THE CANCELING OF THE AMERICAN MIND
By Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott
The title sets off a pair of echoes, starting with Allan Bloom’s now canonical 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, and leading up to 2018’s The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Addressing the state of the American mind, all three books are primarily focused on the authors’ observations on what’s been happening to American higher education. As a result, they tend to see the broader currents of American culture, business, and politics as being downstream from the classroom. “It’s no secret that college campuses are ground zero for political correctness,” Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott write in this latest treatise, and now that same “campus stuffiness has exploded into the wider world.” Which may not be the way things actually work but that’s a point I’ll get bak to.
We begin with some definitions. By Cancel Culture (capitalized throughout), Lukianoff and Schlott are referring to “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.”
That’s Cancel Culture, and the dates mentioned introduce a historical argument, that there was a First Great Age of Political Correctness (again capitalized) that ran from 1985 to 1995, which was followed by the Ignored Years of 1995-2013 where political correctness slipped into abeyance, and then the “uptick” or Second Great Age of Political Correctness from 2014 to the present. I think this is basically right, as it’s a phenomenon I’ve been writing about for some time now, though the terms I’ve used are first and second wave political correctness, with the same interregnum in-between.
Why did political correctness, of which cancel culture was an activist outgrowth, come roaring back at this time? And why did its political polarity shift from being a predominantly right-wing phenomenon to one where the whistleblowers were of what Lukianoff and Schlott characterize as the illiberal left? The claim made here is that colleges had (1) become more expensive due to an explosion in administrative staff who then had to somehow justify their existence, and (2) more homogenous in their intellectual point of view, leading to more groupthink and less tolerance for minority opinions. These strike me as plausible explanations, though I tend to think there may be simpler reasons.
If, as is argued here, the cornerstone of Cancel Culture is The Great Untruth of Ad Hominem, which supposes that “bad people only have bad opinions,” (this is actually the fourth Great Untruth, following up the three outlined in The Coddling of the American Mind), then I think its takeoff at the same time as the explosion in the use of social media is pretty obvious. Social media is all about moral outrage, which drives public engagement like nothing else. Most of what academics publish isn’t read by anyone, but their Twitter or X files can be followed by hundreds or thousands. And what’s more, that engagement can be monetized.
But there’s another factor in play as well. I first began noticing the way literary criticism and book reviewing was collapsing into ad hominem judgments of authors (and reviewers!) fifteen or so years ago. Aesthetic criteria all but disappeared from literary criticism, replaced with political and moral posturing (also known as “virtue signaling”). Bad people only write bad books was the takeaway, with the flipside being that good people (and by good here was usually meant some member of an oppressed group) only write good ones. By the 2020s this had become so much orthodoxy, both in academia and the media.
And why? Because, I think, it’s so easy. Prominent tastemakers and cultural custodians could now publicly opine on books they hadn’t even read, because they didn’t need to. All that mattered was a quick moral judgment that shut down any further discussion.
In brief, cancel culture, with or without capitals, had been incentivized with dollars and dopamine. It was profitable, easy, and fun. Given that most people are greedy, lazy, and pleasure-seeking, you could see where all this was going. And it’s worth noting also that the cues being taken came from outside the academy, through things like the way technology changed the economy through the monetization of attention and engagement, and in the increasing polarization of politics and its demonization of the other side. While I don’t want to let higher education off the hook for anything, a lot of its current problems are of external origin. What I’ve said elsewhere is that this kind of moral meltdown is more like the twitch of the death nerve for today’s universities than the cause of its demise.
Lukianoff and Schlott both work for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a group that defends people threatened with cancellation. As a result they have a lot of interesting case studies to mine. And by interesting I mean scary and depressing. Mobs, much like courts, are always odious. I hadn’t realized just how bad things had gotten though, with, for example, attempts to fire faculty now proceeding at a pace far outstripping the McCarthy era. And the rhetoric of social justice has indeed infected many other areas of life, even where you’d least expect it to show up. The short chapter on “social justice therapy,” where therapists now expect their (white) clients to do penance for their privilege was eye opening. Something is rotten in the moral state of the nation.
Diagnosing that “something” is where I think the authors here go wrong. (Well, that and their truly terrible attempts at labeling, coming up with awkward analytical frameworks like the Perfect Rhetorical and Efficient Rhetorical Fortresses to explain how Cancel Culture works). In one important way at least I think they’re too idealistic. What I mean by this is that they make two assumptions that are foundational to classical defences of freedom of speech: (1) that free speech means the debate between what may be radically different but honestly held and principled/reasoned opinions, and (2) in the free marketplace of ideas there will be a Darwinian competition that will see truth, or the Truth, emerge victorious over lies.
I don’t think either assumption is safe to make. The core problem as I see it today has to do with speech we might characterize as being made in bad faith. Or, to put it more bluntly, lies. Not controversial beliefs or opinions. Not offensive jokes made by edgy comedians. Not misleading advertising or propaganda. What I mean by speech in bad faith is the spreading of deliberate falsehoods for personal gain. To take some obvious examples:
There is almost no debate within the scientific community about the way that the burning of fossil fuels has contributed to global warming. Indeed, the major fossil fuel companies have been aware of the fact for half a century. But by bankrolling “merchants of doubt” they have sought to muddy the waters.
The idea that the 2020 presidential election in the U.S. was somehow stolen from Donald Trump has been investigated and litigated extensively. There is absolutely no evidence of there being any such conspiracy, and indeed his then Attorney General Bill Barr even called the idea “all bullshit,” making this particular untruth so egregious that it’s become popularly known as the Big Lie.
Alex Jones was successfully sued by parents of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting for his claims that the tragedy was a “false flag” operation. Fox News was successfully sued by Dominion Voting Systems for pushing the claim that their voting machines had been somehow rigged to throw the 2020 election to Joe Biden. Rudy Giuliani was successfully sued by a pair of Georgia election workers for false claims he’d made about them fixing the vote.
What we’re talking about in all of these cases isn’t the competition of ideas in the public arena. This is only what the political operator Steve Bannon once memorably referred to as flooding the zone with shit: the mass spreading of lies or “misinformation” in order to grow an audience, make money, or political gain. And it works.
What is the solution to this problem? As Lukianoff and Schlott point out, censorship doesn’t work. “Simply put, censorship doesn’t change people’s opinions. It encourages them to speak with people they already agree with, which makes political polarization even worse.” In cases involving defamation and libel there is a legal recourse, but Alex Jones made a fortune with his brand of “infotainment” before declaring bankruptcy in the face of the judgment against him, and Rudy Giuliani, who was only acting as a tool, was human wreckage before taking the same route. Most dramatically, despite the massive payout they had to make to Dominion ($787 million!), this was just the cost of doing business for Fox, and an expense well worth paying in order to allow them to maintain their market share among the believers in the Big Lie.
Something about the “marketplace of ideas” is clearly not functioning properly when a prominent figure like Donald Trump can lie (and by this I mean the making of claims he knew to be false at the time) on an unprecedented scale, while fact-checking him in real time makes no difference. “A healthy, pluralistic society depends on a citizenry who can have serious discussions without resorting to manipulative, ad hominem tactics.” That, as Lukianoff and Schlott conclude, is the ideal. But what relation does it bear to present reality? Discussion and debate are not even being pursued, and the reason manipulative, ad hominem tactics are used is because they work. Which, again, means making money and achieving political goals, no matter how damaging such “winning” might be. Meanwhile, when it comes to the corporate media the truth clearly doesn’t always win. More often the winner is the voice with the biggest megaphone, the largest platform, or the most famous celebrity spokesperson.
Lukianoff and Schlott talk about “censorship gravity,” a force which pulls all societies toward censorship. It seems that censoring is something we naturally want to do, an inclination we have to resist. I think this may be true, but of more concern to me when thinking of free speech and how it operates in the current cultural environment is our predisposition toward dangerous lies that make us feel good, even when we know they’re lies.
Notes:
Review first published online December 28, 2023.