>This year, the Heterodox Academy conducted an internal member survey of 445 academics. “Imagine expressing your views about a controversial issue while at work, at a time when faculty, staff, and/or other colleagues were present. To what extent would you worry about the following consequences?” To the hypothetical “My reputation would be tarnished,” 32.68 percent answered “very concerned” and 27.27 percent answered “extremely concerned.” To the hypothetical “My career would be hurt,” 24.75 percent answered “very concerned” and 28.68 percent answered “extremely concerned.” In other words, more than half the respondents consider expressing views beyond a certain consensus in an academic setting quite dangerous to their career trajectory.
By its own admission academia is no longer a forum for intellectual exploration.
Very few of the people who wrote to me are of conservative political orientation. Rather, a main thread in the missives is people left-of-center wondering why, suddenly, to be anything but radical is to be treated as a retrograde heretic. Thus the issue is not the age-old one of left against right, but what one letter writer calls the “circular firing squad” of the left: It is now no longer “Why aren’t you on the left?” but “How dare you not be as left as we are.”
This is the most revealing quote for me as a fellow left-of-centre person disgusted by this behaviour that overwhelmingly comes from our side.
It's shocking to me that after a few years of this stuff there are still people on the left - including regularly on this site - in denial.
This is a great question that I often ask myself (I've also been railing against it for years), but its in my blood.
A Labour voter, I could vote against the left, but (unless it was to keep extremist left or right wing parties out) I don't think I could ever vote for the Tories.
I guess I'm so far to the left that I have a hard time believing in "cancel culture" as anything meaningful.
Take the example of Steven Pinker, given in article.
Those students explicitly said that they were not trying to cancel Pinker, and the goal was not to expel him from the association, but only to have the association withdraw special privileges that Picker was granted.
How is that "cancel"?
Now compare it to the calls to get Cheney out of office in WY. How is that not cancel culture? Or when Milo Yiannopoulos was de-platformed from the Republican convention - again, why isn't that called "cancel culture"?
My conclusion is that "cancel culture" is a made-up term used to minimize the negative influence of criticism from the left, even when valid.
> In every American community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects, ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. Here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.
and of MLK's grave disappointment with white moderates.
> I guess I'm so far to the left that I have a hard time believing in "cancel culture" as anything meaningful
That's likely. Though i'm not sure that it really matters whether lefties recognize it or not, because the culture war won't be won by the side practicing logic and understanding.
Essentially anyone who has ever felt and inkling of skepticism at whatever progressive proposal is currently at the fore will know that cancel culture exists. It's very obvious at tech companies, where far left political slogans are carelessly bandied about, and mere hints of doubt or disagreement tend to cause drama. For example, I work somewhere than no longer allows you to program the words "blacklist" or "master," and the list of terms they have in the works is hilariously impressive.
It's hard to prove cancel culture exists unless you personally experience it. That said, I will attempt to do so with some prominent examples:
I just wish things would get disgustingly progressive, fast, instead of teasing me into thinking the simple, hegemonic culture of the 90s is still a possibility.
For example, I work somewhere than no longer allows you to program the words "blacklist" or "master," and the list of terms they have in the works is hilariously impressive.
I have no problem with this. I take no pleasure in offending people and will change my language accordingly.
My problem is that I am older than my colleagues and am less likely to know what is considered offensive. I have already made big mistakes about gender identity and I am sure I will make more in future.
If people could be polite and patient instead of overreacting that would genuinely improve culture instead of turning language into a battleground.
I'm not old but i agree with you. I don't think the "cancel culture" is something meaningfull, it's just people societally liberals (calling them leftist when they mostly are dead center on economical issues hurts me) who finally understood the overton windows have been used successfully by economic liberals and fascists/nationalists[0] and using the same tactics, but honestly it is hurting people who don't want to partake in this.
[0] not a shot at them, one of the person i respect the most is fascist and have the culture to admit he is.
I have no problem with this. I take no pleasure in offending people and will change my language accordingly.
This point doesn't make sense. There's 7 billion people in the world. Everything you said will offend someone, somewhere, somewhen. Offence is truly taken, not given. The point others are trying to make is that, if you get in this spiral of changing words and meanings, you're already defeated, as there will be an endless supply of offended people, thus an endless supply of needed changes.
If people could be polite and patient instead of overreacting that would genuinely improve culture instead of turning language into a battleground
That battleground is precisely what postmodernists desire, and is fought with words. And that's why the only logical answer is to not give an inch, and ignore them.
> I take no pleasure in offending people and will change my language accordingly.
The problem is when it's not offensive, and that's why dictionaries have a half-dozen definitions for any one word. The academic cancellers in this article are not going out and burning their own Master degrees
Again, what does "cancel culture" mean? Can you define it in a way which isn't politically biased against left-leaning viewpoints from the get-go?
Obama's caution about a "‘circular firing squad’, where you start shooting at your allies because one of them has strayed from purity on the issues" seems little different than "Life of Brian's" caution about doctrinaire differences in opposing the Romans - certainly not some caution about a new sort of cancel culture! And how much might come from Obama wanting to deflect criticism about his support for using US military power - just how many drone strikes did he order? - or handling of the Central American refugee crisis at the southern border?
Do you think Chomsky is correct about everything? I don't agree with him about the creator of 'email' either. I certainly disagree with many of his co-signers.
Changing "blacklist" or "master" is not worthwhile to debate. The effort is simple, the benefits small (but non-zero), so do it ... and realize that it's a weak-sauce paper-thin covering over much harder and more intractable problems. It's a "recycle your paper cups while companies kill rivers" sort of issue.
Concerning 'Philosophy professors', if someone makes a philosophical argument that there are only males and females, and nothing else - clearly contrary to scientific evidence and cultural experience - then why don't they deserve censure the same way they would for making the philosophical argument that the Earth is flat? Is philosophy really about making shit up and never facing consequences?
I was completely confused by the Twitter link you posted. What's the "cancelling" there?
"for not giving students time off" is a mischaracterization of your #4. It was for using what was described as 'backhandedly racist ... sarcastic rhetoric' in responding to that request.
What does it mean for Stallman to be "cancelled"? He has multiple platforms, including https://stallman.org/ where you see he's giving a (remote) talk this Thursday. You can't really mean that any sort of loss of position as a result of negative criticism == "cancelled", do you?
If you do then surely the effects on Yiannopoulos and Cheney are also parts of cancel culture, right? But they aren't called that, because "cancelled" is only really used when there was left-leaning pressure.
If someone is fired for talking about unionizing, that's illegal of course. But why isn't that also part of cancel culture? If a grad student faces pressure from the advisor to not talk about ongoing sexual harassment in the department, is that part of cancel culture? If an employee is socially snubbed for being an atheist, is that part of cancel culture? Wasn't the entire Red Scare an expression of "cancel culture" against people expressing Communist or socialist views?
Going back to Stallman, should someone's fame and life's work be used to justify ignoring valid negative criticisms from others, in situations where those less famous would certainly have lost their position? That seems to be part of the argument for why Stallman should have kept his position at MIT, but yet that sounds very much like support for cancel culture, by cancelling the voice of those making the complaints.
The "infamous donglegate" was heavy-handed incompetence on the conference organizers' part, combined with a full CYA followup. See https://zedshaw.com/blog/2020-10-07-authoritarianism-of-code for a much harsher view of the PSF. My own experience, when pointing out how certain issue was not handled in a "open, considerate, and respectful", was to be told that my ...
Defined: someone performs an action, and because some group finds that action morally wrong, that person is removed from some position of power or responsibility despite the action they took having no predictive power in deciding whether they are fit to perform in their position of power or responsibility.
Since miscellaneous speech is nearly always not related to someone's ability to perform, many cancellation examples revolve speech.
I'm going to summarize a few of your points and respond to them:
1. What's with the anti-left bias? Why aren't you calling out right wing examples?
Right wing cancellations are not a current problem. I remember in the early 00s when it was, but that time has long gone. If it becomes a problem, I'll gladly complain about it. McCarthyism was wrong, but it doesn't exist anymore. I'd love for you to prove me wrong with examples.
2. Why all the cherry-picked examples?
Cherry picked from what? There's no dataset of cancellations and not-cancellations to pick from. You aren't applying this fallacy properly.
The purpose of this list is to show that even among some of the most prominent left wing leaders, cancel culture is a problem.
3. Regarding Obama: per the definition I gave, I think it would fit cancel culture. It is distinctly a left wing issue, and allies, people who are the most practically capable of working with the left are removed on unnecessary purity tests.
3. On Chomsky: I don't agree with him on everything, but I do on this. Why is that relevant?
4. On philosophy professors "facing consequences" for "being wrong."
So it follows that under your design for philosophy, the only way to remain a philosopher is to never make a morally wrong argument. I don't think that design makes sense.
5. On the twitter link:
Numerous academics and journalists are accusing a journal and the authors of racism for publishing a study that correlates covid effects to race. Pants on head stupidity. So much for the party of science.
6. On me "mischaracterizing #4":
Yes, that is what the students claim, but nothing in the professor's email indicates the professor is incapable of teaching a class and fairly issuing grades.
7. Regarding Stallman: he stepped down as the president of the FSF. How his political musings predict his ability to run free software, only the idiots who cancelled him can say.
9. On Yiannopoulos and Cheney
I'm not aware of what happened there. Are they responsible for cancelling someone?
10. On donglegate
So would this not fit the definition of cancellation?
11. On your various examples of left wing actions resulting in negative consequences to the actors (grad students, harassment, red scare, etc)
I think it is wrong to punish the actors in those cases. If moral outrage from a group of people pushes their punishment, then it should be considered cancellation.
12. On ignoring Stallman's accusers being cancellation:
I don't think it fits the definition, and I don't think the accuser suffers any negative effects for being ignored. Ignoring accusations of wrongdoing because the purported wrongdoing has no impact is in the same boat as ignoring accusations of wrongdoing because there is no evidence of the wrongdoing. Both are checks that render the accusation irrelevant.
13. On American history being full of examples of right wingers cancelling people.
I agree. So why don't we learn from the history and agree on a simple ideal that prevents it from happening to anyone?
14. On banning blacklist and master being an easy change.
I feel this is a tangential topic, but would like to discuss it anyway.
From a purely programatic perspective, it isn't an easy change. At my company the codebase has, lets say a million instances of master within it, spread across numerous packages. Lets generously assume it takes 5 minutes to build and test a replacement (but we both know that's impossibly short). Given that generous as...
"some position of power or responsibility" has an explicit bias that only those in power can be cancelled. Those who are oppressed have no power, and so cannot be cancelled, yes?
Or do you mean any position except the absolute lowest has some power? If so, then it seems that "power" isn't really useful description.
For that matter, who tends to have power - left-leaning or right-leaning people? Men or women? Blacks or white? Doesn't this cause a sample bias?
Furthermore, some of the claims of cancel culture are because of cases where the action they took is due to "predictive power..." To pick one of your examples, the "Joint statement on the GNU Project" argued that Stallman was not appropriate as the head of the FSF because "the behavior of its leader alienates a large part of those we want to reach out to".
And yes, Stallman's alienating behavior was well known, but protected by his position of power. So why do you think this is "cancel culture" rather than a disagreement over what is acceptable levels of alienating behavior?
Or, to go to the Stephen Pinker example I started off with, the argument was that Pinker should only not have special standing in the LSA because of his "pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them" conflict with the goals of the LSA.
In any case, that didn't happen, so by your definition it wasn't a cancelling. And arguing that this proposal shouldn't have been made in the first place because it's intrinsically "cancel culture" sounds very much like wanting to suppress free speech and dialog - so long as it concerns criticizing people with power.
Lastly, your definition at "cancel culture" means that J. K. Rowling is certainly not being cancelled. She has no "position of power or responsibility". What she has is a lot of fame and money, and the free market says there's no reason people need to keep buying her works.
> Right wing cancellations are not a current problem.
Colin Kaepernick's decision to kneel for the pledge does not affect his ability to play football. How do you explain the wide-spread antagonism toward him, including by our ex-president, as other than part of right-wing cancellation?
Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak at a CPAC meeting until it was found out that he thinks that consensual pedophilia (with 13.y.o.s) can be beneficial. CPAC withdraw his speaking spot. How is this not right-wing cancellation?
When you apply your definition, as stated, you'll see that it applies all over the place. When a politician or CEO decides to step down after a secret affair is made public, well, how does that have predictive power on being fit to perform? Do you think people would be fine if it were a public mistress instead, where the wife knows about it? Because it doesn't seem that way. (And this is "right" only in the sense that the right has the strong public stance against extramarital sex .. unless you're Trump, in which case sex with porn stars is hunky dory.)
> Cherry picked from what?
Most of those I've heard before, which is why I didn't need to do research about (eg) Stallman or donglegate.
I figure if it's really common there should be thousands of such stories, rather than the handful of ones repeated over and over.
> even among some of the most prominent left wing leaders, cancel culture is a problem
1) Obama is not a left-wing leader, he's a centrist, and an ex-leader. 2) Chomsky at best is only a thought leader these days - you have to go to places like Democracy Now to hear him. 3) powerful people fear popular criticism, film at 11. 4) Cancel culture is so ill-defined that everyone can be against it without having agreement on what it means.
I am reminded of an article I read not too long ago. About how white people basically need to lay down and die for the sin of being white.
> [..] there are several ways that white liberals can practice what they post. By giving up privilege, higher salaries, houses in gentrified parts of Texas, and other situations that convenience them, white liberals could prove that they’re actually doing the work [..]
There's this idea among these extremists that being white and having even moderate success could only have come from them being white, nothing else. Having anything and not giving it away to whatever underprivileged group is equal to owning slaves and committing genocide.
The very last line of the article says "Maybe that’s why white people keep voting for Trump – they are invested, financially but also psychologically, in keeping the society tipped in our favor". It just show how far off they are, people voted for Trump because they felt they would never be good enough anyway. When you can't wash off the original sin of being a cis-white heterosexual male, why even bother trying to 'redeem yourself'?
Given that toleration is understood to mean recognition of the rights of individuals and groups to hold dissenting opinions' it might be interesting to ask cancel culture' advocates as to the views which they <do> tolerate together with some examples. This is likely to throw into sharp relief their extreme stance. Worth noting that for the cancel-culture crowd, 'giving offense' appears to be a characteristic which cannot be applied to their own pronouncements.
It’s this false dichotomy where “if you’re not with us, you’re against us”. The worst part for me is that Europe is following US in this, as a loyal puppy.
The arguments I've heard from European students are pretty much textbook translated from things I've read years before from Americans, the irony being that these are the descendants of French Theory, only a much more radical and, if you ask me, idiotic treatment of it.
The French Theory ended in great disillusionment over here, I don't have my hopes high for this one.
It's what I call American Bullshit seeping into our societies. Oftentimes it's verbatim parroting of US left-wing rhetoric, most notably ideas from the BLM movement applied to a European country that never had slavery and has a black population of 1% or less.
US universities (maybe universities in general) are extremely left-aligned environments [0]. There is presumably a general background risk of Maoism, Stalinism or other form of Communism developing in extreme left-wing environments.
The natural follow up question from this article is, I suppose, "what moderate force is there to ensure that the universities cultivate a liberal left-wing culture rather than an authoritarian left wing culture?".
I diagnose the key issue in articles like this as that left-ness has been identified as the virtue in opposition to right-wing ideals, rather than liberalism in opposition to authoritarianism. Where is the impetus supposed to come from to encourage academics/students/administrators lean away from authoritarianism?
My father spent the last few years of his career running the finance department of a college. He was a free market economist, and taught finance from that perspective.
Naturally, the rest of the academic staff were leftists. One day, they decided to invite him to a debate on the merits of free markets vs socialism. They figured they'd wipe the floor with him.
Well, they badly underestimated him. He was an experienced debater, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of history and economics. He trounced them pretty good.
But the important thing is the whole thing was very friendly and collegial, and they congratulated him on his performance. Several even thanked him for explaining things in ways they hadn't heard of before. A couple told him they weren't aware there was even a case for free markets.
> He was a free market economist [...] Naturally, the rest of the academic staff were leftists. One day, they decided to invite him to a debate on the merits of free markets vs socialism.
While academics tend to lean left but that in itself does not imply they are socialists.
> But the important thing is the whole thing was very friendly and collegial, and they congratulated him on his performance.
> A far cry from today.
Such intellectual discourse has been going on in academia for millennia and still does today. It's not surprising that an academic would congratulate their opposition for a well-reasoned debate regardless of ideologies.
The idea that this debate isn't near constantly happening somewhere in a given university is a bit odd. The problem now is really in the department's that are only tangentially related to the subject of the debate - e.g. the economics departments are usually, even amongst the increasingly rare Marxists, educated well enough to argue for either side but the social sciences and humanities are often definitely overrun with leftists. As you would expect, really, but still.
I do believe that all university students should be required to take part in a debate like this - the side could arguably he random, although practically I'd let the choose. Being able to debate properly is a very useful skill - some people I've met really don't like being debated, so I don't bother, but sometimes you have to. And on top of that it has a nearly capitalistic approach to challenging your beliefs - the argument formed by (say) 50 students vs. another 50 will catch many more people on different hooks than one lecturer.
Science marches along. Today, we know that markets are likely not efficient, thanks to P likely being smaller than NP, along lines sketched by Nash and Gödel over half a century ago.
We should be careful to conclude lessons from such anecdotes. After all, we could just as easily choose Robert Pirsig as our example academic. Pirsig was grading philosophy papers and wanted to know what made some papers better than others (in his words, which papers "had more Quality"). Eventually he was asked to debate his colleagues on the subject of Quality. While he may have won that debate, he was still ostracized by his peers and fell into a downward spiral which only ended when his personality was destroyed by electroshock therapy.
Oh, and Pirsig would have been the "leftist" here, the non-conservative. The rest of the department were classicists who knew their Plato and Aristotle back and forth, and Pirsig felt himself forced to take the path of Socrates, deliberately destroying the fruits of his career in order to save his intellectual integrity. If we say that cancel culture belongs only to one side or one group, then we are deluding ourselves.
> Today, we know that markets are likely not efficient, thanks to P likely being smaller than NP, along lines sketched by Nash and Gödel over half a century ago.
You seem to be confused with your history/terminology.
To address your larger point: That markets are not perfectly efficient does not buttress socialism and central planning. Far from it. The latter are much worse.
Apparently the Atlantic's editors don't want to piss off the "cancel culture doesn't exist" crowd: the article's title has been changed to "Academics Are Worried About Their Freedom", although they forgot to update the <title> tag.
I normally don't really care about this, but the controversy over the variation hypothesis is really odd to me - Sexual Dimorphism obviously exists in humans, so why not our brains.
On top of that, the idea that it's somehow anti-feminist is weird, because surely it would mean that for a lot of jobs you'd be better off hiring the woman. A lot of those controversies seem like guttural NIH-syndrome (If it were proposed by a woman I don't think there's be a fuss)
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 69.2 ms ] threadBy its own admission academia is no longer a forum for intellectual exploration.
This is the most revealing quote for me as a fellow left-of-centre person disgusted by this behaviour that overwhelmingly comes from our side.
It's shocking to me that after a few years of this stuff there are still people on the left - including regularly on this site - in denial.
A Labour voter, I could vote against the left, but (unless it was to keep extremist left or right wing parties out) I don't think I could ever vote for the Tories.
Take the example of Steven Pinker, given in article.
Those students explicitly said that they were not trying to cancel Pinker, and the goal was not to expel him from the association, but only to have the association withdraw special privileges that Picker was granted.
How is that "cancel"?
Now compare it to the calls to get Cheney out of office in WY. How is that not cancel culture? Or when Milo Yiannopoulos was de-platformed from the Republican convention - again, why isn't that called "cancel culture"?
My conclusion is that "cancel culture" is a made-up term used to minimize the negative influence of criticism from the left, even when valid.
As for "in denial", I am reminded of Phil Ochs' commentary in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Me,_I%27m_a_Liberal :
> In every American community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects, ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. Here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.
and of MLK's grave disappointment with white moderates.
That's likely. Though i'm not sure that it really matters whether lefties recognize it or not, because the culture war won't be won by the side practicing logic and understanding.
Essentially anyone who has ever felt and inkling of skepticism at whatever progressive proposal is currently at the fore will know that cancel culture exists. It's very obvious at tech companies, where far left political slogans are carelessly bandied about, and mere hints of doubt or disagreement tend to cause drama. For example, I work somewhere than no longer allows you to program the words "blacklist" or "master," and the list of terms they have in the works is hilariously impressive.
It's hard to prove cancel culture exists unless you personally experience it. That said, I will attempt to do so with some prominent examples:
1. Barack Obama on the circular firing squad: https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/06/barack-obama...
2. Noam Chomsky (among others) in the Harper's Letter: https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
3. Philosophy professors on cancel culture: https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2019/07/22/philosophers...
4. Left wing twitch streamer loses partnership after Kenosha comments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destiny_(streamer)#:~:text=Thi...
5. Covington kid: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2019_Lincoln_Memoria...
Some examples from the programming community and other places i found amusing:
1. Verified twitter response (from media and academics) to a Covid19 study: https://mobile.twitter.com/JAMA_current/status/1304102350857...
2. Richard Stallman cancelled: https://www.google.com/amp/s/arstechnica.com/tech-policy/201...
3. The infamous donglegate
4. Some professor fired for not giving students time off after george floyd: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.foxbusiness.com/money/ucla-...
I just wish things would get disgustingly progressive, fast, instead of teasing me into thinking the simple, hegemonic culture of the 90s is still a possibility.
I have no problem with this. I take no pleasure in offending people and will change my language accordingly.
My problem is that I am older than my colleagues and am less likely to know what is considered offensive. I have already made big mistakes about gender identity and I am sure I will make more in future.
If people could be polite and patient instead of overreacting that would genuinely improve culture instead of turning language into a battleground.
[0] not a shot at them, one of the person i respect the most is fascist and have the culture to admit he is.
This point doesn't make sense. There's 7 billion people in the world. Everything you said will offend someone, somewhere, somewhen. Offence is truly taken, not given. The point others are trying to make is that, if you get in this spiral of changing words and meanings, you're already defeated, as there will be an endless supply of offended people, thus an endless supply of needed changes.
If people could be polite and patient instead of overreacting that would genuinely improve culture instead of turning language into a battleground
That battleground is precisely what postmodernists desire, and is fought with words. And that's why the only logical answer is to not give an inch, and ignore them.
The problem is when it's not offensive, and that's why dictionaries have a half-dozen definitions for any one word. The academic cancellers in this article are not going out and burning their own Master degrees
Obama's caution about a "‘circular firing squad’, where you start shooting at your allies because one of them has strayed from purity on the issues" seems little different than "Life of Brian's" caution about doctrinaire differences in opposing the Romans - certainly not some caution about a new sort of cancel culture! And how much might come from Obama wanting to deflect criticism about his support for using US military power - just how many drone strikes did he order? - or handling of the Central American refugee crisis at the southern border?
Do you think Chomsky is correct about everything? I don't agree with him about the creator of 'email' either. I certainly disagree with many of his co-signers.
Changing "blacklist" or "master" is not worthwhile to debate. The effort is simple, the benefits small (but non-zero), so do it ... and realize that it's a weak-sauce paper-thin covering over much harder and more intractable problems. It's a "recycle your paper cups while companies kill rivers" sort of issue.
Concerning 'Philosophy professors', if someone makes a philosophical argument that there are only males and females, and nothing else - clearly contrary to scientific evidence and cultural experience - then why don't they deserve censure the same way they would for making the philosophical argument that the Earth is flat? Is philosophy really about making shit up and never facing consequences?
I was completely confused by the Twitter link you posted. What's the "cancelling" there?
"for not giving students time off" is a mischaracterization of your #4. It was for using what was described as 'backhandedly racist ... sarcastic rhetoric' in responding to that request.
What does it mean for Stallman to be "cancelled"? He has multiple platforms, including https://stallman.org/ where you see he's giving a (remote) talk this Thursday. You can't really mean that any sort of loss of position as a result of negative criticism == "cancelled", do you?
If you do then surely the effects on Yiannopoulos and Cheney are also parts of cancel culture, right? But they aren't called that, because "cancelled" is only really used when there was left-leaning pressure.
If someone is fired for talking about unionizing, that's illegal of course. But why isn't that also part of cancel culture? If a grad student faces pressure from the advisor to not talk about ongoing sexual harassment in the department, is that part of cancel culture? If an employee is socially snubbed for being an atheist, is that part of cancel culture? Wasn't the entire Red Scare an expression of "cancel culture" against people expressing Communist or socialist views?
Going back to Stallman, should someone's fame and life's work be used to justify ignoring valid negative criticisms from others, in situations where those less famous would certainly have lost their position? That seems to be part of the argument for why Stallman should have kept his position at MIT, but yet that sounds very much like support for cancel culture, by cancelling the voice of those making the complaints.
The "infamous donglegate" was heavy-handed incompetence on the conference organizers' part, combined with a full CYA followup. See https://zedshaw.com/blog/2020-10-07-authoritarianism-of-code for a much harsher view of the PSF. My own experience, when pointing out how certain issue was not handled in a "open, considerate, and respectful", was to be told that my ...
Since miscellaneous speech is nearly always not related to someone's ability to perform, many cancellation examples revolve speech.
I'm going to summarize a few of your points and respond to them:
1. What's with the anti-left bias? Why aren't you calling out right wing examples?
Right wing cancellations are not a current problem. I remember in the early 00s when it was, but that time has long gone. If it becomes a problem, I'll gladly complain about it. McCarthyism was wrong, but it doesn't exist anymore. I'd love for you to prove me wrong with examples.
2. Why all the cherry-picked examples?
Cherry picked from what? There's no dataset of cancellations and not-cancellations to pick from. You aren't applying this fallacy properly.
The purpose of this list is to show that even among some of the most prominent left wing leaders, cancel culture is a problem.
3. Regarding Obama: per the definition I gave, I think it would fit cancel culture. It is distinctly a left wing issue, and allies, people who are the most practically capable of working with the left are removed on unnecessary purity tests.
3. On Chomsky: I don't agree with him on everything, but I do on this. Why is that relevant?
4. On philosophy professors "facing consequences" for "being wrong."
So it follows that under your design for philosophy, the only way to remain a philosopher is to never make a morally wrong argument. I don't think that design makes sense.
5. On the twitter link:
Numerous academics and journalists are accusing a journal and the authors of racism for publishing a study that correlates covid effects to race. Pants on head stupidity. So much for the party of science.
6. On me "mischaracterizing #4":
Yes, that is what the students claim, but nothing in the professor's email indicates the professor is incapable of teaching a class and fairly issuing grades.
7. Regarding Stallman: he stepped down as the president of the FSF. How his political musings predict his ability to run free software, only the idiots who cancelled him can say.
9. On Yiannopoulos and Cheney
I'm not aware of what happened there. Are they responsible for cancelling someone?
10. On donglegate
So would this not fit the definition of cancellation?
11. On your various examples of left wing actions resulting in negative consequences to the actors (grad students, harassment, red scare, etc)
I think it is wrong to punish the actors in those cases. If moral outrage from a group of people pushes their punishment, then it should be considered cancellation.
12. On ignoring Stallman's accusers being cancellation:
I don't think it fits the definition, and I don't think the accuser suffers any negative effects for being ignored. Ignoring accusations of wrongdoing because the purported wrongdoing has no impact is in the same boat as ignoring accusations of wrongdoing because there is no evidence of the wrongdoing. Both are checks that render the accusation irrelevant.
13. On American history being full of examples of right wingers cancelling people.
I agree. So why don't we learn from the history and agree on a simple ideal that prevents it from happening to anyone?
14. On banning blacklist and master being an easy change.
I feel this is a tangential topic, but would like to discuss it anyway.
From a purely programatic perspective, it isn't an easy change. At my company the codebase has, lets say a million instances of master within it, spread across numerous packages. Lets generously assume it takes 5 minutes to build and test a replacement (but we both know that's impossibly short). Given that generous as...
Or do you mean any position except the absolute lowest has some power? If so, then it seems that "power" isn't really useful description.
For that matter, who tends to have power - left-leaning or right-leaning people? Men or women? Blacks or white? Doesn't this cause a sample bias?
Furthermore, some of the claims of cancel culture are because of cases where the action they took is due to "predictive power..." To pick one of your examples, the "Joint statement on the GNU Project" argued that Stallman was not appropriate as the head of the FSF because "the behavior of its leader alienates a large part of those we want to reach out to".
And yes, Stallman's alienating behavior was well known, but protected by his position of power. So why do you think this is "cancel culture" rather than a disagreement over what is acceptable levels of alienating behavior?
Or, to go to the Stephen Pinker example I started off with, the argument was that Pinker should only not have special standing in the LSA because of his "pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them" conflict with the goals of the LSA.
In any case, that didn't happen, so by your definition it wasn't a cancelling. And arguing that this proposal shouldn't have been made in the first place because it's intrinsically "cancel culture" sounds very much like wanting to suppress free speech and dialog - so long as it concerns criticizing people with power.
Lastly, your definition at "cancel culture" means that J. K. Rowling is certainly not being cancelled. She has no "position of power or responsibility". What she has is a lot of fame and money, and the free market says there's no reason people need to keep buying her works.
> Right wing cancellations are not a current problem.
Colin Kaepernick's decision to kneel for the pledge does not affect his ability to play football. How do you explain the wide-spread antagonism toward him, including by our ex-president, as other than part of right-wing cancellation?
Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak at a CPAC meeting until it was found out that he thinks that consensual pedophilia (with 13.y.o.s) can be beneficial. CPAC withdraw his speaking spot. How is this not right-wing cancellation?
When you apply your definition, as stated, you'll see that it applies all over the place. When a politician or CEO decides to step down after a secret affair is made public, well, how does that have predictive power on being fit to perform? Do you think people would be fine if it were a public mistress instead, where the wife knows about it? Because it doesn't seem that way. (And this is "right" only in the sense that the right has the strong public stance against extramarital sex .. unless you're Trump, in which case sex with porn stars is hunky dory.)
> Cherry picked from what?
Most of those I've heard before, which is why I didn't need to do research about (eg) Stallman or donglegate.
I figure if it's really common there should be thousands of such stories, rather than the handful of ones repeated over and over.
> even among some of the most prominent left wing leaders, cancel culture is a problem
1) Obama is not a left-wing leader, he's a centrist, and an ex-leader. 2) Chomsky at best is only a thought leader these days - you have to go to places like Democracy Now to hear him. 3) powerful people fear popular criticism, film at 11. 4) Cancel culture is so ill-defined that everyone can be against it without having agreement on what it means.
> Why is that ...
> [..] there are several ways that white liberals can practice what they post. By giving up privilege, higher salaries, houses in gentrified parts of Texas, and other situations that convenience them, white liberals could prove that they’re actually doing the work [..]
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/09/white-liberals...
There's this idea among these extremists that being white and having even moderate success could only have come from them being white, nothing else. Having anything and not giving it away to whatever underprivileged group is equal to owning slaves and committing genocide.
The very last line of the article says "Maybe that’s why white people keep voting for Trump – they are invested, financially but also psychologically, in keeping the society tipped in our favor". It just show how far off they are, people voted for Trump because they felt they would never be good enough anyway. When you can't wash off the original sin of being a cis-white heterosexual male, why even bother trying to 'redeem yourself'?
You might find this to be a well reasoned, scientific explanation of your thesis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1sJgjG5AF4
The French Theory ended in great disillusionment over here, I don't have my hopes high for this one.
The natural follow up question from this article is, I suppose, "what moderate force is there to ensure that the universities cultivate a liberal left-wing culture rather than an authoritarian left wing culture?".
I diagnose the key issue in articles like this as that left-ness has been identified as the virtue in opposition to right-wing ideals, rather than liberalism in opposition to authoritarianism. Where is the impetus supposed to come from to encourage academics/students/administrators lean away from authoritarianism?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_ac...
Naturally, the rest of the academic staff were leftists. One day, they decided to invite him to a debate on the merits of free markets vs socialism. They figured they'd wipe the floor with him.
Well, they badly underestimated him. He was an experienced debater, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of history and economics. He trounced them pretty good.
But the important thing is the whole thing was very friendly and collegial, and they congratulated him on his performance. Several even thanked him for explaining things in ways they hadn't heard of before. A couple told him they weren't aware there was even a case for free markets.
A far cry from today.
While academics tend to lean left but that in itself does not imply they are socialists.
> But the important thing is the whole thing was very friendly and collegial, and they congratulated him on his performance. > A far cry from today.
Such intellectual discourse has been going on in academia for millennia and still does today. It's not surprising that an academic would congratulate their opposition for a well-reasoned debate regardless of ideologies.
They set up the debate and the topic and took the socialist side. My father was the lone academic on the free market side.
> It's not surprising that an academic would congratulate their opposition for a well-reasoned debate regardless of ideologies.
It shouldn't be surprising. But these days, it appears to be surprising.
I do believe that all university students should be required to take part in a debate like this - the side could arguably he random, although practically I'd let the choose. Being able to debate properly is a very useful skill - some people I've met really don't like being debated, so I don't bother, but sometimes you have to. And on top of that it has a nearly capitalistic approach to challenging your beliefs - the argument formed by (say) 50 students vs. another 50 will catch many more people on different hooks than one lecturer.
We should be careful to conclude lessons from such anecdotes. After all, we could just as easily choose Robert Pirsig as our example academic. Pirsig was grading philosophy papers and wanted to know what made some papers better than others (in his words, which papers "had more Quality"). Eventually he was asked to debate his colleagues on the subject of Quality. While he may have won that debate, he was still ostracized by his peers and fell into a downward spiral which only ended when his personality was destroyed by electroshock therapy.
Oh, and Pirsig would have been the "leftist" here, the non-conservative. The rest of the department were classicists who knew their Plato and Aristotle back and forth, and Pirsig felt himself forced to take the path of Socrates, deliberately destroying the fruits of his career in order to save his intellectual integrity. If we say that cancel culture belongs only to one side or one group, then we are deluding ourselves.
You seem to be confused with your history/terminology.
To address your larger point: That markets are not perfectly efficient does not buttress socialism and central planning. Far from it. The latter are much worse.
Sad.
On top of that, the idea that it's somehow anti-feminist is weird, because surely it would mean that for a lot of jobs you'd be better off hiring the woman. A lot of those controversies seem like guttural NIH-syndrome (If it were proposed by a woman I don't think there's be a fuss)