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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 cancel culture 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 latter.

Let’s stipulate at the outset that most people would prefer that their political opponents, intellectual enemies, and annoying challengers to their opinions would 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 (1947–1957) 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 dishonorably discharged from the U.S. 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.)

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 they fear and detest (actually, all of it, but especially evidence of the normalcy of childhood sexual play, premarital sex, homosexuality, and masturbation). I could not have imagined, as Pogo, the star of Walt Kelly’s great comic strip, said, that “we have met the enemy—and he is us.” I could not have imagined how many liberal sexologists and other scientists today would be eager to ban research on sexuality that they fear and detest (especially evidence that disputes transgender activists’ claims of the safety and necessity of adolescent medical interventions). And not just ban this research—excoriate, expel, and attempt to cancel the publications, lectures, and even the careers of those who conduct it. Just ask the eminent sexologists Kenneth Zucker (for showing that the great majority of gender nonconforming young boys grow up to be gay, not trans), Stephen Levine (for questioning the claims of gender-affirming therapies), and evolutionary biologists Carole Hooven and Colin Wright, anthropologist Robert Lynch, and philosophers Alex Byrne and Holly Lawford-Smth (for arguing that there are two biological sexes). On that subject, I’m sure, these scientists would never have imagined being in bed with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

Today, when I read accounts by consummate scientists such as anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss (this issue), who found herself caught between (1) the naïve but widespread belief that Native Americans were pacifists and (2) the empirical evidence, written in their bones, of their legacy of brutal battles, I see another light going out on the road to our national Endarkenment.

Cancel culture is the impulse to punish or expel anyone who says the wrong thing or holds the wrong beliefs.

I remember the first straw in the pile that would eventually disillusion me. In 2007, at my alma mater, Brandeis University, Donald Hindley, an esteemed professor of political science who had been at the university for 45 years, was explaining to his Latin American politics class the origin of the disparaging insult “wetback”—a slur against Mexican migrants entering Texas by swimming across the Rio Grande. One or two students were offended and immediately complained to the provost, who, in the words of Hindley’s eventual attorneys, “indulged the students’ fantasy that they were crusaders against racism.” She told Hindley that “The University will not tolerate inappropriate, racial and discriminatory conduct by members of its faculty,” also accusing him of inflicting “significant emotional trauma” on his students by forcing them to hear such an offensive term. As punishment, a monitor would sit in on his classroom for the rest of the term and he would have to attend racial-sensitivity training classes. This Hindley refused to do.

The university was barraged with messages from outraged faculty and alumni like me, along with public mockery and condemnation. I wondered if Brandeis still offered the brilliant course I had taken years earlier on the history of anti-Semitism, which caused no end of “significant emotional trauma” in every class meeting and reading, though we called it “education.” The provost backed down, ultimately telling Hindley the matter was closed and she trusted he had learned his lesson, whatever that was.

Looking back, I see that all the seeds of cancel culture— the impulse to punish or expel anyone who says the wrong thing or holds the wrong beliefs—were present in Hindley’s story:

• indulging the student’s inability or unwillingness to speak to the professor directly, in the classroom or privately, instead rewarding the student for going to a grown-up to solve a complaint for them.
• indulging the student’s self-righteousness in punishing a “racist.”
• failing to enable the student to separate an emotional association with a word from an intellectual understanding of its origins and usage.
• according a word the same trauma-generating status and seriousness as an action, along with blurring a speaker’s intention and motivation. I like knowing the varied and surprising origins of the ethnic slur kike, but don’t call me one.
• holding closed-door committee meetings in which a professor’s sins are debated and determined, in the absence of any avenue of participation or defense from the accused.
• humiliating a professor, in this case one with a lifelong commitment to social justice for the poor and minorities, by demanding he attend racial-sensitivity training and accept a babysitter in the class to make sure he doesn’t say any other bad word.
• establishing “racial sensitivity” workshops as punishment and virtue signaling, without pausing to assess their methods and outcomes. Do these programs achieve their goals, or do they make their involuntary participants stubborn and angry? Come to think of it, haven’t a few other institutions and governments tried to forcibly reeducate disobedient, troublemaking citizens? How did those work out?

Today, Hindley’s experience seems mild compared to the deluge of cases that followed. After all, he was not suspended or fired, nor was he a victim of social media mobs out for blood as compensation for a scratch. Mobs, real and virtual, have made it hard if not impossible for university presidents, company CEOs, and publishers to maintain positions of integrity and defend open debate, but mob influence is new only in the technology that allows it to congeal in a nanosecond and get that offender gone. At The New York Times in 2021, more than 150 young staffers felt entitled to howl for the firing of an honored older colleague, Donald McNeil, who had dared say the wrong word, even in an educational context. “Our community is in pain,” they wrote. They couldn’t possibly work with him and feel safe, they said. And they prevailed. No doubt they would look at my list of the elements of Hindley’s story that distressed and infuriated me and say “So? Brandeis did everything right.”

That is why cancel culture is so worrisome: not because it reflects the familiar political divide between left and right, but because it reflects a generational war between old and young, a war between liberals and illiberals across parties. Liberals in my generation are surprised, and not a little uncomfortable, to find themselves opposing illiberals to their left and supporting conservatives to their right, sharing concern about cancel culture’s methods and the take-no-prisoners ideology that justifies them.

In their extensive assessment of the origins and extent of the problem, Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s The Canceling of the American Mind¹documents 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, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who was coauthor with Lukianoff on this book’s predecessor, The Coddling of the American Mind,² 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 they had long championed as a bedrock liberal value, with freedom of hate speech, which they were 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 online.”

Between 1995 and 2013, Lukianoff and Schlott 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 color, have become, 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 to sharply curtail their children’s free play and independence, while intervening constantly to protect their children 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.

A “trigger warning,” says the Cambridge Dictionary, is “a statement at the beginning of a piece of writing, before the start of a film, etc., warning people that they may find the content very upsetting, especially if they have experienced something similar. Trigger warnings are supposed to protect people from posttraumatic flashbacks.” Enabled by the expanding traumatology industry, which blurred the line between “I feel distressed” and “I feel traumatized,” trigger warnings eventually became almost meaningless, because one person’s “trigger” (a cat who looks just like their dear departed Boots) is nothing to a person who hates cats. If everything can be a trigger for someone, where does it end? It doesn’t, at least on the website doesthedogdie.com, where you can find “crowdsourced trigger warnings” for anything that might upset you while viewing a show or reading a book. Personally, I would welcome a chocolatechip- ice-cream warning to protect me from myself.

In Triggered Literature: Cancellation, Stealth Censorship and Cultural Warfare,³ John Sutherland, emeritus professor of Modern English Literature at University College London, wades into this controversy with entertaining reflections from a lifetime of teaching. We rarely burn books literally any more, he begins, but triggering is but one of “a range of other impositions on the creative act and product, namely, cancellation, prepublication bowdlerisation, suppression, ‘red flagging’, semi-tolerance,” and of course, the sensitivity reader, “creative literature’s superego.” Naturally he does not welcome these “impositions,” but he is sympathetic to the reasons for them, including #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, changing demographics in society and universities, and, as many have noted, the “whopping cost of fees” that transformed students in the UK and U.S. into “consumers wielding the big bazooka: purchaser power.” When, in 2014, the head of English studies at UCL dismissed trigger warnings by saying they were “treating people as if they were babies, and studying literature is for grownups,” Sutherland comments wryly that “There was a cheering chorus of ‘hear, hear!’ from those who saw themselves as grown(er) up(er) than fractious students with weak knees. But the tide was with youth.” Indeed it was, and by 2022, he reports, “British universities had covertly triggered over a thousand texts,” including the work of Shakespeare, Chaucer, Austen, Brontë, Dickens, Woolf, Twain, and even Agatha Christie.

Yet Sutherland’s take is not the familiar “woe are we” of an older generation. Northampton University, he tells us, triggered George Orwell’s 1984 for its “challenging issues related to violence, gender, sexuality, class, race, abuses, sexual abuse, political ideas and offensive language”—the offensive language being bollox. Sutherland does not regard this decision, as the press did and as I do, as “egregious snowflakery” but a result of “careful, legitimately sensitive reading.” He himself falls between seeing triggers as “utter wokery” and “responsible pedagogic practice”: “Triggering is essentially an alert. Done responsibly it does not erase or meddle; it stimulates curiosity and thought.” Agreed, though presumably that is what good instructors have always done when introducing their students to the readings at hand.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.2
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Sutherland begins with brief news stories, without comment, simply as signs of the times “of where we are and where we’re going.” In Part Two, he analyzes a variety of forms of control on literature, the “stealth censorship” of his subtitle, from creation to production to consumption. In Part Three, he provides “free-range meditations on triggered works,” concluding with a close examination of Thackeray, the Victorian author he most loved for “the sound of his rich clubman prose rising off the page.” Yet now, in his ninth decade, he confesses that his love for Thackeray is fading, “self-triggered, one might say.” Now he sees the “racist vein” that disfigures most of Thackeray’s fiction with its ugly portrayals of “darkeys,” “poltroons,” and “blackamoors.” Thackeray was an avowed supporter of the American confederacy and slavery; why, Sutherland asks of himself, did he not see this “suppurating stain” on Thackeray’s novels when he was younger? And what to do about teaching his novels now—try to sanitize them, as some have done with Huckleberry Finn, or not bring the matter up? “My hunch,” he concludes, “is that, without anyone saying much about it, Thackeray will slowly sink into oblivion… He is [already] no longer important enough to trigger.”

Where are matters today? FIRE’s cases have not abated; 2020 “was the worst year for free speech FIRE had seen in our history,” Lukianoff and Schlott report. “Cancellations exploded, both on campus and beyond.” Optimistically, they end their book with a chapter on “what to do about it”—suggestions for employers, parents, publishers, and everyone else. In my view, most solutions must start at the top, as the University of Chicago did in 2015, notifying incoming students that they would not be shielded “from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive”; already more than 100 colleges have signed on to the full Chicago Statement. If changes are not institutionalized, it will be left to individuals to decide whether to conform to keep their jobs or protest and risk trolls, suspension, media mobs, and, yes, cancellation. Nevertheless, cracks in the DEI’s ideological edifice are beginning to widen. Some solutions are bottom up, coming from individuals unwilling to conform. They are finding more allies every day. In other eras, they were called the resistance.