Political Cynic comments upon ‘The Sky Is Falling Political Melodrama’ .

Carol Tavris reviews two books for The Times Literary Supplement of February 9, 2024. I’ll focus on one of her enthusiasm: ‘The Canceling of The American Mind: How cancel culture undermines trust, destroys institutions, and threatens us all’
464pp. Allen Lane. £25. by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott

Ms. Tavris offers thumbnail descriptions of both the authors:

Lukianoff, a lifelong liberal who joined the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in 2001, and is now its CEO, is well positioned to survey the changing landscape and report from the trenches.

Here is an extensive, and well deserved caustic review of Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ by John K. Wilson of December 28, 2018. The precursor to ‘The Canceling’ !

The Myth of the Campus Coddle Crisis: The Coddling of the American Mind

The Myth of the Campus Coddle Crisis: The Coddling of the American Mind

I’ll quote the last five devastating paragraphs of Mr. Wilson’s review:

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There is no better example of “good vs. evil” thinking than claiming that we have to choose King or Hitler as our models. And the notion that “religion and patriotism” help unify us by appealing to a common humanity is a laughable claim in the age of Trump. The fact is, everybody tends to invoke common enemies, including Haidt and Lukianoff.

Haidt and Lukianoff have a blind spot that’s common among people who denounce Manichean thinking. They ignore their own Manichean tendencies. The whole idea of FIRE is deeply Manichean: FIRE is the good, and the censors are evil. That’s a story FIRE tells over and over again. And it’s a true story. They urge “taking a generous view of other people”(14) which is odd considering how thoroughly they denounce people who invoke concepts like microaggressions. For example, Haidt denounces the president of LSU for once saying something as innocuous as, “we’ll keep you safe here.”(199) But there’s nothing wrong with physical safety, and no reason to believe that this president was promising psychological safety by banishing any ideas that students might find offensive.

By psychologizing the problem of censorship, Haidt and Lukianoff lead us down a delusional path. They imagine that if only we could persuade people to talk about our common humanity, rather than our common enemies, we would eliminate the motivation to censor. But that’s an impossible task, and the only way to achieve it would be by massive repression of those who talk about common enemies.

The problem is not that some people have bad ideas. The problem is when institutions use censorship to try to suppress bad ideas. When you decide to target bad thinking rather than censorship, as Haidt and Lukianoff do in this book, you’re actually contributing to the problem. Many readers may respond to Haidt and Lukianoff’s book, as many conservatives have responded to the PC wars on campus, by concluding that we don’t need to get rid of campus censorship, we just need to start censoring the bad ideas. If common-enemy identity politics is the ultimate source of evil on campus, why shouldn’t we strive to eliminate it by firing the professors who are spreading these terrible ideas like a plague?

Haidt and Lukianoff seek to medicalize the campus free speech problem and offer their preferred mental health approach of CBT as the solution. If only we could cure these poor unfortunate young’uns and their sick thoughts, they think, the campus free speech problem would be solved. The entire history of higher education begs to differ with them. If we had censorship before safetyism (and we obviously did), that suggests safetyism isn’t the core cause of repression on campus. Every generation brings a few new excuses for censorship. But these generational differences are of little importance. Even if you could banish safetyism from the world, people would gravitate to another reason for silencing views they don’t like.

Rikki Schlott bills herself as a Libertarian troublemaker @NYPost. With a comment by Steven Pinker.

“Belies the accusation that the younger generation has been hijacked by authoritarians” – Steven Pinker

https://twitter.com/rikkischlott?lang=en

Greg Lukianoff must be desperate for partners in the business of ‘The Sky Is Falling Political Melodrama’ ! Recall that Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt’s ‘The Coddling of the American Mind’ was modeled on Allan Bloom’s ‘The Closing of the American Mind’? or just engaged in some literary shoplifting, of the title, as part of sales promotion campaign. Carol Tavris does not offer a critical review, but treats Lukianoff/Schlott’s book as political revelation :

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The Canceling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s extensive assessment of the origins and extent of the problem, documents case after enraging case that escalated in the years since Hindley. (The “American” mind extends to Canada and the UK.) Lukianoff, a lifelong liberal who joined the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) in 2001, and is now its CEO, is well positioned to survey the changing landscape and report from the trenches. Schlott, a “right-leaning libertarian”, is a Gen Z journalist. Their collaboration is the point: left and right staking out a path between extremes of both sides.

Lukianoff and Schlott’s definition of cancel culture is broader than the individuals who are “fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished” for speech that should be protected by America’s First Amendment standards. Their definition adds “… and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted”. In polls they cite, the majority of Americans of all parties and ages are reluctant to share their views on topics of politics, race, sexual orientation, gender or religion, fearing loss of their jobs, grades or social support. In the preface, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who was co-author with Lukianoff on this book’s predecessor The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), notes that cancel culture “has metastasized and spread far beyond universities … [now infecting] journalism, the arts, nonprofits, K-12 education, and even medicine”. Because cancel culture seeks to punish anyone who says or does the “wrong” thing, absent knowledge of their motivation or context, people censor themselves. “Show me an organization where people are afraid to speak up, afraid to challenge dominant ideas lest they be destroyed socially,” Haidt adds, “and I’ll show you an organization that has become structurally stupid, unmoored from reality, and unable to achieve its mission.”

Many organizations and institutions now fit that description, including Harvard and other elite universities, the ACLU, even the Unitarian Universalist Church, and Lukianoff and Schlott offer an illuminating history of the “slow-motion trainwreck” by which they went off the rails. The “First Great Age of Political Correctness, 1985–1995” gave us the term, pretty much confined to college campuses; its pompous usages were eventually laughed off. But there was nothing funny about the ensuing shift of position by the political left, which began equating freedom of speech, which it had long championed as a bedrock liberal value, with freedom of hate speech, which it was determined to eradicate. Social justice goals began trampling the once inviolate goal of protecting minority opinions, even if “hateful” opinions come from the minority individuals whose rights you otherwise care about. And who defines what “hate speech” is? We all agree that slurs and insults count. But am I guilty of hate speech if I publish a study whose findings you find hateful, hold an opinion about racism or gender that doesn’t conform to yours, or speak Words That Must Not Be Said? In the UK, Lukianoff and Schlott report, more than 3,000 people in 2016 alone were “detained and questioned by police for non-crime ‘hate incidents’ related to what they had said on-line”.

Between 1995 and 2013, the authors write, “viewpoint diversity on college campuses plummeted, tuition skyrocketed, and campus bureaucracy swelled”. In 2010 cancel culture “struck like lightning on college campuses”. The new generation of anti-free-speech activists began demanding speech codes, trigger warnings and the monitoring of “microaggressions”. Speakers – the famous, the eminent, the provocative – were being disinvited, which made national news, which generated more speaker bans. DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies, at first a well-intentioned and overdue approach to making universities and companies more welcoming of people of colour, have become, as Lukianoff and Schlott document, an “ideological litmus test” that faculty and students question at their peril. Students applying for admission and scholars applying for academic positions must display evidence of their commitment to diversity and social justice, but only some kinds of diversity are acceptable: if you care about including working-class people, economically disadvantaged people or conservative people, forget it. Everyone knows the rule: conform or you’re out.

Two other societal factors fed into cancel culture. By 2013 university administrators had enacted policies that accommodated new student “demands” because they couldn’t afford not to. Once students became high-paying consumers rather than, well, students, administrators had to retain them no matter how badly they behaved, no matter how many rules of civil discourse they violated. With a student’s high tuition at stake, deciding between a professor’s expertise and a student’s hurt feelings was a no-brainer. And why the hurt feelings? The year 2013, as Haidt and Lukianoff have argued, also marked the emergence of a generation of overprotected, “overcoddled” children. In their view parents’ panic over their children’s physical and emotional safety led them sharply to curtail their free play and independence, while intervening constantly to protect them from the challenges, shocks, setbacks, teasing, risks, disappointments, anxieties and losses that we all need to become socially and emotionally competent. The result was a cohort of fearful, fragile young adults obsessed with finding safe spaces and safe ideas, with trigger warnings to help them avoid dangerous ideas.

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Like Allen Bloom, and his almost inheritors Haidt & Lukianoff, and now the low-brow Lukianoff & Schlott the enemy of the political present is our own children! Call it by it’s name bourgeois political nihilism !

Here is a review by Carol Tavris of June 5, 1983 @NYT

THE HEARTS OF MEN, American Dreams and the Flight From Commitment. By Barbara Ehrenreich. 206 pp. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday. $13.95.

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Diagnosis matters if men and women are to travel beyond blaming. As it is, Miss Ehrenreich shrinks from the gloomy conclusions of her own account – that men will continue to pursue their own economic and psychological self-interest and women will have to fend for themselves and their children. Perhaps, she suggests wistfully, ”the male revolt can be seen as a blow against a system of social control which operates to make men unquestioning and obedient employees. If men are not strapped into the role of breadwinners, perhaps they will be less compliant as assemblers of nuclear weapons, producers of toxic wastes, or as white-collar operatives of the remote and unaccountable corporations.”

This sounds like the early feminist vision of women entering the worlds of government and business and transforming them into arenas of warmth and nurturance. Still, this lively book will do much to get men back into the conversation.

The final paragraphs of Tavris’ essay demonstrates, in the review of Ehrenreich book, that she can write an engaging critical analysis. Yet Tavris places herself outside the political/sexual/human context, of what she is commenting upon. Have times changed so much from 1983 to the present?

Political Cynic