Book reviews: How the Left “cancels” dissenting opinions—and what it'll take to stop the trend
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This year, Bay Area college campuses have been overrun with cancel culture circuses, leaving residents bewildered by events like: anti-free speech protests of guest speakers at Stanford/SFSU, the firing of De Anza's "not woke enough" DEI dean, and—most recently—hateful anti-Israel demonstrations sponsored by local faculty/student groups. Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott's new book The Canceling of the American Mind codifies how the Left systematically extinguishes forbidden ideas—and steps, for institutions and individuals, to restore our culture's viewpoint diversity. Below, reviews from Substack, WSJ, and Reddit.
From Substack:
Greg and Rikki explain the long history of efforts to silence people by threatening them with social death, unemployment, or physical harm for questioning orthodox beliefs or proposing heterodox theories. They show how today’s version of cancel culture, which first arose on American college campuses around 2014, spread out from universities to many other fields including journalism, medicine, psychotherapy, and even the hard sciences. Greg and Rikki show the devastating effects of cancel culture on institutions that require viewpoint diversity to function, with universities being the pre-eminent example. (Cancel culture causes the condition I called “structural stupidity” in a 2022 Atlantic article.) They show how cancel culture takes a different form on the right, running through legislatures that try to dictate what can’t or must be taught in K-12 schools and even at universities.
The Canceling was a darn good book when I read a draft last spring, in order to write the Foreword for it. It’s an even better book now that the world has been treated to the shocking spectacle of so many university presidents remaining silent, or issuing only vague and cautious comments, in days after the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel. Their collective reticence stood in stark contrast to the speed with which so many had offered expressions of solidarity or shared grief whenever an election or court case went the “wrong” way in the years since 2014. (In general I think universities should embrace the “Chicago Principles” and commit to institutional neutrality. See Jeff Flier’s recent application of these principles to the current situation. But if university leaders made so many pronouncements on “controversial” issues before October 7, then they should have made a strong one on October 8.)
Why did so many leaders take so long to say anything strong or (seemingly) heartfelt about the largest mass slaughter of Jews since the holocaust? Why did so many wait a few days to see which way the wind was blowing before augmenting their initially tepid statements?
I see nothing to suggest antisemitism; I see everything to suggest fear. The kind of fear that Greg and Rikki explore and explain in The Canceling of the American Mind.
This review originally appeared in Substack. Read the whole thing here.
From the Wall Street Journal:
The authors do not merely analyze; they are in the fray. Mr. Lukianoff is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which defends free speech in workplaces and on campus. He is also co-author, with New York University’s Jonathan Haidt, of “The Coddling of the American Mind,” an important 2018 book about emotional fragility among young adults. Ms. Schlott’s college interest in “Coddling” eventually brought her to FIRE; she’s also a columnist for the New York Post.
“Cancel culture” is an imperfect term, but its meaning is well understood: incidents of public shaming and professional defenestration, often ginned up by activists high on their own sanctimony. “Cancel Culture has upended lives, ruined careers, undermined companies, hindered the production of knowledge, destroyed trust in institutions, and plunged us into an ever-worsening culture war.”
When did it start? The authors say 2014, when cancellations “exploded” in higher education. By 2017, following the outward migration of campus groupthink, canceling moved into art, publishing, comedy, journalism and, more recently, medicine, science and law....
Politically, the authors strive to be evenhanded. They identify cancelers on the right (whose targets include progressive college professors and Republicans who fall afoul of Donald Trump) and fault thinkers such as Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule for fostering illiberality. Regrettably, they endorse the claim that conservatives are engaged in “book banning,” though most of their examples involve the curation of what’s on offer in public-school libraries. It is irksome that the authors don’t acknowledge that, in truth, no book is banned in the U.S.; you can buy whatever you want to read.
Efforts to address both sides notwithstanding, “The Canceling of the American Mind” leaves little doubt that cancel culture is primarily a tool of the left. Mr. Lukianoff and Ms. Schlott parse the Catch-22 tricks used to put targets in the wrong. They write of a “perfect rhetorical fortress” that allows righteous lefties to dismiss anyone for anything, to attribute to anyone a “phobia” or an “ism,” and to claim that the person in question is inflicting injury. What the authors call “thought-terminating cliches,” such as “dog whistles” and “punching down,” add to the weirdly chant-like hyperbole when cancelers get going. Jennifer Sey, fired from Levi Strauss for objecting to the Covid lockdowns, was smeared as “a racist, a eugenicist, and a QAnon conspirator.” James Bennet, dislodged from the New York Times for publishing an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton, was said to have made Times readers “vulnerable to harm.”
This review originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Read the whole thing here.
From Reddit:
The Canceling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott is a "I-told-you-so" sequel to Lukianoff's prior book, The Coddling of the American Mind. Despite its grudge match status, the tone is quite sunny and balanced, attempting to be steadfastly nonpartisan. Unlike the prior book, in which Jon Haidt was a co-author, Canceling produces a more robust empirical record of censoriousness and illiberalism in American discourse. It also engages in a fairly detailed and comprehensive rhetorical analysis that lays bear the strategies that are used to foreclose open debate on sensitive or salient topics in elite spaces and in public discourse more broadly. The primary aim of the book is to show how the "Great Untruths" (adding a fourth to the Coddling's three untruths) are at the center of discourse derangement.
The Three (now Four) Great Untruths:
What doesn't kill you makes you weaker
Always trust your feelings
Life is a battle between good people and evil people
*4) Bad people only have bad opinions
To accomplish this aim, the book is divided into three main portions with specific sub-objectives: 1) define the much abused term "cancel culture;" 2) Illustrate the mechanisms of cancel culture; 3) offer strategies that may be a salve.In part 1, Lukianoff and Schlott essentially run with a previous definition provides by a think tank scholar who also works in free speech advocacy, Jonathan Rauch. Rauch's definition of cancel culture alleges six distinguishing components to cancelation: punitiveness, deplatforming, organization, secondary boycotts, moral grandstanding, truthiness. Given the complexity of Rauch's definition, the authors also offer a simpler version:
The uptick beginning around 2014, and accelerating in 2017 and after, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is - or would be - protected by First Amendment standards and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted from this uptick
There is a great deal of coverage of high profile cancellations and then various quantitative examinations of the phenomenon using data mostly collected by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). The empirical portion is really the most compelling in terms of contextualizing how impactful this new cultural censoriousness has been. It really closes the door on attempts to dismiss the phenomenon as exaggerated. One of the wildest stats is that more professors lost their jobs due to 2010s cancel culture than in the Red Scare (1947-57) and post-9/11 combined! Plus, these figures only include actual termination not just attempts, which according to contemporary reports appear to be significantly higher now.
And the most useful part of the work is probably the second part, which examines the rhetorical approaches that have been used to foreclose debate. Greg and Rikki outline two defensive postures that destroy discourse: The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress (often deployed by left-wing censors) and The Efficient Rhetorical Fortress (often deployed by right-wing censors). Both rhetorical strategies are variants ad hominem (a basic no-no in honest discussion), where the PRF is a portfolio of deceptive practices and ERF is a blanket dismissal of political enemies. Many readers will be familiar with many of these rhetorical terms (whataboutism, straw-manning, motte and bailey, etc), but many will also noticed that these terms can themselves be used in inappropriate ways to shut down debate. In many cases, errant naming of rhetorical postures has become the latest entry among many "Thought Terminating Cliches."
In the final section, Greg and Rikki outlines a few ways that cancel culture can be mitigated. First and foremost, the argue that parents should increase the freedom and adversity that their children face. Coddling children is a route to censoriousness in their view. In this vein, they propose a number of changes to the educational system through higher ed, including banning litmus tests and encouraging political neutrality at the institutional level.
This review originally appeared in Reddit. Read the whole thing here.
Related:
Soon-ousted SJSU prof: University all for viewpoint diversity, until the “cancel culture mob” whines
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