Cancel Culture Cancels Thinking

Dorian Abbot, invited to lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this fall, was disinvited after some faculty and graduate students complained. His views on affirmative action, they said, made him an “infuriating” and “inappropriate” choice. His planned lecture, as a University of Chicago geophysicist and climate scientist, had nothing to do with social justice.  “Words matter and have consequences,” Dr. Robert van der Hilst, head of the MIT earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences department, said to justify canceling his talk.  

Those consequences go beyond a canceled lecture. As Abbot noted: “There is no question that these controversies will have a negative impact on my scientific career.”  Also, the students “protected” from Abbot were denied the opportunity to learn from him.  The university sent the message that silencing those we disagree with rather than an open, if difficult, debate on those disagreements is acceptable in higher education. 

Cancel thinking and behavior is not new.  Galileo was convicted of heresy and died under house arrest for insisting the earth revolved around the sun and was not the center of the universe.  In the 1950s, the blacklisting of suspected communists by the House Un-American Activities Committee led to social ostracism, ruining careers. 

Nor is “canceling” applied only to professors.  Political, entertainment and business figures have been frequent targets.  Neither is it unique to the political left.  On the right, it may take the form of trolling, doxing and ad hominem attacks, aimed at shaming victims into silence and to thinking twice before, well, thinking.

Journalist Jonathan Rauch’s book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, highlights the dangers of “cancel culture.”  Universities, especially, he argues should be concerned with helping students confront the uncomfortable through the application of reason.  Instead, the “emotional safety” of students disturbed by discomforting voices is used to justify silencing those voices, including the voices of fellow students.  Psychologist Jonathan Haidt and attorney Greg Lukianoff, in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind, charge that parenting has increasingly “prepared the road for the child not the child for the road.”

Rauch cites multiple dangers of succumbing to student demands for emotional safety.  Those who engage in “cancel culture” over-react.  They may excuse the physical violence that sometimes follows protests for and against a cancel target.  They undermine pluralism and ignore the consequences to individuals, often for words/actions years before, ignoring what they have said and done since. They may distort professors’ research and teaching, constricting their contributions to knowledge and students.   He quotes one professor who told him “I used to say things in class just to be provocative…I never do that anymore because I don’t want to deal with a dozen complaints to the dean.” 

Perhaps most troubling, Rauch argues, is that the cancel culture anchored in “emotional safetyism” distracts from the real problem – it avoids the need to confront issues with reason and truth.  “Homosexuals did not win our battles for equality by censoring claims that we seduced children or were mentally ill or subverted the country’s security,” he says.  “We won them by holding the false claims up to the light of evidence and argument.  We won by correcting, not by coercing.”

“Cancel culture” underestimates the ability of those it purports to protect.  It assumes we’re not strong enough – mentally and psychologically – to deal with differences. It acts as if ignoring or using humor against inaccurate and inflammatory rhetoric are tools never to be considered. It fosters a condition dangerous to freedom – the refusal or inability to think.

In a Harpers Magazine “Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” 152 writers, scientists, musicians, professors and historians argue that “[T]he free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.”  They warn against “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”  “The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence them or wish them away.  We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom.”

Thankfully, there are voices reminding those on the political left and right of the impact of their professions to moral and civic superiority.  Manu Meel, an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, helped found BridgeUSA, a student-led organization with chapters on 40 campuses and now expanding into high schools.  Its mission: “to develop a generation of leaders who value empathy and constructive dialogue because our generation will bear the consequences of polarization for years to come.”  Heterodox Academy “is a nonpartisan collaborative of 5,000+ professors, educators, administrators, staff, and students who are committed to enhancing the quality of research and education by promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in institutions of higher learning.”

Those on the political right, with justification, have criticized “cancel culture” on the left.  Those on the political left have, with justification, criticized similar shaming and silencing practices on the right.  We’d all benefit more from the free inquiry and open, civil debate they both work to prevent.

Photo Credit: Markus Winkler @ unsplash.com