All cancel, no culture

How did the US end up so polarised? Two writers try to explain the chaos

CANCELING OF THE AMERICAN MIND by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott 464pp, Allen Lane, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£25, ebook £10.99

The Left often deny that cancel culture is real, while the Right use the idea with strategy

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, and the artwork was shown, a student who had chosen to remain filed a complaint. The university decided not to renew Prater’s contract.

This is the “case study” that opens Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s The Canceling of the American Mind, and 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, both journalists and writers, 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 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 torches that the conservatives left behind.

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 Prater’s use of the Mohammed image, or a professor who was coaxed into early retirement after making provocative jokes about feminism. Lukianoff and Schlott are correct that too many on the Left have been quick to deny the existence of cancel culTHE ture. 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. Lukianoff and Schlott are ostensibly neutral, but not immune to exaggeration. For example, they list some “cheap rhetorical dodges” that activists use. One method that they claim is popular is “conflating two arguments”: when someone is (say) criticised for chanting “defund the police”, they can defend it by saying, “I mean we should spend more money on housing.” This makes their critics look unreasonable for opposing housing reform.

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, to put it mildly, unbalanced.

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 turn, on college campuses, towards a rhetoric of “safety”, whether in the form of “safe spaces” or “trigger warnings”. But in taking Bloom’s cold analysis of American academia and turning it into a repetitive, emotional argument, they only weakened its force.

Lukianoff and Schlott’s sequel is no more 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). They don’t rely on an easy divide between the political Left and Right, nor do they imply that we live in a culture in which an irrational minority is simply getting revenge on a more reasonable majority. It’s ironic, really. Polarisation and simplistic answers are among the things Lukianoff and Schlott condemn.