do you mean by that?” Hours would be spent arguing about the word “the”, or pondering “How is my thought about Cambridge a thought about Cambridge?” J.L. Austin was particularly good at turning everyday thoughts and feelings into objects of rigorous investigation: “If a landlady complained about her lodger’s ‘nasty habits’, would we take her to be complaining about the same kind of thing if she’d spoken instead of his ‘nasty ways’? Why can we speak of someone as a ‘good’ batsman but not as a ‘right’ batsman? Could someone complain of a pain in the waist?”

Verbal confrontations would often occur, between, as Isaiah Berlin called them, “the people mending the wall” and “the people knocking holes in it”. Temperamentally, Austin was a hole-knocker, prone to glaring at interlocutors in seminars, and asking with quiet menace: “Would you mind saying that again?” Ayer, meanwhile, was a wall-mender, and resented Austin’s powers of destruction, complaining bitterly of him: “You are like a greyhound who doesn’t want to run himself, and bites the other greyhounds, so that they cannot run either.”

For those who have suffered through the anguished pauses, sudden waspish outbursts, and surreal flights into the imaginary of the average philosophy tutorial, Krishnan’s book offers many opportunities to nod with an affectionate grimace at the recollection. There is the mandatory gladiatorial verbal sparring, rendering some poor souls so anxiously beset with possible counterexamples to every idea that they can barely write a word afterwards. There’s also the desire to talk exclusively to other philosophers who understand the highly technical background, rather than to communicate to the general public. This resulted in what Krishnan euphemistically calls “a new and strikingly unessayistic style of prose” (translation: some of the most godawfully impenetrable texts in the English language).

Other parts of this philosophical culture inherited from its elders have proved more fruitful, however. To this day, the best of analytic philosophy exemplifies a refusal to accept ideas just because powerful or clever people say that they are true. There was, and still is, a cultural expectation that every great thinker of the past is bound to be wrong in some way. Relatedly, there is what Ernest Nagel recognised in Vienna in the Thirties as a refusal to be explicitly ideological: “its professors do not indoctrinate their students with dogmas as to life, religion, race, or society”, and “no doctrines and no institutions are free from critical reappraisals”.

Today, when you study philosophy in Britain, this translates into the conceit that the dry and tortuous philosophical ideas you are being asked to assess have no history. You are to act as if they have just landed from the moon. Indeed, this is precisely what the analytic method encourages you to pretend. The question is not where or when the ideas come from, but whether they are true or false. In a similar vein, you’re encouraged to believe that a thinker’s personality is irrelevant to their thoughts.

Part of the delight of Krishnan’s book, then — with its focus on highly entertaining personalities, career achievements, and relationships — is to realise how utterly contingent the intellectual trajectory of analytical philosophy has been: dependent all the while on the character traits, foibles, and personal obsessions of a particular group of people. Had the thinkers been very different, so too would the body of thought.

More — had the personalities involved been different, we would not have had the contemporary stereotype of the public philosopher: unshakeably confident in the realm of abstract reasoning; able to say preposterous-sounding things without laughing; content with displaying a child-like naivety about many obvious aspects of the world; but also able to suddenly illuminate the ordinary, and place order into the chaotic, in ways few other minds can match. In short, we would not have had the likes of Professor Agnes Callard and her friends — and philosophy would not have become so wonderfully and enlightening alien.

What they did have was a strong career incentive to produce quirky arguments in favour of the progressive norms emerging at the time, an advanced capacity to handle abstraction and technicality, and huge intellectual confidence. In real life, these would be the last people any sane individual would trust with a moral dilemma. Luckily for the outside world, they tended to have little influence, mainly because nobody could understand what the hell they were talking about.

The same cannot be said for the philosopher geeks in charge of the hugely popular and influential Effective Altruism (EA) movement, which was given new vim last week with the publication of a new book by one of its leading lights, 35-year-old William MacAskill, accompanied by a slew of interviews and puff pieces. An Associate Professor at Oxford, MacAskill apparently still lives like a student, giving away at least a tenth of his income, living in a shared house, wild swimming in freezing lakes, and eating vegan microwave meals. (Student life isn’t what it used to be.)

But his influence is huge, as is that of EA. Beloved of robotic tech bros everywhere with spare millions and allegedly twinging consciences, EA and offshoot affiliate organisations such as GiveWell, 80,000 Hours, and Giving What We Can aim to apply strictly rational methods to moral action in order to maximise the positive value of outcomes for everyone. Unlike many metaphysicians-turned-ethicists, MacAskill sells this in a style that is comprehensible, even attractive, to civilians — and especially to those with a lot of dosh to give away. Quite frankly, this worries me a bit.

The background to EA is austerely consequentialist: ultimately, the only thing that counts morally is maximising subjective wellbeing and minimising suffering, at scale. Compared to better potential outcomes, you are as much on the hook for what you fail to do as for what you do, and there is no real excuse for prioritising your own life, loved ones, or personal commitments over those of complete strangers. MacAskill’s new book, What We Owe The Future: A Million Year View, extends this approach to the generations of humans as yet unborn. As he puts it: “Impartially considered, future people should count for no less, morally, than the present generation.” This project of saving humanity’s future is dubbed “longtermism”, and it is championed by the lavishly-funded Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at Oxford University, of which MacAskill is an affiliate.

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Longtermism is an unashamedly nerdy endeavour, implicitly framed as a superhero quest that skinny, specky, brainy philosophers in Oxford are best-placed to pursue — albeit by logic-chopping not karate chopping. The probability, severity, and tractability of threats such as artificial intelligence, nuclear war, the bio-engineering of pathogens, and climate change are bloodlessly assessed by MacAskill. As is traditional for the genre, the book also contains quite a few quirky and surprising moral imperatives. For instance: assuming we can give them happy lives, we have a duty to have more children; and we should also explore the possibility of “space settlement” in order to house them all.

In this matter, MacAskill seems to be in line with his colleagues at FHI: a 2013 profile of the institute describes how the consensus then was that “the Milky Way galaxy could be colonised in less than a million years, assuming we are able to invent fast-flying interstellar probes that can make copies of themselves out of raw materials harvested from alien worlds”. (The potential of space settlement to solve the current housing crisis appears sadly unaddressed.)

In his previous book, MacAskill described EA as about asking: “How can I make the biggest difference I can?” and using evidence and careful reasoning to try to find an answer. It takes a scientific approach to doing good.” True to form, What We Owe The Future is full of graphs, tables and graphics, and — as with the EA movement generally — the first impression is of something rigorously scientific, free from all those pesky emotional biases that might otherwise hamper rational thought.

Given this emphasis, it is unsurprising that both EA and longtermism seem to have captured the imaginations of the sort of tech-bro entrepreneur fascinated by the possibility of freezing his own head. Bill Gates has endorsed MacAskill as a “data nerd after my own heart”. Elon Musk already funds the FHI, and described MacAskill’s book as “a close match for my philosophy”. Billionaire crypto-trader Sam Bankman-Fried has appointed MacAskill as an advisor to his organisation The FTX Future Fund, dedicated to funding “ambitious projects to improve humanity’s long-term prospects”.

Talking to the New Yorker recently about MacAskill, Bankman-Fried disparaged “neartermist causes” such as “global health and poverty” as “more emotionally driven”, and described himself as never having had a “bednets phase” (referring to EA’s earlier focus on targeting malaria). “I did feel like the longtermist argument was very compelling. I couldn’t refute it. It was clearly the right thing.” Psychopathic as this sounds, it is entirely in keeping with the logic of longtermism: only unreliable and partial emotion could lead you to care more about the lives of real people over those who are yet to exist.

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By Kathleen Stock

Yet of course EA is not actually science as we know it. If an impartial scientific worldview were really in play, at best we’d end up with the conclusion that altruism towards immediate conspecifics is an adaptation that has helped the human species survive, alongside things like language and opposable thumbs. At worst, we’d end up with the idea that it is disguised self-interest. Either way, there would be a strong argument for the absence of any quantifiable, verifiable moral facts about goodness and badness. The scientific worldview, strictly applied, leads to a separation of facts and value, and the demotion of value to a form of psychological projection. It certainly doesn’t lead to any moral concern about what to do with respect to humans that don’t exist yet, or of the idea that we could accurately detect, quantify, and then rank something as ephemeral as human well-being.

And EA isn’t emotion-free, either. In these polarised times, it is tempting to contrast EA with that other wildly successful moral movement of our time, woke progressivism. At face value, while woke seems to be all heart — about oozing empathy for certain minority groups at the expense of more hard-headed and complicated concerns — EA seems to be all head. Actually, though, the two have more in common than you’d think.

Throughout his book, MacAskill covertly uses emotive thought experiments to push the reader’s moral intuitions in the way he wishes them to go. At one point, for instance, the reader is asked to imagine leaving a broken bottle on a pathway, so that a child then cuts herself on the shards. We are then supposed to extend these consequent feelings of guilt and revulsion through time to unborn strangers. Future people are talked about as if they were distressingly disabled by their own non-existence: as “disempowered members of society” who “can’t made their views heard directly” and are “utterly disenfranchised”. MacAskill exhorts us, as if from the pulpit: “Imagine what future people would think, looking back at us debating such questions. They would see some of us arguing that future people don’t matter. But they look down at their hands; they look around at their lives. What is different?”

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Effectively, both longtermism and woke progressivism take a highly restricted number of emotional impulses many of us ordinarily have, and then vividly conjure up heart-rending scenarios of supposed harm in order to prime our malleable intuitions in the desired direction. Each insists that we then extend these impulses quasi-rigorously, past any possible relevance to our own personal lives. According to longtermists, if you are the sort of person who, naturally enough, tries to minimise risks to your unborn children, cares about future grandchildren, or worries more about unlikely personal disasters rather than likely inconveniences, then you should impersonalise these impulses and radically scale them up to humanity as a whole. According to the woke, if you think kindness and inclusion are important, you should seek to pursue these attitudes mechanically, not just within institutions, but also in sports teams, in sexual choices, and even in your application of the categories of the human biological sexes.

In both cases, our original and admirable impulses eventually get buried under so much impersonality that they are obliterated, or at least distorted beyond recognition. And so it is that we find longtermists such as Bankman-Fried worrying more about future non-existents than humans suffering today; or progressives trying to get people removed from their jobs in the name of kindness.

What is perhaps particularly scary about the longtermists, as opposed to the other lot, is not that they are driven by emotion, but that they don’t know they are. And what is perhaps scary about humanity generally is that, in our perennial attraction to movements like EA, longtermism, and woke progressivism — and to the gurus within them — we seem so bent on fooling ourselves into thinking that the ethical world is relatively one-dimensional and hackable. Grand-scale fantasies of saving the world are easy. Personal relationships are hard. Ethics is an art not a science — and, in my experience, people with PhDs are probably not the most reliable guides to it.

Now I have to be slightly careful about what I’m about to write. Because it turns out that the Bishop of Oxford is rather thin-skinned and liable to pick up the phone to his lawyers when challenged — as the author of the Archbishop Cranmer blog discovered this week. The matter at hand was the pastoral support given — or rather, not given — by the Bishop to the Dean of his Cathedral over the last few tumultuous years.

Cranmer’s offence was to repeat words that had already been printed in The Times, and had already been spoken by the Dean, Martyn Percy: “I was despairing, because I felt that actually you would want your bishop to be a person of courage and integrity, somebody who might actually stand up against, pardon the expression, the forces of darkness and oppression, and he just colluded with them.”

Well, the Bishop didn’t pardon the expression and called in his lawyers against the Cranmer blog — though not against The Times. He decided to pick on the little guy, which is not a good look. And the bad blood between the Bishop and the now-former Dean has reached Trollopian proportions, complete with a colourful cast of poisonous featherbedded Dons and warring clerics, all weaponised by expensive lawyers and incompetent PR companies.

When the dons of Christ Church College chose Martyn Percy to be their Dean — uniquely, the boss of both the college and the cathedral — they knew they were taking a bit of a punt. Unlike his predecessors, Percy wasn’t the clubbable type. He wasn’t proper public-school, nor Oxbridge, nor ex-military (like his predecessor). He probably used his fork the wrong way up to eat his peas.

They thought they were being a bit edgy by appointing him. But they also thought they could control him. After all, everyone comes to worship those honey-coloured stones in the end. The privilege is so seductive; they all give in to it eventually. Except, Percy didn’t. And they despised him for it. “[Think] of the Morse episode we could make when his wrinkly body is found,” one of the dons wrote in an email to colleagues.

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This sorry tale all started with a stabbing, when a student attacked her boyfriend while drunk. At the time, Percy was the only person in the college able to respond appropriately. In other words, the college was woefully ill-prepared for pastoral emergencies. It was obvious that things needed to change. And not just pastorally: the pay structure was all wrong, too. So Percy became a hated reformer, a moderniser.

The campaign to oust him was long and expensive, even for a college with deep pockets such as Christ Church. Because according to the statutes of the college, the only way they could get rid of him was to expose his “immoral, scandalous or disgraceful conduct”. So if that’s what it took, that’s the sort of evidence the dons would need to find. And set about finding it they did.

Again and again, they charged him with one form of misconduct or another; 27 charges in the first instance. But when a high court judge came in to adjudicate the matter, Percy was fully cleared. But that was just the start of it. New charges were discovered. He was reported to the police. They investigated and concluded there was no case to answer. Then he was reported for touching someone’s hair. Christ Church were trying to paint Percy as a sex pest. Again the police dismissed the case and another high court judge deemed that it would be “entirely disproportionate that this matter should be referred to a tribunal”.

Christ Church paid millions of pounds to try and trap Percy — and then had to pay him £1.4 million in settlement to leave. By that time, Percy resembled a shadow of his former self — thin and gaunt, he looked like a hunted man. Finally, this week, Percy quit the Church of England. “It’s an unsafe place to work,” he concluded.

Part of his reason for quitting was the lack of support shown to him by his Bishop — the one with the trigger-happy lawyers. Even when charges were dropped against Percy, the bishop refused to give him a licence. “He would not even allow me to preach at my own farewell service,” Percy said.

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So what has gone wrong? The Church recently advertised for a new director of safeguarding, the fourth in four years. The job is impossible: on the one hand, the church has harboured abusers for too long, moving them on to other jobs when their abuse is discovered. On the other, it conducts campaigns against long dead clerics, unable to defend themselves — such as the former Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, who died in 1958. And now we are all suspects.

This sort of thing has happened to me more than once. A car window winds down. A random man shouts out at me from the other side of the road. “Paedo!” he screams, his voice tailing off into a cackle. He doesn’t know me from Adam. But I am wearing a clerical collar. I don’t often wear one these days and this is partly why.

The clerical abuse of children and vulnerable adults is such a grotesque crime I feel like echoing Jesus when he said of abusers: “it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” But precisely because of the visceral nature of our repugnance of such crimes, it is easy for emotions to swamp good judgment or simple justice. The accusation is often enough for guilt to be presumed. Guilty until proven innocent. And proving a negative is often impossible.

Reputations sometimes never recover. One clergyman, Fr Alan Griffin, took his own life in 2020 because of a whispering campaign that he was a child abuser — yet, as the coroner admitted, these claims were “supported by no complainant, no witnesses and no accuser”.

Of course, there certainly has been abuse within the church. Rev. John Smyth was accused of the most horrific beatings of teenage boys in his care on Christian holiday camps. Before being prosecuted, he left England for Zimbabwe, where he was arrested after a naked body of a teenage boy was discovered in his swimming pool. A few years ago, the Church of England commissioned an independent report into the clerical abuse of children. 390 clergy were convicted of such abuse between the Forties and 2018. I don’t know if this makes us clergy greater abusers of children than postmen or accountants or teachers. But clergy are supposed to serve a higher calling; even one such example is one too many.

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So I totally understand why safeguarding has become such an abiding preoccupation in the church. I understand why we are repeatedly vetted and why safeguarding seems to be the number one preoccupation of Diocesan HQ — not that I have all that much confidence in bureaucratic exercises to root out wrongdoers.

But precisely because of the intense emotions that such terrible crimes create in us, it is not hard to appreciate how safeguarding can sometimes over-reach, creating a culture of fear and distrust within an organisation that can make those within it feel “unsafe”. I have never been accused of wrongdoing, but I have changed my behaviour with parishioners. What used to be called “child protection” transmuted into “safeguarding” some years ago, and now protects all who are vulnerable. So now I always leave the door open when I am talking to someone in my study. I prefer to go for a walk with vulnerable people — a category that now includes the bereaved and those seeking any sort of help — rather than see them in the church. The shepherd has become afraid of his flock.

The whole thing has become an unholy mess. There is no fully independent head of safeguarding in the church. Ultimately, it’s for the Bishops to sort out. But they are also supposed to be the pastors to the clergy, and they cannot be the both prosecutor and defence and pastoral support. As Percy put it: “in the face of partisanship, failure to manage conflicts of interest, double standards and incompetence in the CofE’s safeguarding, I finally took a decision: to leave the church”.

The campaign against Percy began because he raised the whole question of safeguarding at Christ Church. The dons then reached for safeguarding as a way of getting rid of him, requisitioning it for persecutory purposes. They may call it safeguarding. But it’s hardly surprising that so few of us feel safe.

Every Thursday: eminent guests and student debaters meet in the hall. It has been a House of Commons for speechifying embryos since 1823. Points of order; references to honourable gentleman; rules-based pedantry; pomposity; ambition. “An incomparable school of politics”, Jan Morris called it.

The show is watched by the fish-cold marble faces of grown up to grandeur Union men: Gladstone, Asquith, Curzon, Macmillan, and Salisbury. To speak here is to join an exclusive club. To speak well here may be the first croaking syllables towards ultimate power. One day: you — yes, you boy! — can be a bust.

The Union is where Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and Jacob Rees-Mogg began their political ascents. But, as you may have gathered, Oxford has launched more than contemporary Tories. The university’s yellow-grey colleges educated Dr Johnson and Sir Walter Raleigh, the only English Pope, Earl Hague and Shelley, ten Viceroys of India, VS Naipaul and Bill Clinton. Oh, and the Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper.

It was summer, 2019. People who read the FT were still unsure why Brexit happened, beyond knowing that whatever made it happen was not good. At that moment Kuper appeared, and wrote an article that was so delicious, and so put-all-the-dots-together, it immediately went viral. What machine spat out Brexit? Oxford. Which wackily irresponsible creche raised Boris Johnson? Oxford. The reason Kuper provided was not good. An old story (unearned privilege; naughty toffs) that has always chilled Britain’s fretful not quite upper-middle classes. It was just what Remainers wanted to read. Finally, an explanation that satisfied all their priors.

Now the viral article is a short and typical non-fiction book. Chums: How A Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK. Kuper’s story is simple. One afternoon he flicked through some old Cherwells, where he had been a student journalist in the late Eighties, and realised that the names there were the same ones bothering the pages of the Times in the late 2010s. Gove, Cameron, and Johnson; Hunt, Hannan, and Rees-Mogg. He had covered them back then, and here they were again, running Britain into the ground by levering it out of the EU. “Though we didn’t realise it, we were witnessing British power in the making,” Kuper writes of his time at Oxford.

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The Brexiteers were not just Brexiteers. They were Oxford Brexiteers. They belonged to a generation that faced no wars, no real poverty, no famines, and not a single earthquake. A generation “without tragedy” — if we ignore Edward St Aubyn, who drifted through Oxford in those years. Instead, la haute had Brideshead Revisited on ITV, champagne, strawberries, and the polished company of sloaney girls in floaty dresses. A dreamy epicurean garden world of velvet and lavender, where young men lofted Nigella Lawson through parties on a sedan chair, far from the Trade Unionists and Left-wing council officers who despised them all.

After Oxford they moved into opinion journalism, then to politics. Bored, nostalgic, and louche, they seized on Brexit as a Thing To Do, and for a game to play. Their dislike of Brussels was personal, not political. The EU might get in the way of their God-given, Oxford-inculcated right to rule. “Brexit was above all their generational grand project,” Kuper argues, “designed to protect the powers of their personal fiefdom of Westminster.”

Other than Dan Hannan, who is approvingly compared to the steely early Bolsheviks, Kuper does not think much of his Oxford Tory Brexiteers. Nevertheless, he is good on Boris. On the sad clown tensions; his “killer” cynicism; his studied Wooster-Waugh role-playing. Then again, no one left in London media should be in this game if they can’t file 1,000 classy words of Boris pop-psych at this point. As Kuper points out himself: “[Boris] possessed the political asset of being all too easy to write about.”

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As for Boris, so for Brexit. So easy to write about, if your aim is to titillate rather than explain. Did Brexit happen because Michael Gove, David Cameron and Boris Johnson learned that “the rules didn’t apply to them” in Oxford in the Eighties, as Kuper suggests? Did Brexit happen, as Fintan O’Toole argued in Heroic Failure, because England’s toffs ‘n’ plebs still harbour a sickly yearning to hear the sound of trumpets on the plains of Omdurman? And did Brexit happen, as every half-drunk Etonian I’ve met since June 2016 has insisted to me, because Boris Johnson got into Pop, and David Cameron didn’t? In a century, these tropes may be of sociological interest to historians, but they will not have much explanatory power.

Admit it: we all like a conspiracy theory. History becomes simpler that way. We can ignore material conditions, and argue that change comes about in the small rooms where men manufacture opinions. Chums is this kind of history. Kuper, like fellow Oxford man Cecil Rhodes before him, believes that ideas, not circumstances, ruthlessly organised and disseminated, are what move things.

Oxford can fool anyone there into thinking this way. Walk around cobbled Radcliffe Square at night, when it gets spooky and hushed, and you may believe that this private place is the inner sanctum of Britain. The centre of the centre, the bullseye, and the only place that really matters. The fact that none of this is true — there is no experience quite as shattering as sneaking into a high-altitude, Nobel Prize-winner stuffed seminar at All Soul’s and realising that half the room is as stupid as you are — doesn’t stop Kuper. “To understand power in today’s Britain,” he writes, “requires travelling back in time to the streets of Oxford, somewhere between 1983 and 1993.”

Oxford always loved a romantic tale like Chums, though Kuper would hate to think he’s written one. The university delights in being the mover behind massive historical events. Romantics say Oxford was responsible for the discovery of America, based on the fact that a paragraph from Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus gave Columbus the idea of a westward passage to India. When Roger Boyle devised his law of gas expansion in his grubby High Street lodgings in 1662, wasn’t he launching the Age of Steam? When Edmund Cartwright — Fellow of Magdalen — invented the power-loom in 1785, didn’t he make the Industrial Revolution inevitable? To this list Kuper adds Brexit. Another Oxford fantasy, like Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, and Carroll’s Wonderland. Made at the Union, delivered in Westminster.

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Kuper is far from romantic about Oxford though. As with the current Vice-Chancellor Louise Richardson, and many students there today, he seems embarrassed that it exists at all. Embarrassed — only after saying what a powerful and important and special place it is, even if it is powerful and important and special in negative ways.

Chums ends up baffled by Oxford. Kuper cannot see the point of the place in our supposed-to-be meritocratic age. Like Hooper walking through the Marchmain’s palatial house in Brideshead Revisited, Kuper is troubled. “It doesn’t seem to make any sense,” says Hooper, “one family in a place this size. What’s the use of it?”

Kuper doesn’t trust the house to clean itself up. Outside forces must intervene, before young over-valeted men with long faces — he raises the ominous spectre of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s nephew play-acting at the Union recently — get big ideas again. So make a use for it. Make it a postgraduate “Institute of Advanced Studies”, he says. Or go even more full FT: convert Oxford into a start-up hub, and make “even more money from corporate conferences and executive education”. He thinks this will make Britain a fairer place.

This is like cutting a man in half and telling him to dance. Kuper wants to maim Oxford — but why stop there? Once you have abolished the undergraduate system that has endured for eight centuries, you may as well bring it all down. Bulldoze it. Cull the Magdalen deer park. Pull down the Sheldonian, crater the Bodleian. Wouldn’t the Union make a wonderful bingo hall?

Don’t pretend Oxford can be fixed, or that it is more powerful than it actually is. Don’t pretend, as Kuper does, that countries can ever have justly selected ruling elites. Either shutter Oxford (and watch in horror as another elite arises from another elite forcing house) — or otherwise accept it for what it is, and always will be. A microcosm of British society: stratified, argumentative, semi-democratic, drunk. An artefact of cruel, cold beauty that will never be fair.