Steven Pinker: Cancel Culture Is Orwellian
thetimes.co.uk
thetimes.co.uk
If you can "cancel" someone by writing about them, refusing to employ them, refusing to buy their products, or refusing to subscribe to them, then isn't cancellation inevitable? It's certainly not new. There has always been fame and infamy.
It seems like the major difference now is that large social networks enable the amassing and coordination of groups at a speed and scale that was never possible before.
If that's the case, then Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey are essentially the only people capable of changing the dynamic without infringing on anyone's rights.
You can't replace companies that have up to 2 billion combined users and buy any competitors that get any traction at all. All you can do is legislate.
The only solutions I can think of involve limiting the dissemination of false or exaggerated information and fact checking.
Everyone seems to agree on the need for this except the people who are spread the most misinformation and the people who want to make them happy.
Again, it seems like we're all hostages of the whim of a few social media CEOs.
It would be ironic if it turned out some huge percentage of observed echo chambers were bots and alts. Unfortunately, I may be too optimistic on that point.
pre-internet sock puppetry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Scherhorn
non-internet spontaneous angry mobs include rock fans on 12 July 1979, serbs on 24 April 1987, etc.
Boycotting, publicly denouncing or even attempting to convince an employer to fire someone falls within the bounds of legitimate free speech. The effects of cancel culture lie within the power of employers, platform owners, etc. The angry mob isn't putting a gun to anyone's head, they're just complaining loudly.
>The only solutions I can think of involve limiting the dissemination of false or exaggerated information and fact checking.
Which would, itself, be cibsuderedd Orwellian and denounced as an attempt to create a Ministry of Truth to punish wrongthink, all while questioning who gets to define what "falsehood" or "exaggeration" is, and who watches the watchers?
That's a solution, but it's one that the opponents of cancel culture would probably vehemently oppose as being no different than cancel culture itself.
(:philosoraptor:)
And not to get too "political" with it, but the camp opposed to cancel culture tends to be right-wing, and tends to frame their opposition as being left-wing (using US standards.) Right-wing people also tend to support at-will employment as an expression of right-libertarian/anti-regulation principles.
This may be why the discourse around cancel culture tends to be framed in such a way that the threat is the speech of leftists/liberals/progressives, etc. rather than the power of corporate entities to enforce arbitrary consequences.
We do that already, specifically if it has the effect of harming someone. See, defamation law.
But most of what is objected to about “cancel culture” is dissemination of true facts about people as well as statements of personal preferences about how others should react to those facts, not dissemination of false or exaggerated information.
No wonder he deserved assassination[1], unlike the uppity types who merely got a more modern cancellation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23641010
(for that matter, Orwell wasn't even very "Orwellian," in the modern sense. I haven't read much of the potboiler surrounding Goldstein, as I view it as having been fast-forward for what Orwell had to communicate, but as far as I can tell proles, Inner Party members, and animals are all relatively free: it's the Outer Party members who must newspeak and blackwhite and self-censor, and they are not a large percentage of the population, nor even would they be a large percentage of current internet users.
I don't think Orwell had intended to be predictive[2] so much as descriptive, and the "Outer Party" would have corresponded (as EA Blair himself was) to the middle Ronnie in: https://twitter.com/johncleese/status/1254130854462455813?la...
(note well that Cleese himself has felt the need to point out to the BBC that one of the ways one makes fun of an idea is to put it in the mouth of a clearly unsympathetic[3] character)
cf Animal Farm or why waiters are the worst snobs in Down and Out... or Notes on Nationalism http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part30 When Orwell says "... it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which [nationalism] deals should actually exist" he is probably pointing at the same ideal which in the Vonnegut multiverse is known as a Granfaloon.)
[1] Kennedy and Khrushchev horrified their hard-liners with détente, and they both got "cancelled". Causation or mere correlation?
[2] although he did call Airstrip One's relationship to Oceania well before the Suez Crisis made it official.
[3] unfortunately Poe's law has won, and it's no longer clear what is clearly unsympathetic?
Is this a Poe's law pony? https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/986/297/383...
et in Arcadia ego?
Does Pinker have "a willingness to “dismiss and downplay racist violence”"? Yes or no?
His response is that the accusation is "utterly ludicrous."
But rather than demonstrate why it's ludicrous, perhaps by pointing to research publications which support him (instead of an NYT article) he instead asserts that his critics are using Orwellian tactics. That's a meta argument, and that sort of switch is a technique people use to distract people from the underlying argument.
His critics explicitly say they don't want to "cancel" him, but he in essence says that's doublespeak. While on the other hand he rejects "dog whistling", saying “It means that it doesn’t matter what anyone says, you can always accuse them of having dog whistles of your own invention.”
So he's reading between the lines, in essence arguing that these are dog whistles of their own - yet his own logic says that's a bad faith interpretation.
And if the argument has any merit it can be applied to accusations like "Orwellian" and "doublespeak" - "It doesn't matter what anyone says, you can always accuse them of being Orwellian."
That's why I hate meta arguments which don't start by actually demonstrating the validity or invalidity of the underlying argument.
Or, consider "A large number of people have been appalled at the firings".
Are those firings appropriate? Is there a list of these suspect firings, with evidence that it was due to Orwellian accusations?
Because those "cancellations" I know about appear due to the reasonable consequences of their criticisms.
Without those details, the actual argument is too amorphous to be actionable. For example, when he points to "junior scholars who say, ‘Well, this is what I think, but I dare not say it.’" -- what are the things they want to say, and why shouldn't they suffer consequences of making, say, unfounded, unjustifiably, and racist statements.
I'm sure Pinker agrees that some things deserve chastisement, since he himself is chastising.
Since he took the argument to a meta-level, we must also ask about how many junior scholars want to speak out against bigotry, sexism, racism, and more but don't dare not say it for having senior people like Pinker speak against them. And given the people who have talked about, for example, sexism in the academic workplace which they have felt powerless to oppose for fear of losing their job and career, we know that's an issue, so Pinker's argument isn't actually a strong one.
Finally, look at the quotes "I wouldn’t go too far in tasteless comparisons to the Chinese cultural revolution or the European witch hunts, but ... I don’t want to say that the criticism of journalists and academics is the same as burning a real witch, [but] some of the underlying dynamics overlap.”
That's the "I'm not saying it was aliens... but it was aliens" meme.
It's an argument style which lets you say something, but not actually say it. Which is disingenuous at best, and "some of the underlying dynamics overlap" with Godwin's law.
Pinker says that he's safe in his position and does not worry about being canceled.
The people doing the criticism specifically say they are not trying to cancel him. Quoting from the open letter linked by Aaronson:
> We want to note here that we have no desire to judge Dr. Pinker’s actions in moral terms, or claim to know what his aims are. Nor do we seek to “cancel” Dr. Pinker, or to bar him from participating in the linguistics and LSA communities (though many of our signatories may well believe that doing so would be the right course of action).
They are:
> calling for the removal of Dr. Steven Pinker from both our list of distinguished academic fellows and our list of media experts. We, the undersigned, believe that Dr. Pinker’s behavior as a public academic is not befitting of a representative of our professional organization, that the LSA’s own stated goals make such a conclusion inevitable, and that the LSA should publicly reaffirm its position and distance itself from Dr. Pinker.
Even if that action were taken, how is that meaningfully "canceling" someone?
Aaronson argues that it's a first step to test their power, and a veiled threat of what might be to come if they actually have power.
Which I cannot distinguish from the age-old rhetorical technique of pointing to the extremists of any movement, then argue they are representative of everyone in the movement, in order to dismiss the entire movement.
Aaronson's piece uses a similar argument to Pinker, with:
> Again and again, spineless institutions have responded to these sorts of ultimatums by capitulating to them.
Can we have a list of examples please? Without concrete definitions and examples, we can read anything into this topic.
We know there are many cases where spineless institutions did not intervene despite public outrage, eg, MIT's fondness for a certain rich convicted pedophile, so it's hard to think there's a systemic capitulation to the demands of cancellers.
I do think that we need to have a more general (meta if you will) conversation about the outrage and pitchfork actions resulting from social networks (twitter in particular), so I agree with Pinker there.
I also strongly disagree that in a piece like this he needed to demonstrate that he has "a willingness to “dismiss and downplay racist violence”", especially if that accusation is based on a tweet citing a NYT article. If that's the only basis for the assessment (I have not seen the other tweets and was not familiar with Pinker before reading this article), then it's absolutely ludicrous.
I then agree with his following point, that if citing an article like that in an argument, or disagreeing with a subpoint of a large issue (in a tweet even) can get 500 academics to write a letter to get you dismissed from a fellowship, then we are in very dangerous territory.
Your points about the "I'm not comparing it a witch hunt, but it looks like a witch hunt" are well taken and annoyed me a lot as well.
1) One explicit criticism was a stated "willingness to “dismiss and downplay racist violence”". Rather than address the criticism, the article goes into Pinker's meta-discussion about the methods of criticism.
A stronger counter-argument would be to first demonstrate why the criticism is meritless. I also do not know the larger context, but nkurz's point was that this was a good article, and I disagree with that assessment.
2) I don't like how there's a lack of concrete examples of cancel culture. Instead, there's a second-hand argument about against cancelling (without listing those who were canceled), and an argument about chilling effects (without describing which arguments are being chilled - something that Pinker could do by proxy, as he says he is secure in his position).
If we do go into a discussion about "the outrage and pitchfork actions resulting from social networks", then we need to define terms, backed by specific examples.
We have have the Black Lives Matter movement, which have a tragically long list of names and examples of people, which vividly support their thesis that Black Lives have mattered much less than they should.
Terms are important. Is what happened to Kaepernick the results of "outrage and pitchfork actions resulting from social networks"?
Or is cancel culture something that only happens to bigots and entitled people?
If someone quits their job because of public outrage over a legal but distasteful opinion, is that automatically cancel culture?
Eg, if someone is fired for promoting unionization on Twitter, is that cancel culture?
Having a definition also lets us judge how long "cancel culture" has been here. In my own reading of the topic, liberty means the right of criticism, and very severe penalties are the natural result of some unfavourable opinions - (paraphrasing John Staurt Mills there; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23794480 ).
By leaving the details blank, Pinker lets people read into the argument whatever viewpoints they want. Which is why I do not think this that good of an article.
The lack of a real definition is also my fundamental problem with this entire topic of "cancel culture."
This is the same thing as those 2010 pieces "the millenials are killing restaurants". They're just voting with their wallet. It was poor food when they were mostly student or young workers. Now it's Nike, or anything caught doing thing that some millenials find immoral. That's what the previous generation kept saying. The millenials just listened (and have tools to organize).
I'm not agreeing with this, i'm just understanding. I'm voting with my wallet too. And this is a powerful tool.
If some millenials (or now the next generation, whatever its name) chose not to go to an university because of what a professor said and this is causing financial loss, well to bad. It's sad for the professor, but what can you do? If it is not defamation, people have the right to talk and organize, no?