Stelios Panagiotou is a political commentator and former academic. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of York, and he specializes in rationalism, ethics, and free will. After teaching in the academy for six years, he decided to pursue a more active engagement in public discussion about the political and cultural issues that Western societies face. Since December 2022, he has been a regular podcaster with the UK-based Lotus Eaters media company, where he discusses current cultural and political affairs from a philosophical perspective.
The European Conservative interviewed Dr. Panagiotou on some of the pressing issues affecting Europe today, including progressivism, wokism, cultural self-hatred, the rise of conservative political parties, and the state of academic freedom.
You often discuss the ‘far-right.’ Is there a clear, current definition for this term? Please explain why the Western political establishment and mainstream media often use this term to label people.
As conventionally understood in Europe since the Second World War, ‘far-right’ refers to political outlooks that bear strong resemblances to fascism and/or Nazism (National Socialism). In this sense, the question “What is the far-right?” becomes the question “What is fascism and what is Nazism?” Scholarly debates about this are and will remain ongoing, because one of the main methodological questions is whether we should understand each of these concepts in terms of an essence shared by all fascist and all Nazi movements respectively, or not. But generally speaking, the main characteristics that are often associated with both are: a) authoritarianism, b) ultra-nationalism coupled with an intense hatred of particular groups, c) anti-parliamentarianism, d) anti-Enlightenment (focusing on irrational forces as opposed to reason), e) anti-liberalism, f) anti-individualism, g) opposition to the free market, and h) a mythical glorification of violence that portrays it as a purificatory and necessary means for national palingenesis.
Lately though, the term ‘far-right’ is routinely used in a very misleading way. Mainstream media use it to refer to opposition to globalist and woke policies and to the advocacy of traditional conservative values like patriotism, secure borders, law and order, and concern with social cohesion coupled with a skepticism of abstract multiculturalism. Perhaps the most outrageous example is The Guardian’s almost constant description of Argentina’s new president Javier Milei as ‘far-right,’ who possesses none of the characteristics mentioned in the first description above.
The reason this organized smear-campaign takes place is very simple: it is a systematic effort to discredit conservatives, classical liberals, and those who oppose wokism and globalist policies. Public discussion frequently involves the competition to convince the general public. In the minds of the general public, the ‘far-right’ is synonymous with policies that have brought unprecedented destruction upon Europe and the West. Some people hope that by throwing mud against conservatives, classical liberals, and all those who do not belong to the Left and who oppose globalist policies, the general public will associate them and their policies with disaster and evil. It is also indicative of their view of the level of intelligence of the general public.
What do you think are the causes of the rise of the right-wing, conservative parties in many European countries?
The people of Europe find themselves in a situation where the values that they took for granted for decades are being threatened. On a daily basis, we witness the vast gap between the promise of progress and the realities of cultural erosion, diminishing safety, economic pessimism, and dire demographic tendencies. We are becoming increasingly frustrated with the direction towards which Europe is heading and with the way that European leaders are callously dismissing our concerns by weaponizing a narrative of oikophobic multiculturalism that: a) presents Europeans as having a unique civilisational guilt for which they have to atone, and b) that the only way to atone for such guilt is by cultural self-immolation. The popularity of European right-wing, conservative parties is rising because their leaders and supporters speak about the very topics that concern many Europeans and which European leaders have lately been neglecting. In a nutshell, they state what is on everyone’s mind: destroying one’s own culture in the name of humanitarianism is not a value, let alone a European one.
You wrote on Twitter that ”people underestimate how extremist wokeness is. The rejection of disagreement as hate speech combined with the ‘silence is violence’ stance in conditions of social justice multiculturalism, presents any action against those not celebrating the latest woke trend as self defence.” Could you expand on this?
Almost everyone agrees that the state should guarantee our safety and that if it cannot do so, we have a right to self defence. To ensure social coordination, it is imperative to discern between what constitutes a threat to our safety and what does not. Traditionally, harm was understood as physical harm. Now, more and more people across the political spectrum understand harm as also having a psychological dimension as well, which can be present even in the absence of physical harm.
Wokeness thrives on victimisation. The extremism of wokeness is the tendency of many wokists to portray almost everything short of enthusiastic agreement with their preferred policies as psychological harm, and therefore, an existential threat to themselves or members of ‘protected’/ ‘minority’ groups. If disagreement with any point of the progressivist agenda is psychologically harmful hate speech, and if silence is violence, then we are left only with agreement as an acceptable stance. That is why the overwhelming majority of people in almost every institution that goes woke understands that something is going wrong but are terrified to speak.
What are today’s greatest challenges facing academic freedom and teaching?
Academics who want to teach students how to think are sabotaged by a bureaucracy within academia that either aims to tell students what to think or treats student satisfaction as one of the most important indices.
In varying degrees and across different universities, the bureaucratic apparatus is used to promote the aim of turning students into activists or, at least, supporters of progressive politics. Tenured positions are rapidly becoming extinct; the demand for academic jobs is so high and the supply is so low that academics who do not enthusiastically support the bureaucracy’s vision soon find themselves marginalised. Sometimes, this takes the form of loud cancellation. Some other times, this just takes the form of one’s contract not being renewed and one not receiving good recommendation letters when one applies for a job at a different university.
As far as student satisfaction is concerned, teachers are being asked to do what every mature person understands to be impossible; to keep everyone happy and satisfied. In an abstract sense, this may sound plausible. Why would any sane teacher disregard student dissatisfaction? But there are two main problems with this. First, people are satisfied with all sorts of things, some of which are the very things others find dissatisfying. Groups of students are no exception to this. Second, the way in which satisfaction is understood and reported by students is problematic. Any person who is remotely familiar with philosophy, for instance, will be familiar with Socrates and know that the process of learning is not always a fun one. Sometimes it can be a very challenging and temporarily disorienting experience. The whole problem now manifests in the form of coddled students who are dissatisfied with being challenged and sometimes go as far as claiming that they are psychologically harmed by the very process that constitutes actual learning. In combination, these problems create a generation of people who are told that feeling is more important than reason, who are told what to think, and who are becoming supporters of the latest trend of progressivist politics. In short, academic freedom is rapidly becoming a relic of a bygone age.
You wrote: “’Progressivism’ is basically regressivism. Institutional progress comes with raising barriers to arbitrary authority. The more the laws we are subject to appeal to subjective elements, like feelings, the more arbitrary the state’s authority becomes.” What are some of the beliefs or goals of progressivism? How do you think progressive beliefs or policies harm Western societies?
The first thing to bear in mind is that progressivism and progress are not identical. The belief in the desirability of progress is almost universal. The disagreement lies in how we are going to understand what counts as progress.
Generally speaking, advocates of progressivism call for multiculturalism, wokeness, and an expansion of the state in terms of size, powers, and intervention. Multiculturalism is the belief that there are many groups in society whose members practise different cultures and that those who belong to cultures other than the ‘dominant’ one should not feel any pressure to assimilate into it. Wokeness can be understood as the pursuit of social justice within a multicultural context. Whereas plain multiculturalists urge us to let groups be, wokists divide the various groups into oppressors and oppressed and tell us that the state should intervene in civil society and actively help members of the oppressed groups. Whatever such help involves, it will be delivered by the rejection of equality of rights and an expansion of the state’s size, and an increase of the state’s intervention into all aspects of culture.
Wokeness and statism are extremely harmful and socially corrosive forces that distort how we view each other. Rather than allowing communal wounds to heal in civil society, progressivists attack civil society. We are repeatedly told that we are inhumane oppressors and that without the state’s expansion and intervention, society will remain inhumane and oppressive. The more people come to believe this, the more social ties relax and societies dissolve into aggregates of tax-payers and receivers of benefits.
Multiculturalism is not necessarily harmful. It is harmful when it is combined with wokeness for the reasons described above and when it is approached in an entirely abstract fashion. Europe in particular suffers from a very abstract approach to multiculturalism. We are all fundamentally human beings. This does not mean that we are abstract beings. Even if we grant that we all share a common nature, it is not so robust to make coexistence unproblematic between any groups of humans. We are largely creatures of habit and our cultures affect our habits in the same way that our parents and our biology affect us. Multiculturalism then becomes unbelievably destructive when it lends support to the policies of mass and unqualified migration that the EU of the last few years seeks to impose on European people, irrespective of what they want.
You’ve also talked about the West’s “cultural self-hatred.” Who do you think is pushing for this idea of self-hatred in Western nations?
Oikophobia is the exact opposite of xenophobia. It is the hatred of one’s culture and the tendency to blame it for every negative thing that happens. Where the xenophobe’s knee-jerk reaction is to blame foreigners, the automatic response of the oikophobe to any negative event is to blame his or her culture.
The spread of oikophobia in Western countries is a very complex phenomenon and I doubt we can trace it to purely intentional factors. According to some theories, like the one Dr. Benedict Beckeld develops in his book: Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations, it is a natural consequence that follows a culture achieving a kind of dominance. Usually, when cultures reach the zenith of their power, they turn inwards and their people start treating domestic opponents as posing much graver threats than foreign actors. Such a state renders Western societies more fragmented and makes it much easier for non-Western powers to take advantage of such division and support one side against the other within Western countries. To the extent that we can talk about conscious efforts to spread oikophobia, we can look at who is profiting from it. The answer seems to be that those who profit from the spreading of oikophobia within a country are those within it who view patriotism as a threat to their interests and those foreign actors who form temporary alliances with them.
