Why cancel culture should be canceled

This open letter on open debate is signed by a wide range of notable people including Steven Pinker, Gloria Steinem, Fareed Zakaria, John McWhorter, Jonathan Haidt, Olivia Nuzzi, Noam Chomsky, Matthew Yglesias, Michelle Goldberg, David Brooks, Caitlin Flanagan, Emily Yoffe, Dahlia Lithwick, Michael Walzer, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Katha Pollitt, David Frum, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Deirdre McCloskey, Coleman Hughes, Jonathan Rauch, Wynton Marsalis, J.K. Rowling, Francis Fukuyama, and Salman Rushdie:

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.…

[I]t is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms.

Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.

Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal.

We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.

We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other.

As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

Is support for free speech correlated with intelligence?

3 studies on that question all point to the answer: yes!

Here's an excerpt from that article in Heterodox Academy (an organization founded by Jonathan Haidt):

we again replicated the positive relationship between cognitive ability and supporting freedom of speech for all groups across the ideological spectrum.

Moreover, ... we found evidence that higher levels of Intellectual Humility could explain the relationship between cognitive ability and free speech support. In other words, those with higher cognitive ability might support principles of free speech because of their greater independence of intellect and ego, openness to revise their viewpoints, respect for others’ viewpoints, and lack of intellectual overconfidence.

The series of studies suggest that cognitive ability is related to support for freedom of speech for groups across the ideological spectrum. These results do not mean that people with higher cognitive abilities are free speech absolutists.... The results do suggest, however, that individuals with higher cognitive ability are more appreciative of the free flow of divergent ideas by groups at various places on the ideological spectrum ... even when these groups voice ideas that they don’t like.

Are conservatives in academia victims of discrimination and deserving of affirmative action?

This New York Times article has gotten a lot of attention for raising that question (by focusing on Jonathan Haidt, who's concerned about the underrepresentation of conservatives even though he himself is a liberal).

But the really odd thing is, as Megan McArdle points out: every time this topic comes up, liberals and conservatives both seem to do a 180 on their usual talking points about discrimination and diversity. Specifically:

Conservatives are usually reluctant to agree that women and minorities are still often victims of structural or personal bias--despite numerical underrepresentation and some fairly compelling studies showing that hiring is not race or gender blind. Yet when it comes to conservatives in academia, they suddenly sound like sociologists, discussing hostile work environment, the role of affinity networks in excluding out groups, unconscious bias, and the compelling evidence from statistical underrepresentation.

Meanwhile, liberals, who are usually quick to assume that underrepresentation represents some form of discrimination--structural or personal--suddenly become, as Haidt notes, fierce critics of the notion that numerical representation means anything. Moreover, they start generating explanations for the disparity that sound suspiciously like some old reactionary explaining that blacks don't really want to go into management because they're much happier without all the responsibility. Conservatives are too stupid to become academics; they aren't open new ideas; they're too aggressive and hierarchical; they don't care about ideas, just money. In other words, it's not our fault that they're not worthy.

Besides, liberals suddenly argue, we shouldn't look for every sub-population to mirror the composition of the population at large; just as Greeks gravitated towards diners in 1980s New York, and the small market business was dominated by Koreans, liberals are attracted to academia, and conservatives to, well, some other profession.

Part of what's going on here is that everyone wants to point out the hypocrisy of people who are on the other side from them. But hypocrisy often cuts both ways: if your opponents are taking positions that directly contradict each other, and both of them are the exact opposite of what you believe, then doesn't that imply that you're also taking contradictory positions?

McArdle quotes Paul Krugman's defense of liberals on this issue:

Every once in a while you get stories like this one, about the underrepresentation of conservatives in academics, that treat ideological divides as being somehow equivalent to racial differences. This is a really, really bad analogy.

And it's not just the fact that you can choose your ideology, but not your race. Ideologies have a real effect on overall life outlook, which has a direct impact on job choices.

McArdle has an apt response:

I have no idea what distinction one is supposed to make between beliefs and something you "can't change". Could Paul Krugman become a devout Baptist and a supply sider tomorrow, if the financial incentives were right? I devoutly hope not. I presume that Paul Krugman . . . could no more change his beliefs than he could change his native language. It is easier (in most cases) to pretend different ideas than a different race--but we rightly think that it was horrific to force blacks to "pass" as a condition of being treated like a full human being.

But what about Krugman's other point that's supposed to show how ideology-based discrimination is nothing like race-based discrimination? "Ideologies have a real effect on overall life outlook, which has a direct impact on job choices." Oh. But wait a minute . . . how exactly does that show that there's no analogy between ideology and race/gender? Is Krugman trying to say that that gender and race have no correlation to job choices? I don't see why he'd assume that. As for gender, well, men and women are different in many ways; you'd have to be pretty naive to be shocked at the possibility that certain jobs are more appealing to men while others are more appealing to women. Race may be trickier, but should we really assume that race isn't correlated with job choices?

Krugman (a Nobel Prize-winning economist) seems to be doing some awfully sloppy thinking here, and McArdle is right about the shameless hypocrisy on both sides.

I also wonder if Krugman considered that the fact that ideology does have to do with different outlooks on life (as he says) makes ideological discrimination a particularly bad thing. If academics tend to dogmatically shut out certain outlooks and privilege others, so much the worse for academia.

IN THE COMMENTS: LemmusLemmus says, agreeing with that last paragraph:

One often hears the argument for affirmative action for African Americans in academia that it enriches discussion because African Americans contribute a different perspective on issues (which can be relevant at least in the social sciences and some humanities). And that's not true of conservatives? Ha!

ADDED: A commenter on Krugman's post sums up what I imagine is the real thinking behind the liberal reaction to this topic:

Besides, Paul, people who disagree with you are stupid, right?

Can't have stupid people teaching. They're too stupid!