Academics Are Worried About Cancel Culture | Hacker News Reader

Academics Are Worried About Cancel Culture

theatlantic.com

55 pointsTomte29 comments

Very few of the people who wrote to me are of conservative political orientation. Rather, a main thread in the missives is people left-of-center wondering why, suddenly, to be anything but radical is to be treated as a retrograde heretic. Thus the issue is not the age-old one of left against right, but what one letter writer calls the “circular firing squad” of the left: It is now no longer “Why aren’t you on the left?” but “How dare you not be as left as we are.”

This is the most revealing quote for me as a fellow left-of-centre person disgusted by this behaviour that overwhelmingly comes from our side.

It's shocking to me that after a few years of this stuff there are still people on the left - including regularly on this site - in denial.

As a former left leaning person who saw this coming ten years ago when will you say it’s too much and vote against the left?

This is a great question that I often ask myself (I've also been railing against it for years), but its in my blood.

A Labour voter, I could vote against the left, but (unless it was to keep extremist left or right wing parties out) I don't think I could ever vote for the Tories.

Do you think you're different than someone who would rather vote for the extreme right than vote for the moderate left?

The Labour party are very much not extreme so they are by definition different as per your question.

It’s this false dichotomy where “if you’re not with us, you’re against us”. The worst part for me is that Europe is following US in this, as a loyal puppy.

The arguments I've heard from European students are pretty much textbook translated from things I've read years before from Americans, the irony being that these are the descendants of French Theory, only a much more radical and, if you ask me, idiotic treatment of it.

The French Theory ended in great disillusionment over here, I don't have my hopes high for this one.

It's what I call American Bullshit seeping into our societies. Oftentimes it's verbatim parroting of US left-wing rhetoric, most notably ideas from the BLM movement applied to a European country that never had slavery and has a black population of 1% or less.

Apparently the Atlantic's editors don't want to piss off the "cancel culture doesn't exist" crowd: the article's title has been changed to "Academics Are Worried About Their Freedom", although they forgot to update the <title> tag.

Sad.

It's common practice for online publishing platforms to show a different title in site's body and in its title tag.

Yeah, it's common when the title has been changed by the editor.

Given that toleration is understood to mean recognition of the rights of individuals and groups to hold dissenting opinions' it might be interesting to ask cancel culture' advocates as to the views which they <do> tolerate together with some examples. This is likely to throw into sharp relief their extreme stance. Worth noting that for the cancel-culture crowd, 'giving offense' appears to be a characteristic which cannot be applied to their own pronouncements.

I normally don't really care about this, but the controversy over the variation hypothesis is really odd to me - Sexual Dimorphism obviously exists in humans, so why not our brains.

On top of that, the idea that it's somehow anti-feminist is weird, because surely it would mean that for a lot of jobs you'd be better off hiring the woman. A lot of those controversies seem like guttural NIH-syndrome (If it were proposed by a woman I don't think there's be a fuss)

My father spent the last few years of his career running the finance department of a college. He was a free market economist, and taught finance from that perspective.

Naturally, the rest of the academic staff were leftists. One day, they decided to invite him to a debate on the merits of free markets vs socialism. They figured they'd wipe the floor with him.

Well, they badly underestimated him. He was an experienced debater, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of history and economics. He trounced them pretty good.

But the important thing is the whole thing was very friendly and collegial, and they congratulated him on his performance. Several even thanked him for explaining things in ways they hadn't heard of before. A couple told him they weren't aware there was even a case for free markets.

A far cry from today.

Science marches along. Today, we know that markets are likely not efficient, thanks to P likely being smaller than NP, along lines sketched by Nash and Gödel over half a century ago.

We should be careful to conclude lessons from such anecdotes. After all, we could just as easily choose Robert Pirsig as our example academic. Pirsig was grading philosophy papers and wanted to know what made some papers better than others (in his words, which papers "had more Quality"). Eventually he was asked to debate his colleagues on the subject of Quality. While he may have won that debate, he was still ostracized by his peers and fell into a downward spiral which only ended when his personality was destroyed by electroshock therapy.

Oh, and Pirsig would have been the "leftist" here, the non-conservative. The rest of the department were classicists who knew their Plato and Aristotle back and forth, and Pirsig felt himself forced to take the path of Socrates, deliberately destroying the fruits of his career in order to save his intellectual integrity. If we say that cancel culture belongs only to one side or one group, then we are deluding ourselves.

> Today, we know that markets are likely not efficient, thanks to P likely being smaller than NP, along lines sketched by Nash and Gödel over half a century ago.

You seem to be confused with your history/terminology.

To address your larger point: That markets are not perfectly efficient does not buttress socialism and central planning. Far from it. The latter are much worse.

> He was a free market economist [...] Naturally, the rest of the academic staff were leftists. One day, they decided to invite him to a debate on the merits of free markets vs socialism.

While academics tend to lean left but that in itself does not imply they are socialists.

> But the important thing is the whole thing was very friendly and collegial, and they congratulated him on his performance. > A far cry from today.

Such intellectual discourse has been going on in academia for millennia and still does today. It's not surprising that an academic would congratulate their opposition for a well-reasoned debate regardless of ideologies.

> While academics tend to lean left but that in itself does not imply they are socialists.

They set up the debate and the topic and took the socialist side. My father was the lone academic on the free market side.

> It's not surprising that an academic would congratulate their opposition for a well-reasoned debate regardless of ideologies.

It shouldn't be surprising. But these days, it appears to be surprising.

The idea that this debate isn't near constantly happening somewhere in a given university is a bit odd. The problem now is really in the department's that are only tangentially related to the subject of the debate - e.g. the economics departments are usually, even amongst the increasingly rare Marxists, educated well enough to argue for either side but the social sciences and humanities are often definitely overrun with leftists. As you would expect, really, but still.

I do believe that all university students should be required to take part in a debate like this - the side could arguably he random, although practically I'd let the choose. Being able to debate properly is a very useful skill - some people I've met really don't like being debated, so I don't bother, but sometimes you have to. And on top of that it has a nearly capitalistic approach to challenging your beliefs - the argument formed by (say) 50 students vs. another 50 will catch many more people on different hooks than one lecturer.

US universities (maybe universities in general) are extremely left-aligned environments [0]. There is presumably a general background risk of Maoism, Stalinism or other form of Communism developing in extreme left-wing environments.

The natural follow up question from this article is, I suppose, "what moderate force is there to ensure that the universities cultivate a liberal left-wing culture rather than an authoritarian left wing culture?".

I diagnose the key issue in articles like this as that left-ness has been identified as the virtue in opposition to right-wing ideals, rather than liberalism in opposition to authoritarianism. Where is the impetus supposed to come from to encourage academics/students/administrators lean away from authoritarianism?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_ac...

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