In a response to our recent event with Judith Butler, Olivia Fane offers her view on the progressive movement. No culture is either true or untrue. Culture is a shared narrative; one that should be judged not on whether it is true or not, but on how much people thrive within it. Money, power, sex, gender, and the self, have been turned into new gods for us to either worship or rage against. Progressives are not thriving, argues Fane.

This is the curious thing about our progressive culture as promoted by Judith Butler et al. Unlike other intellectuals who attempt some kind of bird’s eye view, who ask questions like why? and where from? and are happy to compare and contrast one culture with another, the progressive intellectual believes, I’m quite certain of it, that the culture they espouse and promote is in an important way ‘true’. Not only do they write and talk politically, with words like ‘power’, ‘equality’ and ‘vulnerable minorities’ peppering their discourse, but quasi-religiously, as they imagine a time ahead when all things will be good and right and equal – which means chucking out the old Christian-Judaic values, and replacing them with their own.

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I yearn for debate, as in, what are people’s actual experience of being a gender? Would that experience be different from culture to culture – as in, the Russians think of young men as hormonal, irrational, moody, tearful, and might that stereotype make a male Russian teenager simply conform to expectations as he grows up? To what extent are we simply the product of the values and norms of our peers? There are so many exciting questions to be asked – and yet, where are those questions?  Where are the academics asking them? Would they be cancelled if they dared?