John GrayoxfordPeter ThielWokeness

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October 26, 2023 - 7:00am

Oxford

Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer have a “secret agreement” to talk about the culture wars as much as possible, Peter Thiel has said. 

Speaking at the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford as part of the Scruton Memorial lecture series, the Silicon Valley billionaire argued that the Prime Minister and Labour leader were trying to distract the population from the economic problems facing the country:

It seems to me that there is a secret agreement between Starmer and Sunak to talk as much about culture wars, take various sides on those issues, to avoid addressing basic economic questions like runaway deficit spending. This you can solve with either higher taxes or lower entitlements, but if we talk about these then we’ll lose 10-15% of our voters… There’s a kind of ‘look ahead function’ meaning that we shouldn’t touch that; but when all the solutions are outside the Overton window, we’re confined in this very narrow box and the groundhog day will continue until something really breaks.
- Peter Thiel

He began his speech with a chant he remembered from his days as a student at Stanford: “Hey hey, ho ho, western culture’s got to go”. It sums up, he says, a battle that has raged ever since. But the woke vs. anti-woke dichotomy is a “magic trick” designed to distract us from what is really going on. 

Douglas Murray and Kevin Spacey listen to Peter Thiel

Thiel singled out the housing crisis, which successive politicians have failed to remedy over the last two decades: “Think about the craziest woke excess in the UK of the last 10 years and then think about how it increased aggregate housing prices,” he told the audience, before adding that the Marxist critique “had quite a bit to it”:

When you’re focused on all these forms of identity politics you’re not focused enough on economics. Race, gender, but there is not enough focus on class. Even though I’m not a Marxist, the Marxist critique has quite a bit to it. If you had Karl Marx or Rosa Luxemburg here, they would suggest [DEI officials] are in the same category as a bank robber or a prostitute because it’s a form of crony capitalism.
- Peter Thiel

Thiel asserted that the Left was more prone to trying to repeat old radical ideas than the Right, warning that “going back to Blair is a mistake we have to make in the UK”:

The temptation has always been to find a straightforwardly economic solution. Getting science and tech back on track is pretty hard. There was a one-time Right-wing fix by Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s: deregulate, cut taxes and allow lots of mergers and acquisitions to happen. That gave the economy an enormous lift. Then there was a one-time Clinton-Blair solution in 1995-2007, which was globalisation. It was also a way to increase GDP and a far more ruthless way than capitalism because it led to huge amounts of inequality. There were some gains from that. Sadly the centre-left still believes we can go back to this.
- Peter Thiel

In his address and subsequent conversation with philosopher John Gray, Thiel said there were other issues that politicians and elites were attempting to distract from. One was the decline of the sciences in universities.“Be suspicious of cancer researchers claiming they’ll have a breakthrough in just a few more years,” Thiel warned. Science has been degraded, and it is “no longer progressing”:

If we criticise universities for its humanities, that it what the centre-Left blob and the establishment wants us to do […] Where they get their sense of validation from is the sciences. If you can show that the sciences are more corrupt than the humanities, you win, game set and match […] The string theorists have been doing nothing for 40 years.
- Peter Thiel

The most significant loss in contemporary society, according to Thiel, has been that of God and religion. “It’s an odd thing to be distracted from,” Thiel said, “because it suggests so many ways that this debate could be reframed.” “Wokeness”, meanwhile, was a perversion and acceleration of Christian narratives: “woke post-Christian temptation is to be more Christian than the Christians.” 

The venture capitalist concluded that a possible alternative to the extremes of fascism or communism might be some form of “Christian democracy”.

is UnHerd’s Senior Producer and Presenter for UnHerd TV.