If you've ever caught yourself before expressing an opinion about politics, good parenting or even your favourite place to eat, you'll know that censoring is humankind's natural inclination says US author Greg Lukianoff.
But he says cancel culture is something different; a symptom of a bigger problem where good arguments are being replaced by cheap rhetoric.
Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), examines the phenomenon of cancel culture in his new book The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All-But There Is a Solution.
Greg Lukianoff Photo: supplied
He and co-author Rikki Schlott conducted a survey which found 84 percent of Americans say they don't speak freely in everyday situations for fear of retaliation.
“That's unhealthy for democracy if 84 percent of people are not actually being honest or authentic.”
This isn’t about politeness, he tells Jesse Mulligan.
“We're talking about people actively hiding what they believe because they believe they can't be authentic anymore. And that's not healthy.”
The last book he published with Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind. was about how modern parenting practices have turned Gen Z into emotionally fragile people incapable of handling conflict.
This new book is a natural follow-on, he says.
“In Coddling of the American Mind, we were genuinely explaining something that we thought was, as we said, in the subtitle, good intentions and bad ideas.
“Basically people who really are compassionate and want to be good to their kids, but they're accidentally teaching them mental habits that will make them anxious and depressed.”
Cancel culture started to emerge when this cohort hit higher education, he says.
“It tends to follow that generation along, but there's one thing that does make cancelling a little different, even though it's often justified by an abstraction of social justice and a specific person who might be hurt, it justifies a great deal of cruelty to actual flesh and blood people in the real world.”
There is sometimes a “carnival-like” experience watching someone getting cancelled on social media, he says.
“Essentially people are kind of having fun with ruining this person's life.
“There's a great Aldous Huxley quote that says if you want to create a movement, give people the opportunity to be cruel to another person, but feel self-righteous in doing that.”
Photo: Simon & Schuster
Lukianoff has undergone cognitive behavioural therapy which he says saved his life.
“I always give the example of, if a date goes wrong, and instead of being like, 'oh, that was unfortunate', you say to yourself, 'I'm going to die alone, she hated me', all this kind of stuff.
“And those are what's called cognitive distortions. They're normal, very common, mental exaggerations in your head, that will, if not addressed, make you miserable, make you anxious.”
He believes young people are being encouraged to catastrophise.
“I'm watching what's going on in campus. And I'm like, are we telling young people to catastrophise, to negatively filter out all the good stuff?
“Are we telling them to mind read that people are actually out to get them? Are we telling them to fortune tell, which is to say, you're doomed.”
He and Haidt started to make the argument in 2015 that this new attitude among students was going to be disastrous for academic freedom.
“But it's also going to be disastrous for the mental health of people who believe it, because it's all based on the kind of cognitive distortions that will make you miserable.
“And unfortunately, Haidt and I were not just right on that, that we thought we'd see a little scholarly dip in mental health among young people. But instead, it's a cliff, it's been absolutely terrifying watching what's happened to the mental health of young people over the last seven years.”
His new book talks about a “great untruth”.
“And that is no bad person has any good opinion.”
Debate on American campuses, he says, has become increasing ad hominen.
“What we're really trying to do is not refute the actual arguments someone's making, but show how that person is, in some sense, bad or not worthy of listening to or fit to ignore.”
Intellectually this is a tactic, he says.
“As we say in the book, winning arguments without actually winning arguments.
“That is defeating someone, so to speak, in a rhetorical battle, without even having to address their ideas.”
Cancel culture is not the preserve exclusively of the left, he says.
“We have we have several chapters where we talk about cancel culture on the right.”
But he says a “perfect rhetorical fortress” has developed on the left, because it “grew up in academia”.
“It is just layer after layer after layer of ways to not have to address the substance of someone’s argument.”
He calls it a “demographic funnel”.
“We give examples; you shouldn't have an opinion on this because you're white; you shouldn’t have to have opinion on this because you’re cis, you shouldn't have opinion on this because you're straight.
"And when you follow that demographic filter, you get down to about 0.9 percent of the United States.”
Even if you are in that 0.9 percent you can still be seen to think wrongly, he says.
“If you're a non-white, trans person, you will still be dismissed if you have the wrong opinion.
“In some cases you'll be dismissed even more forcefully, because you'll be told you have internalised transphobia, internalised misogyny, internalised racism.”
If we devoted less energy to having arguments without any substance, we might solve some problems, he believes.
“I've suggested that maybe social media platforms need a stream inside of them, in which there are rules, classic debate rules, where essentially you focus on the argument not the person.
“Because we have all these additional voices in the public square now, it's been incredibly disruptive, social media has been so disruptive because it brought a billion new people to the global conversation.
“And there's no way that wouldn't be insanely disruptive. But in the meantime, we're wasting it on cancel culture and cat videos.”
The final third of the book, he says, is devoted to possible solutions.
“Starting with raising resilient children, children who can tolerate disagreement.”
And reasserting some overarching values, he says.
“What are the values that could bring us out of this? We make the point that a lot of them are well represented by old fashioned American idioms that I grew up with, but my co-author, who’s only 23, didn't, she just didn't hear these things regularly.
“Things like; to each their own, everyone's entitled to their opinion, it's a free country, don't judge a book by its cover.”
Deeper solutions offered look to structural change in education and corporations, he says.
“There's opportunities to make meaningful change and reform, but it's not going to be easy, partially because we have a chapter called the ‘conformity gauntlet’ in the book, and we talk about all the different pressures and filtering that goes on from high school and up, we call them conformity inducing pressures.
“And really, for great thinkers, you need non-conformity inducing pressures, you need creativity, you need devil's advocacy, you need thought experimentation, all these things that actually produce more creative ideas, even wrong ideas, because that's what you need, you'll never get to really creative, interesting solutions unless you actually have the freedom to engage an idea, to throw a lot of things out, see what actually might work.”
