Canceling the American Mind

For those of us who have been cancelled, it is a terrifying, grinding, and arduous process. It begins with rumors and innuendos, with threats to expose some seemingly benign past comment as the instantiation of contemporary blasphemy against the latest virtue-signaling fad, and then the hammer falls with explosions of self-righteous allegations and moral grandstanding.

Next comes the demand(s) for an apology. These eat away at your self-respect and confidence, knowing all the while that what you wrote or said perhaps years earlier is unobjectionable by any reasonable standard, yet it anathemas to the barbarians who want their sacrifice.

Ultimately though, it becomes clear that the most groveling mea culpa will not satisfy the demands for blood, and you come to accept that you will finally and viciously be cancelled. You catastrophize, but sadly, your worst imaginings don’t even begin to match the reality you are facing. You will lose your job, your reputation, fair-weather friends, and opportunities. Having lost your livelihood, you may also lose your home, witness the destruction of your closest relationships, and come to know a soul-destroying sense of isolation.

Then comes the psychological tailspin that has you questioning every decision you have ever made. And from here, the cancelled victim enters a potential life-ending mental drama. Some do not make it out alive – suicide becomes a formidable option.

Eventually, once you collect yourself enough to begin to fight back, you may consult a lawyer and commence a years-long litigation process. This is expensive, it is uncertain, and it adds to the psychological storm. Again, some do not survive. By this point, the thought of suicide is no longer just a singular consideration but an ever-present companion offering a final escape from the inescapable.

This is what cancellation feels like; there are those who deny it exists, and they may call it “accountability.” The inquisitors, wielding their weapons of interrogation and destruction, sanctimoniously assure the victim that their sufferings are deserved, are recompense for the great sins committed, and are the necessary sacrifice in an age of woke saviors run amok. Depressingly, even some of the cancelled victims, in a horrendous act of self-mutilation, come to deny its reality.

But it does exist and Greg Lukianoff, in his second book on the subject of the “American Mind,” along with Rikki Schlott, have attempted to explain cancellation’s history, tactics, effects, legality, and philosophy. Lukianoff and Schlott, both working with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), have provided an exhaustive assessment of the cancellation phenomenon using a series of substantive discussions interspersed with numerous case studies.

As noted, this is Lukianoff’s second book to diagnose the ailments of the American psyche. Previously, Lukianoff wrote about the coddling of the “American Mind” with co-author, Jonathan Haidt, in 2018. The two works are connected, and Lukianoff and Schlott draw on some insights from the prior work to their present study. Behind both books is their namesake— Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Published in 1982, Bloom’s best-seller provided the in-depth philosophic analysis to explain how academic relativism and cultural nihilism were preparing generations of American youth to engage in what would become the scourge of cancellation.

A Definition

Lukianoff and Schlott begin with a definition. After reviewing those proffered by others, our authors propose the following as a workable description, stating that cancellation is:

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.

This is a comprehensive definition that speaks to cancellation’s history and its impacts and its legal status in relation to the First Amendment of The Constitution. As concerns the First Amendment, the authors note that the statements made by the cancelled are normally protected in that they are simply the expression of a viewpoint, not statements that might be defamatory, threatening, or harassing. In other words, this is legitimate speech from a legal standpoint, but it still comes under societal attack with disastrous results.

One of the key insights here is the nature of the punishment meted out to the cancelled. As the authors note, and in reference to a definition provided by Christina Hoff Sommers, the victims suffer “absurdly harsh consequences for relatively minor lapses. Sometimes there are no lapses at all.” This is a distinctive feature of cancellation. It seeks punishment entirely out of proportion to the alleged offence. In this regard, the offending words themselves are often said to harm, to do violence against a specific group with accusations of racism, sexism, or one of the many “phobias” trotted out. In the result, it is only the cancelled who suffer any real harm as per the list of effects provided in the authors’ definition. The cancellers go on to cancel another day.

Ultimately, the authors confirm that cancellation is not about harm to any group or purportedly offensive speech. Instead, it is a set of tactics designed to shut down an argument, to avoid dealing with a contending position, and to eschew the normal requirements of persuasion in favor of muzzling an opponent. To cancel is to avoid accountability all while demanding an outrageous level of “accountability” from the cancelled. There is an inverse relationship such that the stronger the desire of the cancellers to avoid any scrutiny of their position, the more forceful, organized, and distorted are the accusations they make against the cancellation target.

A History

Moving on from their definition, the authors provide a brief history of how the “American Mind,” and many others around the world, ended up in the cancellation conundrum. In this case, the history touches on the highpoints but puts an emphasis on what the authors call “the Anti-Free Speech Movement.” Contrasting the more traditional liberal notion of free speech as a protection of the expression of minority or unpopular views, the authors, with special reference to university campuses, argue that free speech today is portrayed as “doing the bidding of the powerful.” Though given the massive and exceptionally wealthy industry that is post-secondary education, they are also quick to point out that there is something highly disingenuous about academics claiming to represent the marginalized.

Here we come to the philosophic roots of our predicament. For a series of social justice activists leading up to the 1960s, free speech was the indispensable tool in battles for civil and equal rights. The liberal idea of a free exchange in the marketplace of ideas aspiring to truth was the model, and for those far from the center of power, free speech protections were their ticket into that marketplace.

But that all changed with the coming of some Europeans, or at least their fashionable yet problematic ideas. For the authors, the source of the trouble is identifiable in the works of Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse is often seen as the harbinger of what today considers anti-liberal ideas in The United States. The highlights of Marcuse’s thoughts are fairly well understood and relatively easily condensed. He was a Marxist of the German critical theory school, along with thinkers such as Habermas, Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer. Where Marx focused on the objectivity of class conflict, Marcuse and his clan highlighted a range of non-class-based subjective sources of oppression. From race to gender to disability, the critical theorists proposed that the powerful exploited and divided the oppressed using a series of identity markers. For this emerging line of thought, free speech was seen as just another tool of the oppressor to prevent the down-trodden from uniting (or as we would say today, “intersecting”) and using their identities to undercut hierarchical structures.

On this account, the liberal notion of free speech, as an individual and universal right, now became just one narrative among many. This particular narrative, allegedly deriving from patriarchal, heterosexist, racist, and colonial conceptions of the atomistic human (i.e. European), was the one narrative that was to be suppressed. Discourses of oppressed groups attempting to disinter and overturn the very structures of oppression would replace free speech as prioritized narratives— add to this the postmodernism of Michel Foucault with its denial of any objective viewpoint, and a firestorm of anti-free speech tribalism spread across universities (where this dogma first gained a foothold).

Today, as any student of the history of ideas knows, critical theory mashed together with postmodernism is the dominant ideology in many academic disciplines. This terrain was already covered by Allan Bloom in Closing of the American Mind, but it remains an important part of any thorough explanation of cancellation. The crisis of liberalism that reaches back to the masters of the hermeneutic of suspicion (Marx, Nietzsche and Freud) must be understood and assessed in a full account of cancellation. Both modern philosophy and liberalism have come in for severe questioning, and it is not in itself a bad or avoidable thing. The problem is that the criticisms offered by those who justify cancellation on the grounds that it is a means of holding the powerful accountable do little more than lead us into intellectual obscurantism on the one hand, and the mutual political dead-ends of destructive populism and stifling wokism on the other. This is bolstered by a return of anti-intellectual religious radicalism, suggesting the return of the gods has not been a comforting dispensation.

The anti-free speech movement that began in the 1960s bore the fruit of political correctness that came into its own from 1985 to 1995. It was during this time that universities began to implement speech codes.

On a personal note, it was also during this time that I attended The University of Alberta from 1988 to 1992, and then Harvard Divinity School from 1993 to 1995. While at Alberta, I completed a four-year Bachelor’s degree in political philosophy. Though political correctness was in the air, it had little impact on my own education. For the most part, I studied the history of political philosophy and wrote my undergraduate thesis on Eric Voegelin. In my experience, things changed when I arrived at Harvard. The Divinity School was rife with political correctness. While I was able to locate outstanding teachers, it was impossible to avoid the general campus atmosphere genuflecting before the politically correct under the justification of uncovering structures of oppression. None of its proponents had even the slightest clue about the intellectual origins of their commitments, which only served to strengthen their enthusiasm. But at the time, despite being uneasy with the campus dogma, I largely ignored political correctness as something without significant teeth. I believed, wrongly, that reasoned argument would triumph.

As the authors point out, however, I was not alone in this assumption. The dominant response to the first great wave of political correctness was mockery. It was “declared laughable,” while campus speech codes were regularly defeated in court challenges; this led to the intervening “Ignored Years” running from 1995 to 2013. According to the authors, a few things happened during this period to prepare the ground for the upcoming age of cancellation, and it all occurred on university campuses. It was in the late 1990s that universities began to transform: “viewpoint diversity on campuses nationwide plummeted, tuition skyrocketed, and campus bureaucracy swelled.”

While it is often agreed that viewpoint diversity in the academy has declined precipitously since the 1990s, most accounts of cancellation tend to focus on the intellectual element to the exclusion of the structural changes at institutions of higher learning. As a result, we focus too much on the lefty professor as the villain and forget that it is has generally been an activist and growing administration that has championed the ideologies and policies that underlie our current cancel culture. From the 1990s onward, universities competed with each other to establish trendy degree programs, which catered to a series of niche projects. Similarly, the number of administrators in proportion to students and professors ballooned. In turn, corporate America obliged by funding many of these programs with the expectation that their employees would enroll in the new courses with an assurance of receiving the corresponding certificate, diploma, or degree.

This is a key piece of the authors’ analysis, perhaps the central historical insight. While many academics have readily embraced the theoretical bases of cancel culture, the phenomenon would not have gained so much traction if not for an academic bureaucracy, starting in The United States, that both encouraged its development on campus while spreading its contagion off campus to donors in the corporate world, and then beyond into media, journalism, government, and the not-for-profit sector. If there is a power dynamic to be deconstructed, this would surely be it. Far from being a movement designed to uncover oppression, the intellectual movement that has justified cancel culture is very much a corporatist and largely market-driven mechanism with a very American pedigree, with countries like the UK and Canada following along behind. France tends to turn its nose up at these developments.

And with all of this in place, the contemporary age of cancellation dawned. According to the authors, a number of factors came together around 2014 to contribute to our current catastrophe. Drawing on Lukianoff’s preceding work on the coddling of the “American Mind,” the authors argue that cancellation now became a sort of psychological fascination as well as emotional balm for students on campus, many of whom were from wealthier backgrounds due to the significant raise in tuition during the 1990s – another indication that cancellation is hardly an act of solidarity on the part of the oppressed. Moreover, these students were attuned to the immediacy of social media where the slightest misstep might result in a wave of mobbing that could destroy a reputation in hours. As the authors point out, it is no surprise today that, while students were initially the impetus behind many campus cancellations, it is Generation Z that expresses far more opposition to cancellation than preceding generations. Add to this what was becoming the growing instability in the post-Cold War neoliberal order, and it is clear that students, aided by indulgent administrators and agitating professors, were primed to join the group mentality of cancellation scapegoating.

The Tactics

The authors spend quite a bit of time on how cancel culture works. Rather than follow their analyses and case studies – all of which are enlightening – I would like to address a misconception that the authors explode. It is generally assumed that cancellation is done by the woke left. While it is true that cancellation largely began on the woke side of the new left, the populist right has quickly taken up the cancellation mantle as its own. But strategies differ. As far as the woke new left is concerned, the tactics they use fall under what the authors call “the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress.” This involves using a number of optional identity markers as screens to avoid engaging in any real argument. In short, the new left, relying on the doctrine of intersectionality that accompanies so much of critical theory, employs an ever-changing combination of markers to reinforce the status of the canceller as oppressed while casting the cancelled as the oppressor. The point, in line with the notion that all is power relations structured by incommensurate narratives, is to ensure that the oppressed narrative never engages with the oppressor narrative, but rather shouts it down. This is war and persuasion and dialogue are not wanted.

The populist right, largely in response to the woke new left’s “Perfect Rhetorical Fortress,” deploys its own “Efficient Rhetorical Fortress.” According to the authors, the right’s fortress simply, and efficiently, eliminates opposition by outright dismissing it with the quick appellations of “liberal,” “expert,” or “journalist.” Branding an opponent with any of these monikers is sufficient to end discussion, often to be followed up with the banning of this or that book or the deplatforming of such and such speaker.

Overall, the authors provide a highly workable description of the tactics used by both the left and right in the cancellation wars. Helpfully, they connect their theory to a number of case studies that reinforce the patterns described in the two “Fortresses.”

Fighting Back

Finally, the authors provide some thoughts on how to fight back. These include going beyond the protections of the First Amendment, which also tend to protect the cancellers’ speech, to a culture of free speech. As Lukianoff and Schlott note, there are many critics of the notion of cancel culture who argue, in a very legally positivist vein, that all we need is the First Amendment (or its equivalent in other nations) to protect speech. Unfortunately, this also protects cancellers, especially because it can be difficult to hold them accountable for what would appear to be defamatory speech targeting the cancelled. The issue of the proper legal response to cancellation is one that would take another book, or at least a rather long paper. Given FIRE’s own activities representing the cancelled in lawsuits, the authors are very much aware of the problems cancellation poses for those seeking justice. Often, cancellation presents itself as the organized voice of a group interest, necessarily creating the impression that it is not just one angry canceller on the attack but a number of concerned individuals addressing a matter of public interest. In other words, the cancellers claim it is they who are defending free speech and academic freedom by canceling, in the public interest, the cancelled. Our legal institutions have some way to go before they effectively deal with this issue.

This is in part why the authors argue for a broader free speech culture. Central here is encouraging a positive desire for debate and discussion among our students. Beyond this, the authors also counsel something somewhat unexpected in this context: friendship. It has regularly been noted by child psychologists that many children and young people increasingly suffer from intense loneliness and anxiety. There are a variety of reasons offered to explain this, but one of its implications is that individuals without friends are more likely to bully others and conversely collapse under the pressure of the canceling bully.

This lack of friendship reflects a larger social framework that tended to become dominant after the 1980s. With the end of the Cold War and the triumph of the free-market West, a pure liberalism arose that hoped for the end of the national political form with its interplay of difference and belonging, in favor of a stark extreme that recognized only two legitimate social actors. On the one hand, there was the individual separated from all mediating authorities. On the other, it was the pure universal of globalized humanity. The individual, now perfectly free to choose its allegiances, was ultimately only required to obey the dictates of humanity engaged in free exchange and without any national, religious, or social encumbrances. With the fracturing of this neoliberal order under economic and political strains, we have turned to an equally stark dichotomy. We now embrace our particular identities, though they remain ones of our choosing, constantly subject to variation. We gather these identities under the Manichean rubric of the oppressed versus the oppressor. In this, our would-be postmodern and critical theorist escape from neoliberalism only reinforces and entrenches neoliberalism’s individualism while engaging it in a rhetorical war against the global oppressor under the guise of global solidarity with the oppressed. All of this occurs, as explained by the authors, under the same drive for marketplace rewards that the canceller claims to oppose.

In all, the authors shine a useful and timely light on cancellation as a dangerous, and sometimes deadly, phenomenon that reflects our current intellectual and political commitments. They make it clear that much of the cancellation industry is itself driven by marketplace forces. Its beating heart is in the universities, but it has expanded out to affect numerous social actors and institutions, but authors are also hopeful that cancellation will pass. As a guide to how we got here and how to move beyond it, The Canceling of the American Mind is a worthy contribution.

The Canceling of the American Mind
By Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023; 409 pp

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