The universities have surrendered on free speech again
THE CANCELING OF THE AMERICAN MIND How cancel culture undermines trust, destroys institutions, and threatens us all
GREG LUKIANOFF AND RIKKI SCHLOTT 464pp. Allen Lane. £25.
TRIGGERED LITERATURE Cancellation, stealth censorship and cultural warfare
JOHN SUTHERLAND 272pp. Biteback Publishing. £18.99.
IT SEEMS OBVIOUS that we live in the era of cancel culture, but what does that mean exactly? To many on the left “cancel culture” is merely a whiny, self-defensive term offered by justifiably banished academics, writers and celebrities – “cis white intellectuals”, as one online writer disdainfully put it – who face no realistic threats to their freedom or livelihoods. Others think it is an overblown label for the eternal ideological wars between the left and the right, in which each extreme complains that the other side is censoring them while working hard to censor that other side. Or is the term something new, describing a phenomenon that has become far more insidious, widespread and dangerous for free speech and democracy? Spoiler alert: I’m going with the last of these.
Let’s stipulate at the outset that most people would prefer their political opponents, intellectual enemies and annoying challengers to their opinions to just shut up and go away. There’s nothing new about that desire, which has manifested throughout the centuries in the censorship, shunning, banishment or imprisonment of those daring to differ. In my own lifetime I have observed a dizzying turn of the academic and political wheels, as ascendant conservatives try to oust commie-pinko-oversexedsocialist liberals until ascendant liberals try to oust fascist-racist-puritanical-authoritarian conservatives. I was born in the heyday of the Red Scare (1947–57) and grew up watching the censorship or ostracism of anyone remotely tainted with membership in, or even holding supporting opinions about, left-wing groups. My older half-brother was dishonourably discharged from the US Army in the early 1950s because of his prolonged and unrepentant association with a “known member of the Communist Party” – our father, who had briefly joined the Party in the 1930s. (The Supreme Court eventually overturned that discharge and my brother was able to teach again.)
Observing these right-wing efforts to stifle or expel liberals (defined as anyone less ideologically conservative than they, including other conservatives), I was optimistically, if delusionally, certain that the liberal commitment to free speech, open debate and scientific evidence would prevail if the tables were ever turned. It was clear who the enemy was. In sexology, it was and remains religious fundamentalists eager to ban any research on sexuality that they fear and detest (actually, all of it, but especially evidence of the normalcy of ch
