![RIght- and Left-wing protestors clash in 2017 in Virginia](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/10/06/TELEMMGLPICT000137276116_16965819162940_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwekapBZ1c_8650LP5YH00zA.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Why cancel culture in America isn’t as simple as you think
The Canceling of the American Mind, a survey by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott, gets the basics right, but its own mind isn’t broad enough
![RIght- and Left-wing protestors clash in 2017 in Virginia](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/10/06/TELEMMGLPICT000137276116_16965819162940_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwekapBZ1c_8650LP5YH00zA.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Last October, Erika López Prater was teaching an art history seminar at Hamline University in Minnesota. She had warned her students that in one class she would show a 14th-century painting that included a representation of the Prophet Mohammed; any student who didn’t want to see it, she said, could skip the class without penalty. When the class came, she repeated her warning at the outset, then in due course, she showed the artwork. A student who had chosen to remain in the class filed a complaint. Others who hadn’t been present followed suit. The university decided not to renew López Prater’s contract.
This is the “case study” that opens Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s The Canceling of the American Mind, and López Prater’s tale is the first of many. Major institutions, from universities to media companies and Hollywood studios, now seem to take reflexive action whenever one of their own is accused of being offensive. Having seen other companies or groups besieged with boycotts and harassment after standing by their employees, many have decided that it’s easier and safer just to cut ties.
This is the actual face of “cancel culture”. Lukianoff and Schlott connect it, in America, to previous ideological witch-hunts, such as the post-Second World War paranoia about secret communists, or the forcing out of the “unpatriotic” during the so-called War on Terror. There has always been a hegemonic political consensus, and going against it has always had illogical and disproportionate consequences. It’s just that in contemporary America, elite institutions have a noticeable liberal bias, and the political Left has taken up the pitchforks and the torches that the conservatives left behind.
There’s a good summation in this book of how “free speech” went from a Leftist ideal to something conservatives now claim to defend. The standard critique of cancel culture relies on a defence of the ability of someone to state an unpopular opinion or say something someone might find offensive. There can be consequences for offensive speech, we’re told, but they must be proportionate, and (in America) they cannot violate a person’s constitutional rights.
But the old First Amendment argument holds less sway than it used to. The American Civil Liberties Union was once considered heroic in its defence of free speech: it took on cases against neo-Nazis to protect minority opinions and ideas. Today, speech is conflated with harassment, and the ACLU’s association with hate groups has tarnished its reputation in Leftist circles. Hence it’s often Right-wing pundits who claim to defend the right to free speech.
![Former New York Times writer Bari Weiss appears as a free-speech warrior](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/10/06/TELEMMGLPICT000268963078_16965840590530_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqWSm3Hskyb1S8n9mpYgoiG_4Xpit_DMGvdp2n7FDd82k.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In their assessment of the state of cancel culture, Lukianoff and Schlott focus almost exclusively on the university system. They write about professors who have been reported, reprimanded or fired for what the authors argue are free-speech issues, such as López Prater’s use of the Mohammed image, or a professor who was coaxed into early retirement after making provocative jokes about feminism. This allows the book to circumnavigate, for instance, the recent spike in book bans orchestrated by the political Right across America’s public-education system. (They also ceaselessly promote their non-profit organisation for the protection of free speech on college campuses: Fire, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.)
Lukianoff and Schlott are correct that too many on the Left have been quick to deny the existence of cancel culture, either because they’re in denial or because it’s a process that’s politically useful for them. But accusing others of being cancel-happy has been equally useful to figures on the Right, whether it’s a comedian declaring themselves a martyr when they’re criticised for an offensive joke, or the likes of op-ed columnist Bari Weiss – praised in this book as a free-speech warrior – who tried to convert her quitting The New York Times into a seismic event.
All of this makes cancellation a murky subject, one that requires its investigators to show precision and rigour. Otherwise, they fall into the same bad habits as the cancellation mob: exaggeration, ad hominem attacks, hysteria. Lukianoff and Schlott are ostensibly neutral, but in reality not immune to this. For example, they list some “cheap rhetorical dodges” that activists use. One method that they claim is popular is “conflating two arguments”: when facing criticism for an extreme statement, someone will reply by saying their words have a more moderate, secret meaning. So, when an activist is criticised for the slogan “defund the police”, they can defend it by saying, “I just mean we should spend more money on housing.” This allows them to deny their extreme beliefs, and makes their critics look unreasonable for opposing housing reform.
![Ayatollah Khamenei, writes Jessa Crispin, hardly makes for a reasonable comparison](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/10/06/TELEMMGLPICT000247183205_16965836739660_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwSX5rhseiWKOo9p9OQ-ymek.jpeg?imwidth=350)
And yet, having given that example, one which is evidently from the Left and held up as having been on “wide display” in 2020, Lukianoff and Schlott instantly compare it to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s defence of the phrase “death to America” as meaning “death to American policies, death to arrogance”. This seems unbalanced. If I say something like, “You know who also banned books? Hitler” – that would be a cheap trick to stymy debate. But apparently if Lukianoff and Schlott say, “You know who also conflates arguments? The Ayatollah” – that isn’t.
Lukianoff’s previous work, a 2018 collaboration with Jonathan Haidt called The Coddling of the American Mind, was a mushy, inferior and unauthorised update of Allan Bloom’s 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. Lukianoff and Haidt made some good points about the unintended consequences of the turn, on college campuses, towards a rhetoric of “safety”, whether in the form of “safe spaces” or “trigger warnings”; the authors argued that this was antithetical to good pedagogy. But in taking Bloom’s cold analysis of moral relativism in American academia and turning it into a repetitive, emotional argument, they only weakened its force.
Lukianoff and Schlott’s sequel is no more restrained or incisive, and there are already several better books on this subject, from Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse (2016) to Laura Kipnis’s Unwanted Advances (2017) – or even, to my mind, ‘Canceling’ (2022), a 90-minute explainer video by Natalie Wynn, aka the YouTube star Contrapoints. One thing that makes the above superior is that they don’t rely on an easy divide between the political Left and Right, nor do they, like The Canceling of the American Mind, imply that we live in a culture in which an irrational minority is simply getting revenge on a more reasonable, logical majority. It’s ironic, really. Polarisation and simplistic answers are among the things Lukianoff and Schlott condemn.
The Canceling of the American Mind is published by Allen Lane at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books