Crushing certain plants could add up infinitesimally. A little error here would multiply in 60 million years, all out of proportion… A dead mouse here makes an insect imbalance there, a population disproportion later, a bad harvest further on, a depression, mass starvation, and finally, a change in social temperament in far-­flung countries. Something much more subtle, like that. Perhaps only a soft breath, a whisper, a hair, pollen on the air, such a slight, slight change that unless you looked close you wouldn’t see it. Who knows?

Eckels accidentally crushes a butterfly.

Returning to the now there are signs of a devastating ripple effect. The company logo now reads: “SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST. YU NAIM THE ANIMALL. WEE TAEK YU THAIR. YU SHOOT ITT.” A despotic strongman has just been elected President. And something else has happened, too — something much worse. The story ends: “There was a sound of thunder.”

We all stand to the distant future as Jurassic Eckels stood to now. Anything you do might have momentous consequences in 500 years. Not stopping at a traffic light might mean not hitting a fly; that fly has several million descendants; one of these is mutated, bringing a pandemic to Europe… If you look at it from far enough, everything you do is fraught with the gravest consequence. But what they will be — well, who can say? And from that perspective, our attitude to the distant future can look deeply selfish. The truth is that most people don’t care much about it. Shouldn’t we?

That we should care, much more than we actually do, is the main message of long-termism. According to long-termism, “positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time”. Probably the most popular and influential long-termist is Will MacAskill. MacAskill is Professor of Philosophy at Oxford University and director of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research.

MacAskill is best known for his work on effective altruism. This movement, which until recently has been increasingly popular among the most influential tech entrepreneurs, is based on the idea that there are more and less effective ways to “do good”; so if you are going to do good then you should do it as effectively as possible.

“Until recently”: as most readers will know, things have taken something of a turn in recent days. The cryptocurrency exchange FTX, valued earlier this year at about $30 billion, has suddenly collapsed. Its founder and CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, is something of an avatar of the movement. In 2012, when Bankman-Fried was still a student at MIT, MacAskill persuaded him that the thing to do, if he really wanted to do good, was to get rich first himself, and then improve the world. Bankman-Fried certainly got rich, for a while. Whether he improved the world, or anything much, is another question.

I have no intention of rushing into judgment on these events, about which I know very little. I do believe that there are sound philosophical objections to long-termism. and indeed to any form of Effective Altruism that entails it. I spell out some of these here. One such objection may be that Effective Altruism, or the ideas behind it, threaten common-sense moral values like integrity and honesty. But it is too soon to say — certainly too soon for me to say — whether it is that particular tension that is now being played out.

In any case, effective altruism plainly did, at least for a while, persuade a lot of important or at least wealthy people. Of course, that doesn’t settle whether it is true. Whether it is true depends on what you mean by “effective”.

MacAskill et al. interpret it broadly in line with utilitarianism, which prescribes “the greatest good for the greatest number”. This in turn can also mean quite a lot of things; depending on what it means, effective altruism might turn out to be demanding in surprising ways. For instance, it may enjoin you to spend your next charitable dollar on malaria charities rather than cancer charities. The best cancer interventions prevent a death caused by cancer for each $19,000 spent, whereas the best malaria interventions prevent a death caused by malaria for each $3,000 spent.

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And it may also enjoin you to spend much more attention and also money on the distant future. After all, barring catastrophe the distant future probably contains many more people than the present or near future. So “the greatest good for the greatest number” means prioritising the future, possibly the very distant future, doesn’t it?

Indeed it does, according to long-termism. And MacAskill’s recent book, What We Owe the Future, is an extended defence and application of long-termism. The earlier chapters of the book emphasise just how big the future is, and just how much influence we can have over it, and why all this matters. In later chapters, MacAskill applies long-termism to the analysis of specific threats. These include social collapse and “value lock-in”: the idea that we might adopt, irrevocably, a set of moral values that lead humanity into deep and eternal darkness. (A crucial defence against that, in my view, is unbreakable protection for free speech.) They also include a Terminator-style takeover of humanity by Artificial Intelligence. (A colleague calls it “Attack of the Killer Toasters”.)

Finally, MacAskill tells the reader “what to do”; and here he recapitulates the basic ideas of effective altruism. It turns out that the effective altruist has more career options than you’d expect. The most good that you can do means the most good that you can do; and as Aristotle more or less says, this means matching the needs of the world with the talents and values of the individual. MacAskill’s utopia, or at least the path to it, has a place for software engineers and tennis stars as well as charity workers.

Before returning to long-termism, I should disclose that I taught MacAskill myself, back when he was an undergraduate and I was a junior lecturer. This was many years ago. And I didn’t teach him anything glamorous, like the ethics of the future. For us it was nerd central: philosophical logic, which covers the semantics of conditionals, the nature of reference, and related thrills and spills. But even from that crabby perspective he was clearly brilliant. His tremendous success in the following years didn’t surprise me, though it did give me great pleasure. I did think some of his ideas wrong or questionable. But my attitude to MacAskill was (I imagine) more like Aristotle’s feelings about his star pupil than Obi-Wan Kenobi’s feelings about his.

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Anyway, this is what MacAskill says:

“The idea that future people count is common sense. Future people, after all, are people. They will exist. They will have hopes and joys and pains and regrets, just like the rest of us… Should I care whether it’s a week, or a decade or a century from now? No. Harm is harm, whenever it occurs.”

It is worth thinking more about the underlying philosophical attitude. Most of us care more about people who are alive now, and perhaps also their children, than about their descendants four millennia from now. We don’t care about them at all. If MacAskill is right, then that’s a serious mistake. Is it, though? It is a vexed question. Philosophers and economists writing on climate change have discussed it extensively. I was surprised to see relatively little discussion of that literature in What We Owe the Future. Here, though, it’s worth emphasising two points.

The first concerns what is realistic. Throughout history people have, on the whole, cared more about those closer in space and time — their family, their neighbours, their generation. Imagine replacing these natural human concerns with a neutral, abstract care for “humanity in general”. In that world, we would care as much about the unseen, unknown children of the 25th millennium as about our own. That may be admirable to some people — at any rate some philosophers. But it is hardly realistic.

“She was a… diminutive, plump woman, of from forty to fifty, with handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if…they could see nothing nearer than Africa!” Mrs Jellyby — that eminent Victorian philanthropist who left her own home and family in squalor — was always meant, and has always been taken, as a figure of fun. The same goes for the modern equivalent of Dickensian space-Jellybism. I mean time-Jellybism, which reckons the distant future as important as the present. I don’t expect that to change soon.

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None of this is surprising. There is no proof, no argument, that can prove anyone wrong to care about one thing more than another. High-minded philosophers from Plato to Kant have imagined, and blood-soaked tyrants from Robespierre to Pol Pot have enforced, a scientific ethics. But ethics is not a science, although MacAskill’s approach can make it look like one. MacAskill “calculates” value using the “SPC framework”, which assigns numerical values to the significance, persistence and contingency of an event — say, an asteroid impact or a nuclear war — and then plugs these into a formula. The formula tells you how much we should now care about — in practice, how many present dollars we should be spending on — that future contingency.

But really neither maths, nor logic, nor empirical evidence, nor all these things put together, can ever tell you how much to care about anything. There is, as Hume said, a gap between “is” and “ought”. Science, reason, logic, observation, maths — all these tell us how things are; but never how they ought to be. Instead our moral judgments arise, as Hume also said, largely from our sympathetic feelings towards others. Putting it crudely: the root of moral evaluation that seeing a fellow human in pain causes pain to you, and the more vividly you observe it, the stronger the feeling. Joe Gargery is a finer moralist than Mrs Jellyby could ever be.

And is it any wonder that our strongest feelings — and so our deepest moral concerns — are for those that we see most often; those most like us; those who inhabit our time, and not the unknown future victims of unknown future catastrophes? And does anyone seriously expect this to change? As Swift said, you could never reason a man out of something he was never reasoned into. As for the time-Jellybys, who would sacrifice God knows how many people to material poverty today for a 1% shot at an interplanetary, interstellar, intergalactic future in 25000AD — though MacAskill is usually more careful — well, if all they ever get is mockery, they will have got off lightly.

The second point is that it’s hardly obvious, even from a long-term perspective, that we should care more about our descendants in 25000AD — not at the expense of our contemporaries. To see this, we can apply a thought-experiment owed to the Australian philosopher Frank Jackson. Suppose you are a senior policeman controlling a large demonstration. You have a hundred officers. You want to distribute them through the crowd to maximise your chances of spotting and extinguishing trouble. There are two ways to do it — you might call them the “Scatter” plan and the “Sector” plan. The Scatter plan is as follows: each officer keeps an eye on the whole crowd. If he spots a disturbance, he runs off to that part of the crowd to deal with it.

The Sector plan is as follows: each officer surveys and controls one sector of the crowd. If she spots a disturbance in her sector, she deals with it. But she only focuses on her own sector. She doesn’t look for trouble in any other sector. And she won’t deal with trouble outside her sector if it arises. What works better? I have described it so abstractly that you couldn’t say. It depends on the details. But the sector plan might work better. If each policeman is short-sighted and slow, each additional unit of attention might be better focused on problems that she can effectively address (those in her sector) rather than the ones that she can’t.

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The analogy is obvious. It might be better for everyone in the crowd if each policeman were to concentrate on what was near in space. And it may be better, for everyone in each future generation, if each generation were to concentrate on what is near to it in time. This means you, your community, your children and grandchildren. Each generation would then enjoy the focused attention and concern of its own and the two preceding generations. On the other scheme, the long-termist one, each one gets marginal attention from all preceding generations. And each of those must also think about thousands of other generations. And most of them are inevitably ignorant about the problems facing this one.

Do we, today, think we would be much better off if the monks and barons of 1215 had spent serious time addressing problems they then expected us to face in 2022? — say, how to control serfs on the Moon, or how bodily resurrection could be possible for a cannibal? (Thomas Aquinas gave serious thought to that one.) No: none of that would have done any good. The people of that time were like the short-sighted policemen — and all the better for it. Magna Carta was signed in 1215, and it remains a beacon to the world. But it came about not through the Barons’ high-minded concern for the future, but through their ruthless focus on the present. About one third of the way through What We Owe the Future, there is a passage that clearly illustrates its utopianism. MacAskill writes about the long reflection: “a stable state of the world in which we are safe from calamity and we can reflect on and debate the nature of the good life, working out what the most flourishing society would be”.

He continues:

“It’s worth spending five minutes to decide where to spend two hours at dinner; it’s worth spending months to choose a profession for the rest of one’s life. But civilization might last millions, billions, or even trillions of years. It would therefore be worth spending many centuries to ensure that we’ve really figured things out before we take irreversible actions like locking in values or spreading across the stars.”

If a 400-year ethics seminar appeals to anyone, then I suppose it would be people like me, who make a living out of that kind of thing. But barring pandemic catatonia, even six or seven decades earnestly discussing Mill, Parfit and Sidgwick will leave most of us pining for anything that could raise the temperature or lower the tone — another Nero, say, or the Chuckle Brothers.

More seriously, there may be nothing to “figure out”. Liberty, justice, equality, social cohesion, material well-being – we all care about these things, but we all weight them differently. There is no right answer — there is nothing to “figure out” — about how best to weight them. As if the upshot of all this discussion would be a final, ideal system, which the statesmen-philosophers of tomorrow could impose on their unwilling subjects with a clear conscience. Not that we shouldn’t discuss these things. On the contrary; but let us not pretend that any ethics — even the “mathematical” ethics of Derek Parfit or Will MacAskill — could ever justify much coercion of anyone, ever.

This question is neither entirely impractical nor entirely a joke: knowing why you draw a line here and not there makes it more defensible than an arbitrary one. The Lord originally demanded 50 righteous men from Sodom as the price for sparing the city. By methods that are wearily familiar to any parent who’s been in arguments over bedtime, Abraham whittled Him down to 10. (“Fifty, Lord? But then why not 45?.” “Ok, 45.” “Thank you, Lord. But then why not 40?” Etc.) You suspect that if the Lord had chosen 50 for a reason, He would have stuck to it — not that it made much difference in this case; not to Sodom.

The issue continues to concern the central question of political life, namely whether, and if so when and how, the state may interfere with you. In Iran and North Korea the answer is: quite a lot. But anyone who is liberal, in the broad sense of preferring not to live in either a medieval theocracy or a maximum-security prison, will sympathise with J. S. Mill’s harm principle: “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”

In Britain, this principle leaves everything to play for. After all, almost anything risks some harm to some others.

The consequent possibility, that liberalism gets eroded from within, is not an idle fantasy. Very recently, an ex-army veteran was arrested for tweeting a transgender pride flag in the shape of a swastika because, the police said, “someone has been caused anxiety by [his] post”. Of course, that statement itself will also create plenty of anxiety; so presumably Hampshire Police should now arrest themselves. Indeed their interpretation of “harm” is so loose that probably the only person Mill’s doctrine could protect is Bartleby the scrivener, the infamous Wall Street clerk who spent all day staring out of his office window at a brick wall, and whose mild but unfailing response to any request to do anything, ever, was: “I would prefer not to.”

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Setting aside that demented reading of it, any actual application of Mill’s rule must therefore draw a principled line between the harms that do, and those that do not, fall under its scope; at least, it had better be principled if we want to avoid the conceptual creep that did for Sodom and now looks like doing for us.

I cannot completely resolve this; but there is a principle that settles things partially, but enough to be useful: namely, consent. This is not new: some philosophers have suggested that Mill had it in mind all along. That what Mill meant, or what he should have said, was: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others who do not consent to it.” In other words, the state may not interfere to prevent consensual harm to anyone. Note this allows that there are other areas where it also may not interfere, for instance where the “harm” is non-consensual but trivial — like asking a policeman whether his horse is gay, a question to which neither the policeman, nor presumably the horse, ever consented.

To see what difference this makes, let us return to 1987, when the Obscene Publications Squad acquired a videotape of sado-masochistic acts among consenting men. At one point a man hammered another man’s foreskin into a block of wood before cutting his (the hammeree’s) penis with a scalpel. Further videos came to light; and soon 16 police forces across the country found themselves with nothing better to do than to join in the hunt for the stars of these home videos, spending hundreds of hours poring over the 400 tapes that they eventually seized. Operation Spanner had begun.

The painstaking work eventually came good, and in late 1989, 16 men stood trial at the Old Bailey on charges including actual bodily harm, unlawful wounding, aiding and abetting assaults against themselves, and bestiality. Bestiality aside, the defence’s main argument was not that these things didn’t happen, but that they happened with the consent of those involved; and, they argued, the law cannot stop consenting adults from doing what they want.

But the House of Lords decided that it can. Where A wounds or assaults B, the Lords said, occasioning him actual bodily harm in the course of a sado-masochistic encounter, the prosecution does not have to prove lack of consent on the part of B before they can establish A’s guilt under section 20 or section 47 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861. In short, consent is not a defence.

But in a state that respected Mill’s principle, in the form that I am recommending, it would have been. And it should have been, too.

Doubtless Cornwall crossed a line plucking out Gloucester’s eyes; ditto Darth Vader vis-a-vis Luke’s hand. But should we imprison every surgeon who removes an organ or amputates a limb? The law rightly prosecutes anyone who knocks you unconscious on the street; should it also condemn every boxer who wins on a KO? For what is the difference? No magic power puts boxing rings and operating theatres outside the reach of the law; but there is actual or presumed consent.

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Nor is consent an arbitrary line. Who is better placed than an adult risking injury to determine whether the potential or actual benefits make it worthwhile? No ethicist, politician or judge could have what Hayek might have called the “local knowledge” that you have.

This proposed interpretation of Mill’s formula also applies to others who are neither surgeons nor boxers nor (typically) sado-masochists: I mean, those who study and work in our universities. Anyone who has been near one of these in recent years must have noticed that it is nowadays nearly impossible to conduct an open, honest debate there about, say, the integration of illiberal religious values, or transgender issues and women’s rights. One driver of this process has been the inflation of harm: the idea that by even discussing certain issues — even giving the impression that they are “up for discussion” — you are harming an audience whose identity thereby feels threatened.

Take the case of Lisa Keogh, then a 29-year-old law student at Abertay University, who in 2021 found herself under investigation for asserting that women have vaginas and that “the difference in physical strength of men versus women is a fact”. Younger classmates reported her for making “offensive” and “discriminatory” comments; these prompted a formal investigation into her conduct.

Or again, Imperial College’s harassment and discrimination policy proscribes pretty much anything that anyone might find offensive — citing jokes about religious beliefs and rituals as an example. In effect, Imperial College is reinstating blasphemy laws. It is also frustrating the aim of university teaching, particularly in my own field, where shocking people out of deeply-held beliefs, or at least into critical reflection upon them, is really the point. Jokes can be most effective in this connection, as anyone who has left a religion themselves probably knows, as too will anyone who appreciates David Hume’s sardonic asides on the matter, let alone the more pointed and vicious rhetoric of Gibbon or Voltaire, to say nothing of Life of Brian, The Book of Mormon or Jesus and Mo.

Again: Steven Greer, a human rights scholar with an outstanding international reputation, had for 15 years up to 2020 been teaching a human rights course at Bristol. Because Greer was critical of Sharia Law, Bristol Islamic Society complained, writing in a petition that the university should not permit a Professor to mention the Charlie Hebdo massacre in connection with Islam’s stance on free speech. Bristol conducted an eight-month inquiry before clearing Greer of all charges. But because of his teaching, he was subject to a social media campaign that made him fear for his life. On top of that, Bristol authorities restructured Greer’s course so as to make it, in their words, “respectful” of the “sensitivities” of the students on it.

Again: a Times investigation this week has found that universities have been removing books from syllabuses, or making them optional, because of their disturbing content. Essex University, for instance, has permanently removed The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about slavery, from its “Beginning the Novel” module, for its graphic depictions of slavery.

But why should anything other than its intellectual value be relevant to whether a book or article is compulsory or even available for study in a course? And what gives university administrators the right to decide that the “harm” to students that these books supposedly risk outweighs the intellectual benefits that they would undoubtedly confer upon them?

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All these cases arise because actors with malicious motives — shutting people up — have manipulated others with more benign motives: administrators wishing to protect students from “harm”. But who gets to decide what counts as acceptable or unacceptable levels of harm? Well, perhaps it should depend on two things: the purpose of the university and the students’ own judgments, as expressed through their voluntary consent.

One practical implementation of this idea could be achieved in two steps. First, at the start of a course, students consent to the risk of exposure to ideas that are legally expressed in ways that they find shocking, disturbing or offensive; and that they understand that by continuing with the course they are implicitly renewing this consent. Consent may be withdrawn at any time by withdrawing from the university. Signing up for a university education would be the intellectual equivalent of stepping into a boxing ring.

Second, any complaint against any lecturer’s or student’s speech would need to show that it failed one of two tests: Is the speech legal? And did the audience consent? If the answer to both is yes, the complaint is immediately and automatically dismissed.

Three clarifications. First, the waiver would not cover illegal speech. For instance, bullying directed at individuals in the classroom might constitute illegal harassment. Nobody is being given permission to direct tirades against students, to defame anyone, to speak in contempt of court, and so on.

Second, the waiver covers expression of ideas, but not speech that directly impaired the functioning of the university, for instance publicising confidential information; nor would it preclude regulation of the time, place and manner of speech. (You couldn’t bring a megaphone into an exam hall.) Nobody would be consenting to any of that.

Third, the proposal does not give anyone a power of veto. A student who withdraws consent is not preventing any teacher or fellow student from saying or hearing anything “offensive”, but rather excluding themselves from a university where the “offensive” speech will happen anyway. I often hear people say: “If you don’t like abortions, don’t have one”; whatever you think of that, it is surely at least as reasonable for a professor to say: “If you don’t like my lectures, don’t attend them.” Consenting adults should be free to discuss Hume or vaginas or Sharia Law, or anything else. If you don’t like it, don’t join in.

The same goes for reading lists. While there may still be a case for specific trigger warnings for students with PTSD, there would be no case for making any text optional, or taking it off the course, just because it contains material that students might find offensive. At any rate, no student who claimed to be — or even was — shocked and offended by a graphic depiction of slavery, could complain about having to read one; that is what they signed up for. Admittedly, this would not address the incentive to virtue signal; but that is a problem in every corporate environment.

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But the basic idea may also have broader applications. For instance, the Online Safety Bill aims to prevent “online harms” by making platforms such as YouTube liable for the harms suffered by users. Replacing “harm” in the Bill with “non-consensual harm” could liberalise it in a helpful way: it could then be a defence, for instance, if the platform could prove that on joining, the user had ticked a box consenting to the risk of seeing distressing material. On the other hand, the Online Safety Bill is so profoundly chilling that to tinker with it may be to miss the point: there is a strong case that the only meaningful way to “liberalise” it would be to scrap it altogether.

Returning to universities, nobody is proposing to scrap them altogether; our Higher Education institutions are remediable and worth fighting for. Still, this proposal won’t solve much by itself. As I have written before, universities should also adopt institutional neutrality, scrap all ideological training for staff or students, institute secret voting at all decision-making levels and offer free-speech induction for incoming students, essentially saying: you can say what you like here, and so can anyone else; this is a good idea and you need to get used to it.

All this could usefully be written into the guidance on the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill currently going through Parliament. One effect would be to remind Vice Chancellors in England and Wales, and the people advising them, that the whole point of universities is intellectual inquiry and the dissemination of its fruits; and that if this is your aim, then nothing matters more than free speech and academic freedom. What is tragic, and absurd, is that they of all people so obviously need reminding of it in the first place.

– My wife has been going to cooking school for three years.
– She must really cook well by now!
– No, they’ve only reached the part about the Twentieth Communist Party Congress so far…

Maybe it’s not so much funny as telling; but what it is telling of is the hijacking of a non-political activity — cookery, but it may as well be biology or history or maths — for a political end.

That end was not (or not only) to stuff your mind with state-approved facts (“facts”); it was to fashion a new man. Enthusiastic about “progressive” causes, responsive to peer pressure and ready to join in exerting it, and completely self-righteous, Homo Sovieticus would be the raw material of the Marxist New Jerusalem. As Stalin put it when toasting tame writers: “The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks.”

Communism has passed away. But the production of souls, or rather their engineering, survives in the capitalist Anglosphere. In our Higher Education sector it doesn’t just survive — it thrives, in the form of political indoctrination passed off as “training” or “mission statements”, specifically on the Thirty-nine Articles de nos jours: racism, unconscious bias, transphobia and the rest of it.

St Andrew’s, for instance, insists that students pass a “diversity” module in order to matriculate. Questions include: “Acknowledging your personal guilt is a useful starting point in overcoming unconscious bias. Do you agree or disagree?” The only permitted answer is “agree”. But what if you don’t feel, and don’t want to accept, personal guilt for anything? What if you think (like Nietzsche) that guilt itself is counterproductive? As one student aptly commented, “Such issues are never binary and the time would be better spent discussing the issue, rather than taking a test on it.”

My own university, Cambridge, wants academic staff to undergo “race awareness” training. This advises you to “assume racism is everywhere”. Attendees are also reminded that “this is not a space for intellectualising the topic”. You might have thought “intellectualising” — ie thinking about — it is the kind of thing Cambridge academics should do. But don’t feel bad about getting that wrong; or at least, don’t feel bad about feeling bad: we are also told that these sessions aim at “working through” the feelings of shame and guilt that you might have on your journey in “developing an antiracist identity”.

It isn’t just Cambridge and St Andrews. There is anti-racism or “unconscious bias” training being offered to, or more likely thrust upon, staff and/or students at Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Goldsmiths, KCL, Liverpool, Oxford Medical School, Sheffield, Solent, Sussex and doubtless hundreds of other universities and departments across the country.

It isn’t just training either. The very purpose of a university is being redefined. You might think they exist to conduct teaching and research. That would be naïve. Most universities now routinely call themselves anti-racist institutions, where this means: actively campaigning for a political end. For instance, Sussex says: “[a]s an institution we must actively play our part in dismantling the systems and structures that lead to racial inequality, disadvantage and under-representation”. Bristol expects all its members to “stand up” to racism “wherever it occurs”.

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And on modern definitions, it may occur more often than its perpetrators or victims have ever noticed. For a thoroughly representative example: one Cambridge department tells students that expressions of racism include “beliefs, feelings, attitudes, utterances, assumptions and actions that end up reproducing and re-establishing a system that offers dominant groups opportunities to thrive while contributing towards the marginalisation of minority groups”. Notice that this definition is effectively suppressing beliefs (not just behaviour) on the vague and possibly intangible basis of whether they “reproduce a system”.

Now imagine being a clever, white 18-year old, not at all racist and not at all privileged either, away from home for the first time, in a lecture or class in (say) sociology, or politics, or philosophy, where a lecturer asserts, perhaps quite aggressively, that white people are inherently racist. Your own experience screams that this is wrong. But do you challenge it? Of course not – after all, it may have, and could certainly be presented as having, the effect of “marginalising minority groups”; and your own institution has told you, through formal training and via its website, that this is racism and we must all stand up to it.

So you keep quiet. So does everyone else; and the lie spreads. Repeat for white privilege, or immigration, or religion; perhaps also, given similar training and encouragement, for abortion, or the trans debate, or… Repeat for a thousand students a day, every day, for the whole term.

There is in Shia Islam the most useful concept of Ketman. It is the practice of concealing or denying your true beliefs in the face of religious persecution. At best our hypothetical student spends her university career – possibly, the way things are going, the rest of her life – practising a secular form of Ketman. Or worse: habitual self-censorship of her outer voice suffocates the inner one too; she starts to believe what she is parroting; she denounces others as racists, or transphobes or whatever; and then after three or four years, starts working for a publisher, or a media outlet, or a big corporation; and the euthanasia of the West continues.

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I should say that anti-racist training or rhetoric does not only appeal to the ideologues who appear to welcome that process. There are other motives, of which at least one is quite understandable. Genuine racism and racial discrimination do exist – there is less now than 30 years ago, but you still notice it. You notice or hear about slurs, pointed comments, racist graffiti or physical violence; you notice being overlooked.

I remember looking for a room to rent when I first started working in London. All my white friends had found one pretty quickly. But for some reason, whenever I showed up to see one it had “just been taken”. I’ll never know how much of this was racism in my own case; but I do hear, and I have no reason to doubt, that similar things happen today.

But bringing in diversity training because racism still exists is like prescribing leeches because people still get headaches. As hundreds of studies attest, it just doesn’t work. It may even exacerbate existing prejudice. Making this training compulsory is especially likely to be counterproductive. A 2016 study of more than 800 US firms finds that:

five years after instituting required training for managers, companies saw no improvement in the proportion of white women, black men, and Hispanics in management, and the share of black women actually decreased by 9%, on average, while the ranks of Asian-American men and women shrank by 4% to 5%. Trainers tell us that people often respond to compulsory courses with anger and resistance-and many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward.

Paying for something with no proven benefits is bad enough. Compulsory training may actively be making things worse.

Another motive, equally understandable but less laudable, is corporate self-interest. I remember arguing at length about training with a well-intentioned senior functionary at a Russell Group university who finally “justified” it on the grounds that “At least we’re doing something”. Doing something, at least seeming to do something, is a familiar practice: oil companies that ostentatiously invest in renewable energy, or tobacco companies that publicly support health research. Since summer 2020, what has especially moved the highly-paid bureaucrats running higher education is the need to look as if you care about racism. Hence, perhaps, all the expensive and useless training; hence the solemn statements about George Floyd and police violence; hence the rhetoric of the “anti-racist” (not just not racist, but anti-racist) university.

Suggested reading

Antiracism won't save you

By Tomiwa Owolade

One obvious problem of corporate whitewashing is the unevenness with which it is applied. Racism is bad, but so is much else. And yet our soi-disant “anti-racist” universities rarely if ever call themselves “anti-genocide” or “anti-corruption” or “anti-censorship” or (for that matter) “anti-corporate-bullshit”. In summer 2020, you could hardly move for universities making fatuous assertions of “solidarity” with victims of racism. But you won’t find similarly prominent (and probably not any) support, from the same sources, for free speech in Hong Kong or for the non-extermination of the Uyghurs. But then upsetting China might affect your bottom line.

This isn’t empty whataboutery. Making corporate statements on racism, and not on these other things, means implicitly ranking anti-racism as the more pressing cause. Confiscating their time and attention for anti-racism training means imposing the same judgment on its staff and students; in effect, doing our thinking for us. Thanks for the offer, but I think we can manage for ourselves.

Whatever the source of demand for training, supply has rushed in to meet it. The winners are (a) the university leaders who can loudly proclaim their woke credentials and (b) the diversity-industrial complex whose clients they are. The immediate losers are the staff and students who expected, and deserved, to give or get education not indoctrination; but in time the losers will be all of us.

It isn’t too late, though. The obvious solution is the immediate and permanent scrapping of any kind of politically or ideologically oriented training or induction. It has no place in a university.

Then, enforce explicit institutional neutrality. In February 1967, the President of Chicago University appointed law professor Harry Kalven Jr to chair a committee tasked with preparing a “statement on the University’s role in political and social action”. The upshot was the Kalven Report, which stated in the clearest possible terms both the essential function of the University and the essential requirement for political neutrality that followed:

The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge. Its domain of inquiry and scrutiny includes all aspects and all values of society… A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community… It cannot insist that all of its members favour a given view of social policy.

These words should be installed in 10-foot high neon in the office of every Vice-Chancellor in the country. And their universities should commit, publicly and non-negotiably, never to take a corporate stance, in any direction, on any political or social question.

The Higher Education Bill currently going through Parliament imposes a new duty on universities to promote the importance of free speech. Clarifying what this means will be the job of guidance to be issued by the Office for Students. That guidance should recommend both the scrapping of political training and the adoption of institutional neutrality. Doing that and then enforcing it would clearly signal, what I very much hope is true, that the regulator sees the difference between properly run universities and the sheep-factories that they are on the way to becoming.