Pun Salad

Back in 2019 I read The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, and (grep tells me) I've mentioned it numerous times since then.

Lukianoff is back, with a new co-author, Rikki Schlott. And their mission this time is to explore the epistemic pandemic of "Cancel Culture". Coddling discussed what they called the "three great untruths": "What doesn't kill you makes you weaker." "Always trust your feelings." and "Life is a battle between good people and evil people." This book adds a fourth, called the "Great Untruth of Ad Hominem": "Bad People Only Have Bad Opinions".

Which makes Cancel Culture sensible, sort of. What to do when confronted with people with Bad Opinions? Unfortunately, that pesky First Amendment makes it impractical to jail them. But that Great Untruth allows you to make the logical leap that they are (indeed) Bad People. So go ahead and feel free to do whatever you need to punish them extralegally: ostracise them, get them fired, censor their writings, erase their names from the historical record, … whatever tactic comes to hand is fair game!

The authors do a good job looking at the history (with a shout-out to another great "saw it coming" book, 2015's So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson). If you've been paying attention to this phenomenon over the last few years, you might be familiar with many of their examples, drawn from (of course) academia, (but also) journalism, publishing, science, medicine, psychotherapy, politics, and more. It's a scourge.

Although most of the examples here are products of totalitarian wokeism, the authors go out of their way to criticize both sides of the political spectrum, detailing conservative's ham-fisted efforts to suppress their opponents' opinions in the marketplace of ideas: book banning, "divisive concepts" laws, and the like.

The weakest bit of the book is its discussion of book banning, which edges into an argument that we should just trust librarians to do the right thing without political interference. That is at best a mixed bag. I wince at the "Racial Justice Resources" compiled by the library at the University Near Here, which spans the ideological range from Ibram X. Kendi to Ta-Nehisi Coates. And there's the Anti-Racism Zine published by Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. And those are just the libraries I frequent.

And then there's the recent installation of Emily Drabinksi, self-described "Marxist lesbian" as president of the American Library Association. Who rhapsodized at "collective power" to build a "better world."

I'm unsure how that's going to play out. Marxists do not have the best history with respect to free speech.

The book's subtitle promises a "solution" to Cancel Culture. It's actually multi-pronged, the first being aimed at parents: raise "anti-fragile" and "free range" kids. Other chapters advocate common-sense activism aimed at K-12 schools and universities. And advocate something that's taken hold elsewhere: defund DEI departments, and ban the ideological purity tests known as "diversity statements" in hiring.

Personal note: I got a taste of Cancel Culture a few months back, visiting Caltech for its "Alumni Weekend". Nobel Laureate Robert A. Millikan, also the president of Caltech (1920-1946) is now a campus non-person, thanks to his onetime embrace of eugenics. Millikan Library has been renamed "Caltech Hall" and the bust of Millikan that used to stand outside the Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics has been removed, to some unknown fate. It's unclear if this effort has actually made anyone's life better.