Canceling the American Mind
I review the latest entry in the free speech wars. The FIRE brigade rushes to extinguish cancel culture.
Censoring is humankind’s natural inclination. It’s why we’ve spent such a small portion of human history not hunting down heretics. And, like those with great posture, free societies are dutifully dedicated to resisting the forces of gravity constantly pulling them down toward embracing conformity.
~Greg Lukianoff & Rikki Schlott, The Canceling of the American Mind (2023)
Like the 60s/70s and 80s/90s before it, the 10/20s have been an era in which issues related to freedom of expression are prominent in American public discourse. Each of these important free speech moments have had distinct characters, but it seems as if our current moment is especially censorious. It has appeared as if our social media era unleashed illiberal attitudes toward expression, allowing ideas previously quarantined in the ivory tower or within fringe political movements to rend and tear at our discourse. This narrative is an oversimplification, but one that envelops a number of concerning trends. And although the tide may be turning in a favorable direction today, we are lucky to have some robust organizations dedicated to the protection and expansion of our free speech rights and a free speech culture. Organization like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has been on the forefront of battling against the anti-speech forces. One of the fronts of this war occurs in the discourse itself. Hence, FIRE President & CEO Greg Lukianoff and FIRE member Rikki Schlott have entered the fray and co-authored The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All—But There Is a Solution.
The Canceling of the American Mind is an "I-told-you-so" sequel to Lukianoff's prior book, The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Despite the grudge match context, the tone is quite sunny, measured, and nonpartisan. Unlike the first book, in which Jon Haidt was a co-author, Canceling is interested in presenting a more robust record of censoriousness and illiberalism in American discourse. Yet, it isn’t excessively interested in numbing readers with charts and data either. Canceling is preeminently engaged in a fairly comprehensive rhetorical analysis of politicized discourse, specifically the kinds with consequences for freedom of expression. It pairs this with lengthy case studies of notable events in cancel culture history. The authors lay bear the strategies that are used to foreclose open debate on sensitive or salient topics in elite spaces and in public discourse. They broadly refer to this phenomenon as “Cancel Culture.” The authors believe that particular ideas have spread broadly that have enabled a censorious culture. These "Great Untruths"1 are at the center of the derangement of discourse:
The 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
Bad people only have bad opinions
Given that Coddling covered the first three great untruths in detail, Canceling focuses on the fourth. It’s a tour-de-force on the problems of ad hominem. Lukianoff and Schlott divide the book into three sections with specific objectives: 1) define the much abused term "Cancel Culture;" 2) illustrate the mechanisms of cancel culture; 3) offer strategies that may be a salve.
Defining Cancel Culture
Lukianoff and Schlott essentially run with a previous definition, one provided by a Brookings institution fellow Jonathan Rauch in his 2021 The Constitution of Knowledge. Rauch, who also works in free speech advocacy, posits six distinguishing components to cancelation which differentiate it from acceptable social accountability: punitiveness, deplatforming, organization, secondary boycotts, moral grandstanding, (un)truthiness. Given the multiple layers of Rauch's definition, the authors also offer their own simplified version to orient readers:
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.
Lukianoff and Schlott’s definition is fairly specific and time-bound, growing only a bit fuzzy with phrases like “First Amendment standards.” They do expound on this a bit, pointing out that they understand private institutions have no obligation to actually observe First Amendment protections. Subsequently, they don’t expect nor recommend that private actors entirely refrain from making decisions based on disagreements about expression. Rather, they call attention to what cancel culture is in order to hopefully shift the culture as a whole; get out of this rhetorical rut.
The Cancelations
There is a great deal of coverage of high profile cancellations mixed with various empirical examinations of the phenomenon. Most of the latter is just cribbed from large surveys or data collected by the FIRE itself. The data, though modest, speak for themselves in terms of contextualizing how impactful and dispersed this new cultural censoriousness has become.2 It should really close the door on the “cancel culture isn’t real” meme. However one wants to look at things, we clearly are in a moment where censorious attitudes are easy to find and so are their social consequences. One of the wildest stats is that more professors lost their jobs due to cancelation in the 2010s than in the Red Scare (1947-57) and post-9/11 combined! Plus, these figures only include actual terminations not attempts and sanctions. According to the data FIRE collects and the need for their services, things aren’t looking too welcoming to those who dissent from the dominant narrow orthodoxy.
The Rhetorical Fortresses
The most useful part of the work is the second section, which examines the rhetorical approaches that have been used to avoid or foreclose open debate. Greg and Rikki outline two defensive postures that are guaranteed to 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 of ad hominem (a basic no-no in any honest discussion), where the The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress is a stack of barricades designed to find any justification to dismiss any idea or critique that challenges progressive orthodoxy (see notes below). Contrastingly, The Efficient Rhetorical Fortress is a three-to-four barrier defense that justifies quick dismissals of inconvenient facts to those on the Right. These barricades short-circuit any engagement because they create two separate spheres of discourse (see Notes below). Supporting these fortresses are the many deceptive rhetorical strategies many readers will be familiar: whataboutism, straw-manning, motte and bailey, etc (see Notes below). This section was extremely useful because it provides a clear and simple map of the actual strategies many well-meaning people hoping to engage in open discussion witness every day online and in-person.
The Long Road to a Better Discourse
To conclude, Greg and Rikki outline a few ways that cancel culture can be mitigated. First and foremost, they argue that parents should increase the amount of freedom and adversity that their children face. Coddling children is a route to censoriousness in their view. The most defined prescription offered was to keep children off of social media as long as possible. Along similar lines, the authors propose a number of changes to the educational system through higher ed: ban litmus tests, install an academic freedom ombudsman, cut down administrative bureaucracy, and adopt explicitly pro-speech institutional policies. The authors also look beyond academia for answers, arguing that the default of going to college needs alternatives: micro-credentialing, prestige-level tests, and small-scale tutorial programs. Unfortunately, this last section does seem to suffer from the “Chapter 10 Problem,” but I like the rough vision that Greg and Rikki forward. I think tearing out the roots of cancel culture will require quite a bit more than the reforms they have in mind, but I can’t see the harm in experimenting with some of their ideas. At the very least, it would be great to see a bit more dynamism in our institutions.
I generally agree with the diagnosis and recommendations of the authors. However, I am less sanguine that such recommendations will actually mitigate censoriousness in the discourse or remedy our politics more broadly. I fear this is because the analysis the authors provide is somewhat blind to the factors that created phenomena like cancel culture in the first place. They are wont to chalk it up to the proliferation of bad ideas and the incentives created by social media. This is certainly part of the story, but there are more fundamental issues at play. Material factors that lie underneath the dynamics of discourse - beyond the realm of ideas. This includes the interactions and tensions among individuals and institutional incentive structures, intra-elite competition, technology (more broadly), social stratification, and prestige scarcity. In other words, there are historical, cultural and material factors that have contributed - perhaps more significantly - to the derangement of today’s social behavior. It remains a dubious proposition that keeping smartphones out of kids’ hands and making higher ed more pro-speech will actually remedy institutional decay or hyperpolarization. I imagine making progress on these fronts will be slow and require a great deal more than tweaks.
However, it is possible I am wrong about this. Maybe it is mostly a pathology of popular ideas and the way their fallout can be coordinated by social media. There are some positive signs that the Overton window is broadening in salutary ways (some unfortunate ways it is expanding too), but this seems to mostly be a function of the rapid fragmentation of media platforms catalyzed by unbundling, monetary policy changes designed to curb inflation, and Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter (now X). So maybe… just maybe the 2020s will be a halcyon era for expression.3
How important is this book?
The Canceling of the American Mind is far from a wholly original tract. There have been many similar works published not just in the last few years but in the last few decades. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (clearly an inspiration for Lukianoff’s book titles) was published in 1987 and sparked a number of critical takes on the intellectual and pedagogical trends among elites and colleges.4 For reader who are familiar with the arguments presented in works like Bloom’s or already stay current on what people like Jon Haidt are writing or listen to podcasts like The Fifth Column or have subscriptions to Reason magazine are unlikely to benefit much from a close read. Most of the book will confirm their priors and present little in the way of new information. But for everyday Americans who are bewildered by the new and strange constraints on public discourse, this work is a balanced and thorough introduction to a nearly inescapable social phenomenon.
Reflections on Campus Culture (2010-2014)
A lot of what the authors allege comprise the bulk of cancel culture comes after 2014, but during my time at a selective liberal arts college in the early-to-mid 2010s, the unabashed disgust for dissent from very progressive viewpoints and the existence of distributed social networks or administrative bodies to sanction violators already felt fairly mature; at the very least, the environment felt very far from the romantic conception of college as a place for intellectual and personal experimentation.
Being someone idealistic about discourse, somewhat oblivious to social signals, and partial to perspectives critical of what is sometimes called the “successor ideology,” I quickly made myself a bête noire to would-be censors on campus. The consequences for my heresies were fairly minimal, amounting to mild administrative admonishments and run-of-the-mill social ostracism. Nonetheless, it was a culture shock. Further, it was remarkable how much it seemed like a function of my own identify itself rather than reactions to actual arguments I got behind. In fact, I probably exercised quite a bit more restraint than if the environment was different. And, in some ways, I think I benefitted from a milieu that was at least partially hostile to my worldview. I was compelled to take more time to seek out alternative perspectives and think carefully about salient issues, especially objections to ideas I held closely. It just seemed bizarre that the rhetorical environment of my college felt more constrained than my high school’s. It was sad that leaving the campus environment felt like escaping from a rhetorical panopticon.
Notes on Canceling’s Rhetorical Analysis
The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress (a wrong answer equals dismissal):
Is the speaker conservative?
What's the speaker's race?
What's the speaker's sex?
What's the speaker's sexuality?
Is the speaker trans or cis?
Can the speaker be accused of being "phobic"?
Are they guilty by association?
Did the speaker lose their cool?
Did the speaker violate a "thought terminating cliche"?
Can the speaker or audience be subject to emotional blackmail?
Can innuendo by used to impugn the speaker or cloud the argument under consideration?
The key factor about the PRF is its optionality. Any of the above "barricades" can be deployed as needed to shutdown a particular argument without real engagement.
The Efficient Rhetorical Fortress:
You don't have to listen to liberal ideas, where "liberal" is defined as having the wrong opinion.
You don't have to listen to experts (even right-wing ones) when they have the wrong opinion.
You don't have to listen to journalists (even right-wing ones) when they have the wrong opinion.
And, among a certain selection of MAGA movement types: You don't need to listen to anyone who isn't pro-Trump.
Dirty rhetorical techniques that support the rhetorical fortresses:
Whataboutism
Straw-manning
Minimization
Motte and Bailey arguments
Underdogging
Accusations of bad faith
Hypocrisy projection
Offense archaeology
Fabrication
The Great Untruths were introduced in Haidt and Lukianoff’s book Coddling, but Canceling makes a new addition to the original three.
They also present related figure on how viewpoint diversity has decreased over time in higher ed. For instance, in 1969, the liberal-to-conservative faculty ratio was 2-to-1 but in 2020, the ratio is now 6-to-1.
Alternatively, it is worth entertaining the idea that speech has never been more free and democratic. Anyone with a smartphone has tons of ways to opine. Look, right now, right here, I am sharing my own ideas on Substack with you without a single editorial barrier. However, this great freedom doesn’t preclude - maybe even provoke - waves of reactive censoriousness. I do think the discourse is to some degree in this paradoxical place.
A non-exhaustive list includes books like Profscam by Charlie Sykes, The Hollow Men also by Charlie Sykes, Tenured Radicals by Roger Kimball, The Shadow University by Alan Charles Kors and Harvey Silvergate, and The Western Canon by Harold Bloom.