An interview with A.C. Grayling
Melbourne Writers Festival and Emerging Writers' Festival are proud to partner to bring you insights into the 2025 Melbourne Writers Festival through the eyes of emerging writers and creatives.
These digital reporters are local creatives responding to this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival, engaging with Melbourne’s literary festivals on a deeper level. Tasmin Sandford-Evans interviewed English philosopher A.C. Grayling as part of this partnership.
Keep an eye out on our socials for more creative responses from EWF’s digital reporters, as well as exclusive interviews with MWF artists, in the coming weeks.
As a Melbourne-based BookTok content creator, I'm not the first person that likely comes to mind when it comes to interviewing esteemed philosopher and public intellectual Professor A.C. Grayling. I don't claim to be an expert in philosophy, and nor is the phrase "public intellectual" typically associated with TikTok influencing.
Yet, as digital platforms increasingly shape public accountability, and with the fear of cancellation now embedded in mainstream conversations, I found myself in a unique position to ask A.C. Grayling about the intersection of these online dynamics and the wider cultural landscape.
As he prepared for his appearance at the Melbourne Writers Festival, where he’s speaking on a panel about Cancelling Culture, delivering a eulogy at Better Off Said and delivering a lecture on Making Peace in the Culture Wars, A.C. Grayling shared his reflections with me on cancel culture, separating art from the artist, and some timely and surprisingly eclectic reading recommendations.
You’re appearing at MWF this May to talk about cancel culture, both in your solo talk and on a panel about separating art from the artist. One thing I’ve been thinking about is how cancel culture has become so embedded in public life that there’s now an entire industry built around managing it. Crisis PR firms guide public figures through backlash, craft apologies, and help them ‘recover.’ Do you think outsourcing that kind of moral accountability turns it into a performance? Can real growth happen in that context, or are these firms just profiting from public outrage? Fig leaf or genuine change of heart? Evasion or reform?
Yes, it’s a dilemma, and in the end only the person at the centre of the circumstances can know whether the apology and promise to do better is authentic. But there has to be room for repair, reformation and reparation – ‘cancelling’ should not be an automatic life-sentence, branding someone indelibly and pushing them out of everything. Not even a convicted criminal in prison is left without a chance to be different and try again.
Is there a particular artist, writer, or public figure whose work you admire but who has made you personally wrestle with the question of whether or how to separate art from the artist? What helped you navigate that tension?
T.S. Eliot, wonderful poet, ugly anti-Semite. He is a classic case of the problem for anyone who wishes to honour great achievement but has a sense not merely of social injustice but of the terrible burdens it imposes, all the way to mass murder. But as with all things else, one must consider details and particularities, and recognise that to explain something is NOT the same as to excuse it. So: Eliot lived at a time when antisemitism was very widespread and ‘normalised’. That explains but does not excuse it; he would have picked it up unconsciously from his social setting and found reasons to sustain it. Secondly, people are alloys; one imagines that a virulent anti-Semite might nevertheless be a kind father or a good friend to anyone not Jewish. These contradictions in human nature are a datum, and challenge us when we meet with them; we have to be able to find a balance in individual cases, not least because in responding positively to good aspects of people and disengaging from bad aspects, we might contribute a mite to nudging things in the more positive direction.
You’ve written about how leisure should be a space where we flourish, not just switch off. So I’m curious: when it comes to how you spend that time yourself, especially with things like reading or watching films, do you ever choose something purely for fun or escapism? Or do you tend to gravitate toward nonfiction or stories where you’re striving to learn something? How do you navigate the tension between consuming something relaxing and something that feeds that desire to grow?
In my own case my work is both my pleasure and leisure. I tell people I’ve never done a day’s work in my life because, loving what I do, finding it so fascinating and inviting, it makes life seem like a perpetual holiday. It’s absorbing, it’s self-forgetful, it transports one to times and climes perpetually alluring, it places one in the company of minds and hearts across the ages. That’s the secret: to do what you love, and then it’s never work; then one can say, with the Chinese poet, ‘I leap from my bed and hasten swift as a thirsty cat to my work, because I love it so’.
You’ve written about how we should distinguish between work, rest, and leisure, with leisure being a space for flourishing. But do you ever catch yourself slipping into habits that don’t quite fit any of those categories? For many people my age, it might be something like doomscrolling—spending long stretches scrolling through negative or mindless content online. It’s not truly restful, productive, or enriching, yet it’s hard to resist. Do you have any habits like that? And do you think behaviours like these deserve a category of their own, or are they just distractions that get in the way of living well?
Walter Pater said that the greatest fault in life is to fall victim to habits. They dim the eye and dull the brain, just as you describe. But taking time to lie fallow – sit in the sun, listen to music, have a glass of wine in the evening – is not equivalent to doomscrolling-type ‘switching off’ – in fact, they can and indeed should be mindful experiences, in which (like meditation) the focus is on the value of rest and relaxation, which bring refreshment, renewal, and clarity.
Literature often gives us space to explore complexity and contradiction. We accept, even admire, morally grey characters who are deeply flawed but still compelling. In the context of today’s culture wars and our sometimes limited tolerance for imperfection in public figures, is there a character from fiction you think captures that moral ambiguity especially well? Why do you think we’re more willing to appreciate that kind of nuance in stories than in real life?
A character from fiction - almost too many to mention! – because literature is par excellence what gives us hundreds of windows to look through into the room where the comedy and tragedy of human experience is played out. The principal characters in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are salient as wrestlers with moral complexity (think Pierre Bezuhov and Levin in the latter), in Flaubert and Balzac characters who both invite sympathy and repel at the same time (think Madame Bovary in the former). Today’s culture wars are in part an artefact of shallow and uninformed thinking, indiscriminate discrimination, facile binary judgments, the anger of frustration and the fear generated by dissolution of traditional certainties.
In your book Who Owns the Moon?, you explore the ethical and political dilemmas of space exploration. I think fiction and storytelling can be an accessible way for people to engage with those ethical questions. Are there any sci-fi books, films, or series you think do a particularly good job of exploring those ideas?
Would have to do a bit of research to see whether there are any such that speak to the relevant issues – answer now is ‘not offhand’. Books like Orbital touch on aspects.
You’ve spent your career helping others think more deeply and often re-evaluate their belief systems. But has there ever been a book that genuinely changed your mind about something important? What was it, and what shifted for you?
Not a single book, but a ‘conversation of books’ you might say – I find that when I read a number of things about a given topic, and reflect on the alignments and disagreements that emerge, it helps in the formation of a response that has more substance to it than if I get carried away by an individual book or article. Reading should be like listening to a chorus and noticing the different voice – tenor, baritone, bass, soprano – that constitute the texture of the music.
Do you have a book recommendation that might surprise people, something totally outside what you’re known for?
Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam is considered by some to be mediocre as poetry, and its message is ‘don’t trouble yourself with all the usual stuff of life because we’ll all soon be dead; just enjoy wine, love and poetry and distance yourself from the mad rush of things’ – his Epicurean attitude is the opposite of mine (I think we should care, do, create, learn, engage) but I find it charming and think that occasionally we should be as he enjoins. And also I think there are some lines and phrases in his various versions of the poem that achieve the status of poetry after all.