J. McKenzie Alexander, "The Open Society as an Enemy: A Critique of how Free Societies Turned Against Themselves" (LSE Press, 2024)
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Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of NewBooks Network. This is your host, Morteza Haji-Zadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Mackenzie Alexander about a recent book that he has published with London School of Economics Press. The book is called The Open Society as an Enemy, a critique of how free societies turn against themselves.

Mackenzie Alexander is a professor in philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method in the London School of Economics and Political Science. Welcome to NewBooks Network, Jason. Well, thank you very much, Martese. It's an honor to be here. This is a very topical book, Martese.

open society, democracy, free societies. That's something that many people are talking about these days, and I'm really excited to be speaking to you about your book. But before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself and tell us about your field of expertise? All right. So I'm a professor of philosophy at the LSE, and my initial area of research was actually applications of game theory to questions in philosophy of social science.

In particular, I was interested in the evolution of morality and the evolution of social norms. And much of my early work involved looking at game theoretic models to try to understand how behaviors and practices that are aligned with what we think of as moral behaviors and practices might have come about.

That's quite far removed from the topic of the current book. But the way in which I got interested in the current topic is that in thinking about morality and social practices, I became to be increasingly interested in questions about society, the philosophy of society, and moral and political behavior. And

given the times that we're living in, it seemed quite important for me to start investigating some questions related to topics of my earlier research and to try to say something to make a contribution to topics of contemporary debate. And I was really interested in the title of your book, Open Society Today.

as an enemy. And it's obviously your play. It's a play with Karl Popper's book, Open Society and Its Enemies. Can you tell us how the idea of this book came to you and how it relates to Karl Popper's book? Is it a critique of his ideas? Is it a response to him? Can you expand on that, please?

Yes. So I think of the book as essentially a extension of Karl Popper's ideas and an attempt to develop a defense of the open society for a new contemporary time. The reason for the play on words in the title is as follows.

When Karl Popper wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies in 1944, he was working in New Zealand, having fled Europe as a result of the rise of the Nazis. And Popper's primary concern was to develop a critique of the authoritarian and totalitarian regimes that he saw as being the rise of

authoritarian governments that yielded Nazism and others. His concern wasn't just with the Nazis. He was also concerned with communism and Stalin and those kinds of authoritarian regimes as well. But the important point is, for Popper, he was concerned with external threats to the open society, hence the title The Open Society and Its Enemies.

What I became increasingly aware of is that in the 30 years since the end of the Cold War, there has been, as a result of the rise of populism, a shift in attitudes towards the open society so that many of the values and ideals which we initially took to be good things about the open society during the Cold War were

have now come to be viewed by some as threats or vices or dangers

Mm-hmm.

That's a very encouraging response to your question and also the play on words that you had there. And in your book, you have four, let's say, four views of open society. Can you just briefly tell us what those four are? And then we'll get to unpack each one of them as we go ahead.

Yes, thanks. So one of the points that I wanted to make is that when we talk about the open society, the open society isn't just a single concept. It's actually a family of interrelated concepts. It is what philosophers often talk about as a cluster concept. And so part of the book actually aims to disambiguate these different senses of the open society. The first sense of the open society is

That's what I call the cosmopolitan conception of the open society. And this is the idea of a society being open in the sense that it allows for the free movement of people, both into and out of the society. This is a really timely topic because it concerns questions about immigration, whether we should have immigration, how much immigration is permissible, and potential threats or dangers raised by immigration.

The second conception of the open society is what I call the transparent conception of the open society. Here, the idea is that a society is open if there is informational transparency about individuals, organizations, and institutions.

The idea is that open societies are good because informational transparency allows us to hold organizations, institutions, and individuals to account for their actions and decisions. But one of the things that I think all of us have become increasingly aware of with the rise of social media is that the transparency which now exists is

is less about organizations and institutions and much more about the ordinary lives of individual citizens. And this seems to be, if you like, an inversion of the ideal that we had when we were thinking about the value of transparency for the open society.

The third conception of the open society is what I call the enlightenment conception. This involves the free exchange of ideas, the view that debate, deliberation, and discussion are important for developing knowledge, making correct and helpful policy decisions, and generally leading to the betterment of society through increased understanding of the issues that affect all of us.

One of the things that has, I think, been increasingly clear to people if they've been following the news is how this ideal of the free exchange of ideas has come under threat in recent years. This ranges from the no platforming of speakers to the idea that certain ideas should not be discussed anymore.

to the idea that some people want to develop safe spaces where they can go and not be exposed to views which challenge their own most cherished beliefs. I try to defend the value of the free exchange of ideas in the book and suggest that this is a mistaken application of the ideal. The final conception of the open society is what I call the communitarian concept of the open society. This is the idea that

there is a value to diverse heterogeneous societies where there are multiple types of individuals all living side by side

And it tries to resist the idea that diversity is a threat, that communities should be homogenous, and that we should not try to welcome this kind of mixed heterogeneous society.

It also looks at the rise of polarization and how people increasingly interact with members of their own kind and how these polarized groups

can actually be an engine of social conflict. It tries to understand how that happens and what can be done to try to challenge it. So those are the four senses of the open society. And one of the points I would just like to close on is that those four senses interact in important ways. And so challenges to the open society that are generated by, say, the cosmopolitan view or the communitarian view are

cannot be solved in isolation. The interrelated nature of the open society means that we need to think about these problems as being interconnected because attempting to solve one problem in isolation without tackling the others is unlikely to be successful. Mm-hmm.

This was X and U. You actually, in each one of them, each one of these conceptions, concepts of open society, you raised a lot of important points. And I wish we could talk about each and every one of them. But let's talk about the cosmopolitan view of open society. And I think that's one of the most topical ones these days as well. And you rightly mentioned the idea of immigration. It's fascinating.

It's always topical, as you mentioned, whether it's a positive thing to have or with the right amount of immigration. And, you know, there's also a lot of, let's say, blaming the immigrants for any economic issues.

issue that comes up in the host countries. And I guess what's happening around the world, especially in the United States right now with this mass deportation. Can you talk about that aspect of the cosmopolitan view of open society, the idea of porous or arbitrary borders that you discuss in the book?

Yes. So perhaps the point to begin is with the question, why have immigration at all? Should immigration be allowed in any case? The first point that I try to make in this part of the book is that I think that there is a very strong moral argument for allowing immigration, and it has to do with what is known as the birthright lottery. Think of it this way.

The country or citizenship that one is endowed with upon birth is the greatest lifetime determinant of the opportunities and possibilities that a person faces. The citizenship that you initially acquire will likely determine the educational opportunities, the employment opportunities, the social

level of well-being and health that a person has. And the important thing to note about that is a person's initial citizenship is acquired one of two ways, either where they are born. So in the case of the United States, if you're born in the U.S., you are automatically a U.S. citizen or

In the second case, citizenship is acquired based on the citizenship of your parents. And of course, the thing is, neither of those two are something that any single person has any control of whatsoever. And so this creates a birthright lottery that is a powerful generator of a natural injustice across persons.

And so given that, I think there's a strong moral argument to be made for allowing immigration as a way to try to correct this natural injustice. Given that, the question then becomes, how are we to implement immigration so as to correct this natural injustice in a way which is maximally beneficial for all of those concerned?

I think you're absolutely right that there's a lot of concern about the economics and sociological consequences of immigration. But I do spend quite a bit of time in the book trying to argue that these concerns, as valid and legitimate as I think many of them are, have more to do with the way in which immigration has been implemented and managed rather than the very concept of immigration itself.

And what I tried to do in the book is to show that, first of all, there's actually a great deal of evidence from the economic literature showing that immigration is generally economically beneficial for countries.

For example, if you look at the economic literature, a number of different models have been constructed that suggest that if we were to open up borders completely and not have any immigration restrictions whatsoever, that world GDP would be predicted to rise anywhere between 50 and 150 percent. So that would mean...

trillions and trillions of dollars of extra economic growth created from opening up borders. Now, there's a lot to be said about those models, whether the assumptions are plausible and reasonable, but the general point is that a number of models all point in the same direction towards great economic benefits. So I think that suggests that the economic concerns are

primarily about how the wealth that is generated from immigration is distributed across society rather than whether or not immigration is generally economically beneficial for society.

The last part of this section of the book looks at the sociological consequences, because I think this is probably the main point that is a topic of concern. And this is whether immigrants create a social disruption and upheaval. And I think that this, again, has to do with the way in which immigration is handled by the host country. And what I try to argue for in the book is that

immigrants actually have a couple of duties towards the host country into which they enter. And I think that if both the host country and immigrants try to develop the right kind of understanding of this relationship and the various duties that each owe the other, that that can go quite some way towards trying to mitigate these concerns. And this is the...

The existential foundation of a cosmopolitan open society that you defend, right? And the duties that it brings for immigrants towards their host countries. I'm interested to know more about those, the two duties that you highlight in the book. Would be great if you could talk about that as well.

Okay, yeah, happy to talk about that. So the foundation that I develop in the book for thinking about immigration is rooted in existentialism and is fundamentally predicated on respect for the freedom and autonomy of individuals to live life according to their own choosing. It respects the right of...

the rights of individuals to choose and it also respects the freedom of association, namely individuals to choose whom they wish to live with and the groups that they want to form. Now, respecting freedom of association means that if a group forms, if a country forms, that respecting the rights of the individuals is

individuals don't have to, all things considered, allow for new members to join the group. Personally, I think that there are moral reasons to allow individuals to join the group, but if a group chooses not to allow that, then I think we need to respect the rights of the individuals to form that policy. But if a group does choose to allow new members to join, to allow immigration, so to speak, to happen, then I think that people who join that community

have some duties that they owe members of that community as a reciprocal obligation for being allowed to join. The way I think about this is as follows. Let me give a metaphor, try to illustrate the point. Think about...

Think about an ongoing society, a country with all of its members and citizens, as being involved in a kind of an ongoing conversation. And think about this as what happens if there's a conversation at a party amongst several people and a new member joins the conversation. When you join a conversation for the first time as a new member,

It would generally be considered to be rude to try to immediately barge in and change the topic of discussion and force the conversation to go along certain lines according to your own interests. Typically what happens when you join a conversation is you listen to see what the various themes are, what the topics are, try to understand the positions that the various members hold, and then over time you begin to make some contributions and offer your own ideas

ideas to the conversation. And then at some point, you become eventually accepted as a full-fledged participant in the conversation and are capable of shifting and redirecting the ebb and flow of the conversation as if you had been present from the very beginning. I think that's not a bad metaphor for understanding the role that immigrants play in society when they join. So

In virtue of arriving at a new country who have allowed you to arrive, I think there are two duties that immigrants have. When philosophers talk about duties, they often group them into two different types, perfect duties and imperfect duties.

And the way to think about this is as follows. So a perfect duty is something that you must do always. And failures to perform perfect duties are morally blameworthy. Imperfect duties, in contrast, are something that you don't always have to do, but you're not allowed to ignore it entirely.

So, for example, a standard illustration of an imperfect duty is the duty to help someone in need. Depending on the kind of nature of the need and the circumstances and so on, you don't always have to help someone. So, for example, if you are rushing to go see a friend who is ill in hospital and someone is asking you to help them cross the street,

it would be completely understandable if you didn't choose to help the person at that point because the other aim that you're trying to fulfill, namely going to see an ill friend in hospital, is sufficiently great that it overrides the duty to help the person in need at that moment in time. So using this language of perfect and imperfect duties, we can think about the duties that immigrants have as follows. I think there's one perfect duty and one imperfect duty that new immigrants have. The perfect duty is

is this. Do not initially interfere with members of the community carrying on with their time-honored and cherished traditions or social practices. In other words, when you arrive in the community, very much just like arriving at a conversation at a party, do not immediately try to interfere with the ebb and flow of the conversation and to try to radically redirect things.

You know, this is basically showing reciprocal respect for the freedom of the individuals in that society to live life according to the way that they so choose. The point is, when you arrive in a community, it will take time to become acclimatized and become eventually recognized as a full member of that community.

The second duty that immigrants have is what I call the imperfect duty to assimilate. It's an imperfect duty because, again, respect for individual freedom means that the immigrant has

cannot be required to give up everything that is of value to them. No person can be forced to assimilate entirely into a community. But at the same time, I think that immigrants have an obligation to try to take on some of the important essential characteristics of the society into which they've been admitted, again, out of reciprocal respect for those original members for allowing them in the society in the first place.

Now, both of these duties require a lot more to be said about how they would be spelled out. But I think that you can see how these two duties can go some way to try to accommodate some of the concerns that have been raised about immigration. Much of the popular discussion is concerned about immigration.

arriving in a society and leading parallel lives in isolation from the rest of the original community which allowed them in. And I think that that shows a failure of the imperfect duty to assimilate. And then concerns about immigrants arriving in society and trying to kind of immediately eradicate

change the nature of society shows the kind of failure of the perfect duty of non-interference. But the point is that all of these duties have to be understood in the right way. The perfect duty of non-interference doesn't mean that an immigrant is never able to work to kind of change and shape society. It just means that there is a

time and a place and a process by which the immigrant becomes eventually integrated into society and then becomes a full and proper member of the community and is capable of engaging in all of the rights, freedoms, and responsibilities that ordinary members of that community have always had. They have a really good example of these two examples that you brought up here.

And I really, really want to go deep further into it, but I'm aware that there are other things that we need to discuss in the book.

The next, let's say, criteria or view of open society is the transparency of open society. And I do remember that when, for example, we had the age of the Internet, there was this euphoria, new horizons for democracy. But then I guess people became quickly disillusioned because of access to information and freedom of information.

It could be a positive thing at the same time there are concerns about privacy or how big data companies are manipulating people or even their choices. They're manipulating even the political orientation they might have in elections, I'd say. Can you expand on that idea of transparent view of open society and how it can be an enemy? That's maybe one part of the question. The second part,

is that do you believe that access to information can foster a stronger, more coherent society or no? Right. Okay, good. So let me take the first point about the way in which the informational transparency can be dangerous. So

First of all, one of the great concerns about the amount of information that is collected in the age of the Internet is the way in which apparently innocuous pieces of information can be put together to generate a much more detailed information.

and understanding of the preferences of the person. So one of the examples I give in the book is an illustration about how an American company was able to design a predictive metric based on the purchases that people made in the store so as to be able to guess whether or not the woman who was making these purchases was pregnant or not. And the reason that they were interested in doing this was because

If you could predict when someone was pregnant and you could engage in targeted advertising at that point in time, the thought was you could effectively capture the loyalty of that customer so that as they then took care of themselves over pregnancy, gave birth, and then bought all the things that were necessary for a new baby, the store would be able to keep that customer loyal to them.

And it turns out that they were able to do this pretty successfully by only tracking whether or not the woman bought, say, about 20 to 25 products. They were able to design a highly accurate predictive measure.

In addition, separately, another company worked on developing a predictive algorithm looking at people's social media feeds to try to predict the sexual orientation of individuals.

Now, you can see how that could certainly be a cause for concern when you look at the number of political regimes around the world where homosexuality is bound. If you could look at just, say, certain social media feeds, photographs and whatnot, and get a fairly accurate indicator of whether or not someone was homosexual, that could be greatly abused by authoritarian regimes in those countries.

And then to give a third example, if you think about trying to gauge and predict people's political orientation, again, using social media feeds, that could allow political operatives to engage in targeted advertising around elections where people are actually fed highly specific individualized advertisements for certain candidates that deliberately

play upon the unconscious or even conscious biases, preferences and whatnot of individuals to try to influence them to vote certain ways. This was one of the worries that we saw about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. So the point about this part of the book is that the sheer amount of information that's collected and our ability to aggregate it and analyze it

suggests that the transparency of individuals effectively allows our information to be weaponized to be used against us to influence our behavior in ways that we're not even aware of

and to shape our actions in ways that I think raise a real threat to our autonomy. So that's the danger of the transparent conception of the open society. And I should just say that this is one of the places where I think this conception of the open society is a real danger. I think this

use of our information against us is something that we need to think about how to respond to as a society.

But in terms of benefits of it, I mean, social media has some huge advantages as well in that it allows people to be able to find like-minded individuals with similar interests, political alignments and whatnot, who they would not have been able to find in times before the internet. If you think about how difficult it was for, um,

for homosexuals in, say, the 40s and 50s in the United States to find other like-minded individuals, that was really quite challenging. The internet has great opportunities for mobilization of people of a wide variety of interests, and I think that is a very good thing. And you talked about Cambridge Analytics. Do you think that...

And I do see how it could be that's a double-edged weapon. Do you see this open society being a threat to democracy, given the discussions these days about, you know, the rise of conspiracy theories, misinformation and disinformation? Do you think it could also undermine democracy? I think that there is a real risk about that. The

The point about conspiracy theories is an interesting one. And I think that this has to do with another aspect about contemporary society. I think one of the reasons why conspiracy theories are able to flourish so readily is for several reasons. First of all,

The internet allows conspiracy theories to spread at just an absolutely phenomenal rate. I mean, it's so incredibly easy for people to push out misinformation or disinformation compared to the past. But secondly, I think that a lot of times, and this actually, if I can make a segue to a different part of the book, this is kind of related to the communitarian conception of the open society. I think a lot of times people,

people's beliefs serve as signifiers of the social groups with which they identify. And I think that what's interesting about certain conspiracy theories is that they often become associated with certain groups. For example, if you look at the United States, there is an association or correlation between belief in QAnon and the Republican Party.

I think that some statistics have suggested that somewhere around 20 to 25 percent, sometimes even higher, of the Republican Party believe to some extent in the QAnon conspiracy theories. Now, part of the reason I think this is possible is because even if a conspiracy theory is false, if there's kind of no evidence of the beliefs that are associated with it,

That those beliefs can be held because they have very few implications on the day-to-day life of ordinary individuals.

So if a certain theory, if a conspiracy theory, if a certain set of beliefs become associated with a group with which a person identifies, a person very much values their social identification with that group, then they might very well take on those beliefs as signifiers of their group identity. And the fact that those beliefs might be false is

has very little implications for their day-to-day life. To take another example, think about people who deny climate change. Quite often, people who deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change often do so because that is associated with a political group of which they're a member. And the reason they're able to do that is because

Climate change is a phenomenon that stretches over decades. The solutions that we need to adopt, again, will take decades to implement and will take decades in order for the change to be seen.

The day-to-day implications of denying climate change have very little impact on a person's life. And in many ways, denying climate change might actually allow an individual to have a slightly higher standard of living because you can drive the big gas-guzzling SUV and not feel bad about it. You can fly all around the world and not worry about offsetting your carbon emissions. Mm-hmm.

So the point about conspiracy theories and the Internet is, I think, a really interesting one because of this fact that beliefs can actually take on this dual function. Right. They can actually serve as indicators of a person's social identity. And that value is so great for the person that it can actually override the fact that those beliefs are, in fact, false. Right.

And you also have this really great argument there that with open society, a transparent view of open society, we have lost our privacy. But this loss of privacy is like a return to the past. How is it like a return to the past? Oh, good. So the idea that it's a return to the past is an idea that I've...

acquired by reading the work of Jared Diamond. And Jared has a fantastic book called The World Until Yesterday. And what he points out in that book is that when you think about the development of vast, complex civilizations and societies and cities that we currently see all around the world, that in terms of the, if you like, the kind of evolutionary history of humanity, that is just a very short period

blip of time. For most of human history, we tended to live in small bands of individuals, maybe no more than 100, 150. And living in these small bands without very much technology and so on

Basically, everyone knew everyone else and everyone knew what other people were doing. So the idea that the current level of technology is a return to the past is that, well, if you go back 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 years and you look at what humanity was like then, you would basically find people living in small communities where everyone knew what everyone else was doing.

Now, that said, I don't think that that is necessarily a good thing. In part of what I talk about in the book, I point out how some anthropologists have noted that even if you look at small-scale societies now where you find...

groups of humans living under conditions quite similar to that, even in those communities, people do find the kind of presence of others to be overwhelming at times, and they do still try to seek out their own privacy and opportunities to be on their own. But I think that

There is a real value to be had in privacy, and I think that the erosion that we're seeing of that in contemporary society is dangerous. For one, it can yield a great pressure to conform to

And I think that that is potentially dangerous because it interferes with what the philosopher John Stuart Mill called experiments in living. It means that people aren't able to live their life in the way that they choose, and it prevents people from being able to experiment in alternative forms of life.

to see whether or not there might be some ways of arriving at social arrangements that constitute an improvement on what has gone before. If you have a completely transparent society, that provides an opportunity for social norms to be very heavily enforced and can be a real force of conformity.

So I think that what we need to try to do with the transparent conception of the open society is to try to find a way of dealing with the existence of social media, the internet, and to try to find a combination of changes in social practices, changes in policy, changes in regulation, so as to try to strike a much better balance in terms of how the information of individuals is utilized.

I fear that that is almost a Herculean, if not Sisyphean task, given the difficulty. But I think it's something that's incredibly important, and it's a conversation that we very much need to have in society. Let's move on to the third concept of open society, the Enlightenment concept that you briefly introduced today.

at the beginning of this podcast. I'm interested to know exactly what it is. If you could expand on that and also tell us if this Enlightenment concept of the societies is the same as a liberal society?

Right. Okay. Happy to do so. So by the Enlightenment conception of the open society, what I am thinking about is a society that is devoted to the free exchange of ideas and the exploration of the reasons, evidence, and arguments that can be given in support of various positions or against other types of views.

I don't think that is the same as a liberal society, at least in how the term liberal is understood today, meaning left-leaning on the political spectrum. I think you can have societies that are dedicated to the free exchange of ideas that cover all areas of the political spectrum, liberal, conservative, and other fields

political alignments as well. I think what is important about the Enlightenment conception is just that people are very much critical about what they believe and why they believe it. This is the part of the book that I think is probably closest in alignment with Popper's conception of the open society, because one of the things that Popper was a staunch advocate of

is what he called critical rationalism. And this is essentially the idea that we are always subjecting our beliefs to the most severe testing and critique in order to make sure that we believe what we do for the right reasons and proportionate to the evidence that we have for it.

And one of the reasons why I think this conception of the open society has come under threat is because, as I mentioned earlier, that there's been a bit of a backlash against the idea that we should be able to have free and open exchanges of ideas. A number of people have tried to prevent speakers from talking on college campuses if they disagree with the views that are being articulated online.

We've seen calls for the creation of safe spaces where people can prevent being exposed to certain kinds of ideas. Some people have expressed concerns about the use of trigger warnings on, say, college syllabi, where people are kind of warned in advance about being exposed to particular types of ideas that they might find upsetting.

Now, I think that this debate is actually much more nuanced than is typically represented in the media. So I actually spend quite some time in this part of the book looking through trigger warnings, safe spaces, and so on. And I do actually conclude at the end of this

that much of the concern regarding those is overblown and that there's really kind of very little of a threat posed by those calls with respect to the Enlightenment conception of the open society. I think that no platforming of speakers is a more serious threat, and I think that there is a lot to be said against that practice. But even so, I mean, this is a very kind of nuanced area because there's

you can see reasons why

you wouldn't want to give every view a platform on a college campus all the time because the mere act of giving a speaker a platform is to some extent a kind of endorsement that that view is at least worth airing the arguments for. And sometimes there are views that are sufficiently, say, biased

incorrect, morally problematic, or whatever, that you wouldn't want to give a platform for those views all the time. But that doesn't mean that occasionally those views shouldn't be given a platform some of the time. For example, one of the things I talk about in the book is think about those individuals who deny the Holocaust happened. I mean,

Part of the reason why I think universities have an obligation to occasionally give speakers who are Holocaust deniers a platform is because it's important to interrogate those views and to have a correspondent who then provides a robust argument showing why those views are false.

These issues need to be revisited occasionally so that future generations of students and scholars can be reminded of the arguments of, say, Holocaust deniers and be shown the evidence and the reasons for why those are bad arguments and what mistakes are being made. I mean, you wouldn't want to do that all the time.

But it is occasionally educationally useful to be reminded of certain views and why they're mistaken. So that's why I say that even the no platforming of speakers is, I think, somewhat more nuanced than is often recognized. Yeah.

And what do you mean by moralization of knowledge and how could it present a challenge to open society? Oh, right. Okay. So in talking about the moralization of knowledge, this is another point where I'm expanding upon Popper's views from his book, The Open Society and Its Enemies.

One of the things that Karl Popper was concerned about was what he called the politicization of knowledge. And this is the idea that certain knowledge claims become inextricably linked with certain political views.

Perhaps the best example in the contemporary time is, say, the existence of anthropogenic climate change. That's a view which I think, at least in the United States, has become deeply embedded in this political discourse. And so the claim that climate change is happening immediately places you on many people's, in many people's minds, on one part of the political divide. It's an unavoidably political claim to make.

In the Soviet Union, an example of politicization of knowledge there was the Soviet scientist Lysenko developed an alternative theory of evolution, which he thought was more compatible with the communist ideologies that were favored by all of the political elites.

The difficulty with Leschenko's views is that they were false and that when they attempted to implement them on the collectivist farms, it just led to absolute disasters. But those beliefs continue to be promulgated because of how those knowledge claims had been politicized. By the moralization of knowledge, what I mean by that is how certain claims in contemporary society, certain knowledge claims,

take on an ineliminably moral aspect. And so the idea that there are certain claims that can be made only by people who have a certain moral status or a certain moral standing, or that certain knowledge claims have moral implications which are kind of independent reasons for believing in them or taking them to be true.

So, now, this is, I think, a point which is not as well established as the politicization of knowledge, but you can see this as something which I think is kind of increasingly becoming part of the contemporary conversation, the idea that certain knowledge claims are

ones which should be treated with suspicion because of the, if you like, the kind of moral valence that is surrounded with them. We see a lot of this in terms of identity politics. We see a lot of this in terms of relationships between certain groups, races, and ethnicities. And I think that the moralization of knowledge, just like the politicization of knowledge, is something which is a potential threat to the Enlightenment

conception of the open society and it's something that we need to be aware of and be on guard against. And earlier you mentioned cancer culture and this, let's say, the so-called crisis of free speech, which I think it's more or less an American phenomenon and a lot of it is more, you know, there's not much substance to it because I've

I've done my research and I've read a lot of articles on this.

Some of the people whose discussions or talks are sensitive, they deliberately try to stage it in a university where they know it's going to be cancer and they deliberately use it to get cancer in order to get onto media and talk about this whole cancer culture. But we can't deny the fact that there are sensitive topics. You mentioned a few of them earlier as well. I'm interested to know how we can navigate these issues

let's say, difficult terrains without limiting or censoring free speech. And at the same time, also observe the sensitivities that might be there.

Okay, that's a great question. So to begin with, I just want to, first of all, acknowledge the point that you made about there being certain types of individuals who seem to deliberately cultivate these controversies. In the book, I actually identify, if you like, three ideal types of speakers who, if you like, seem to fall on the wrong side of the Enlightenment conception precisely because of the fact that they seem to be deliberately...

courting controversy. One of these ideal types I'd label the provocateur. This is the kind of individual who deliberately talks on sensitive, controversial topics, but in a way which is deliberately designed to fuel outrage and to wind people up rather than actually have a reasonable discussion about this.

So I think the first point that needs to be made on this is that the discussions and deliberation and debate have to take place in good faith. There's an assumption that people are actively trying to advance reasons in support of a claim.

They are not deliberately engaging in kind of overt political acts. And they are, if you like, you know, trying to find the truth of the matter to the extent that we can speak of that, right? It is a good faith conversation where people are attempting to understand the viewpoint of another and to take their reasons and weigh them against the reasons that, you know, they might have for believing an alternative view.

So I think that alone goes quite some way towards trying to mitigate some of these concerns, because I think a lot of discussion doesn't actually take place in good faith. I mean, how many times have you heard a politician being interviewed where they're given a question?

And instead of actually attempting to respond to the question in real time, they just simply reiterate the talking point as if the question hadn't been put to them. And they just say over and over and over again the same talking point. That's not a good faith interview. They're not actually trying to respond to the question that's being asked.

Now, the second point I want to make is how do we try to deal with sensitive topics? Well, I think here there's a very important point to keep in mind. And I think that is the reason why people are inclined to avoid certain sensitive topics.

The reason is that there's a natural concern on some parties to try to reduce certain conceptions of certain harms that might be done to individuals either in the audience or in the broader society.

Now, I think there's a very important question to be raised about the concept of harm that's being invoked here, because the harm that is generated from having a conversation and discussion of ideas is not the kind of harm that, say, John Stuart Mill had when he first articulated the harm principle over 100 years ago. The harm that Mill was concerned about preventing was kind of concrete,

physical material harm, right? This is the kind of source behind the quote, you know, your freedom and right to be able to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose, right? You're free to do certain things as long as it doesn't actually cause harm to others, right?

But the notion of harm that's being involved in these discussions actually involves what we might call a type of ideational harm, right? Where certain claims about harms being done are simply because people are exposed to certain ideas or they hear certain claims being made that...

that affect them in some way. And I think we need to be more careful about understanding claims of harm being made on those grounds. Now, that said, even if we do want to accept the concept of certain notions of ideational harm,

There's a question about what we should do in order to try to minimize harms, because there's a question about whether we are concerned with, say, trying to minimize harm at a particular instant or moment of time, or whether we want to try to minimize harms over the long run. And I think this is most salient when we think about certain topics that are raised regarding identity politics, understanding of certain groups, and so on, because there's

If there is a discussion that is being held on a sensitive topic and people make a claim about certain harms being done, say, during that debate, during that kind of deliberation on this stage in a university. Well, there might be certain kinds of ideational harm which could conceivably be done as that discussion takes place.

But that discussion is probably a necessary precondition to moving society towards a better, more enlightened understanding of the topic, which will be very important and helpful for trying to reduce harms over the long run. And so the idea is, I mean, think about this in terms of like,

relationships, right? You know, anyone who's been in an extended relationship knows that from time to time, occasionally it's important to have a conversation which might make the individuals involved feel a little uncomfortable at the moment. But having that uncomfortable conversation yields greater harmony over the long run, right? And so we might think of that conversation

analogy as being relevant for how we deal with sensitive topics in these cases. As long as people are engaging in good faith to try to achieve improved understanding of the views of all parties involved and they discuss these topics with appropriate care, then sometimes uncomfortable conversations which some people might

object to at a moment in time are actually important because it does tend to minimize harm over the long run. And the last concept of open society you have is the communitarian concept of open society.

Can you define that and tell us how it relates to... And I must say that I was surprised that you talked about Henry Burke's... I didn't know about that aspect of his work and how this concept, in a way, was introduced by him as well. Can you talk about that, please? Yeah, so the communitarian conception of the open society that I'm interested in is societies which...

very diverse, mixed groups of many types of people in creating a rich, heterogeneous environment for all involved. Now, this part of the book is given the title Modern Tribes, and the reason I gave it that title is because this notion of the open society, if you like, kind of rejects

what Berkson and others have kind of called like the tribal existence or the tribal mentality of certain individuals. And this involves the idea of a tight-knit group of individuals who care only for their own type and they view the world in a complete us versus them mentality, right? Where the group kind of binds together in support of its own against everyone else.

And the reason I was interested in this conception of the open society is I think that over the last few decades, we have seen an increase in polarization in Western democracies, whether this be along political lines or along other types of social identity lines. There is, I think, a much greater sensitivity to the group identity of individuals.

and seeing the world in terms of us versus them interactions where that's divided along group identity lines. Now, one of the reasons why I think this is interesting and worth mentioning

thinking about is because of a concept known as intersectionality. Now, intersectionality was originally introduced by feminist academics who were interested in how certain kinds of disadvantages

can multiply or are non-additive in nature. So, for example, if in the United States you think about the social disadvantages that, say, women face and the social disadvantages that, say, black individuals face,

The difficulties that a black woman faces in the United States are not simply the kind of sum of those different disadvantages that are kind of faced by being a woman and by being a black individual. There are kind of non-additive aspects to it.

When I talk about intersectionality in the book, I treat intersectionality much more broadly, just thinking about it in the sense that all of us have multiple social identities. And we sit then at the intersection of all of these different social identities, group identities at the same time.

Now, the reason why this is interesting is that if we think about how group identities can yield these us versus them interactions, the fact that we have this rich intersectional identity belonging to multiple groups all the time is

is that which group identity is made salient for any particular social interaction is something which is actually capable of being, if you like, manipulated, right? So just let me give myself as an example. So I'm both a US citizen. I'm also a UK citizen. I'm also not a member of any kind of religious affiliation.

I'm an academic. I'm a professor of philosophy. These are kind of like all different kind of aspects to my identity. Now, which one of those is actually made salient in any particular interaction I have can be an important influence on how that interaction unfolds.

And so now this is, I think, an interesting link to what we talked about when we talked about the transparent view of the open society. If you think about interactions being mediated over social media or along other lines, which of our social identities is made salient?

is, if you like, a point of potential intervention by a third party. And so if you imagine kind of a moderator on a social media group, or if you imagine the algorithm on social media choosing which feeds to show you,

If you wanted to cultivate conflict, you would try to make certain group identities more salient than others. If you wanted to try to cultivate social cohesion and community building, you would draw attention to other aspects of people's group identities. And so I think this is a really important point

point to pay attention to because it is, you know, group identities are a really powerful driver of conflict. In the book, I talk about some really fascinating experiments that were done in social psychology where that shows just how incredibly sensitive people are to social identities and how by making a social identity salient, you

you can really influence conflict between members of the group and members who are not in the group. And this communitarian aspect of open society and also all the social identities you just mentioned, I think it also goes back to the first point you mentioned about the

the first cosmopolitan concept of open society, it could give rise to conflicts among different social identities. And I guess more or less that's what we see these days in different parts of the world, conflict among different social groups in a society. How do you think it can be resolved?

That's a great question. One of the things that has been suggested as a way for trying to reduce group conflict is what is known as the contact hypothesis. And the way it works is really quite straightforward. So the idea is that

If you allow members of different groups to have contact with each other in certain carefully engineered environments so that that contact has positive association with it,

that the more contact that people have of that type with members of the group, the more that will tend to reduce conflict between members of that group when they have contact outside of that environment. So to give an example, so...

If you have, so suppose that say you're a liberal activist who has concern with a number of certain social issues. If you don't have any friends who are politically conservative,

Whenever you interact with people who are politically conservative, the way in which you're going to approach that interaction will be largely based on stereotypes and certain conceptions of conservatives that you've gleaned from

say sociological scripts or certain views that you've acquired from, you know, what books, media or kind of word of mouth and whatever, you won't have any actual kind of concrete human relations that you've cultivated over time to help guide that interaction.

And as a result, when you interact with the person who's conservative and you're just relying on stereotypes, you will be less aware and attuned to the actual, practical, real concerns that members from that political alignment naturally have. On the other hand...

If you do have some friends who are conservative and you know that they are good people who are trying to do the right thing and they have views who are different of yours and you understand their reasons, you'll be more likely to actually view that interaction as not necessarily a source of conflict, but as a

source of trying to understand why they think differently from you and what the points of commonality are. And I think that that's a really important way of trying to reduce and mitigate some of these kinds of conflicts. And I think that you can see why

polarization kind of fuels this type of group conflict. And you can also see why attempting to ban immigration, as I talked about in the cosmopolitan conception of the open society, can itself also be an influence of the polarization of society. This is, I think, kind of an interesting example of how all of these different conceptions of the open society interact with

If people are in polarized groups where they tend to only interact with members of their own kind, if the sole conception of non-group members is gleaned from social media where the algorithm feeds them misinformation or stereotypes about conceptions of the other, then...

then people might try to campaign for reducing immigration on grounds that immigration allows people who are not like us into the society. Then that yields a rejection of the cosmopolitan conception of the open society.

And, you know, that, and I think that this is, you know, potentially dangerous. Why? I think that there's a real value in having rich, diverse, multicultural societies where there's a lot of diversity of thought and so on. Why is that? Well,

Think of this as like the cultural analog of biological diversity. Why is it potentially dangerous to have a group where, say, every individual is genetically the same?

If you have a group where everyone is genetically the same, that means that group is vulnerable to, say, a certain type of virus coming in, taking hold and spreading throughout the entire population. And if that particular genotype is vulnerable to that virus, it could wipe out that group very easily.

An absence of genetic diversity makes group vulnerable to certain viruses. And I think there's a cultural analog to that. If you have a culture where everyone thinks the same, where everyone has the exact same beliefs, then that makes that group susceptible to bad memes, right? It allows certain beliefs to kind of spread and diffuse throughout society very quickly. And if the beliefs are...

bad beliefs and they don't meet any resistance because of the cultural, you know, the absence of cultural diversity, then that means the group is vulnerable to the spread of bad beliefs. So I think that's one argument in favor of diverse societies. This was, I think, kind of an

hopeful way to bring this podcast to an end. But before we come to the end of this podcast, I'm keen to ask if there is another project or a book you might be working on

So I've got a couple of ideas for book projects that I'll be working on in the future. I haven't decided exactly which order I'm going to do these. One book project is on kind of a return to topics I've worked on in the past. So I have a

one book called The Structural Evolution of Morality that looks at how we can use computational models to understand the emergence of moral beliefs. And I'm thinking about a book project called The Rise of Computational Philosophy that looks at the general use of computational models and philosophy kind of across the board. I do have a second book project in mind called

of morality slash knowledge, which is kind of a development or an extension of Foucault's idea of power knowledge that looks at the point we talked about earlier, the moralization of knowledge, how that plays out in society, how it comes about and some of the risks that it presents.

Both of those two projects are in the very early stages, and so it'll be a while before they actually come to fruition. If past experience is any guide, it takes me about seven years to generate and complete a book. So I would ask your listeners to have a bit of patience if they're interested. Yeah, and you have recently finished this book, and I know that authors usually tend to take a little bit of a break. Writing a book is no easy task, of course. Take a bit of a break before they embark on another project.

I do like to just emphasize to our listeners that this is a highly accessible book, Open Society as an Enemy. It's highly accessible. One thing I really liked about the book is that you have broken down a chapter to several parts and the headings are quite, quite interesting as well. For example, the first part says,

Don't Come Around Here No More, which is about the cosmopolitan conception of open society. There are seven headings there. One of them is Go Your Own Way. It's the economy, stupid. Nowhere Man. And then you have concluding remarks at the end of each section, which makes it highly readable, accessible. And it's not quite like other academic book, which is quite dense. And I'm absolutely sure that, as I mentioned at the beginning, this is a topical book. It talks about

cancer culture, immigration, open society, information, all the topics that we are talking about these days as well. And another good aspect of the book is that it's not really a dry book.

narrative, but there's a bit of humor in there as well, which makes reading it quite a pleasurable experience as well. Jason, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us. The book we just discussed was The Open Society is an Enemy, published by LSE Press. Thank you so much, Martez. It's been fantastic to have this conversation with you. Thank you very much for taking the time.