Hat tip to Robert Bidinotto for this article by Bari Weiss, a former writer for The New York Times. The article’s subtitle sums it nicely: “In red America and blue America, an epidemic of self-censorship is threatening democracy.” This article resonated with me because it touches on things I’ve seen and makes cogent observations. The fact that Weiss comes from the left reveals that the right doesn’t hold a monopoly on self-censorship. As a resident of deep blue New England, I have friends on the right who don’t dare to speak up in social settings to avoid the cloudburst of indignation that will rain down on them. At the outdoor tennis club where I play in the summer, my conservative friends whisper to each other about politics. Meanwhile, their liberal friends on adjoining courts loudly mock anyone who even thought about voting for Trump or didn’t vote for Biden. My conservative or Republican friends have another reason why they don’t talk openly about their beliefs: they fear that they won’t be invited to play in these other groups and will be shunned.
Weiss starts her article noting some examples of intolerance on the right then switches her aim to the left. (Weiss provides some revealing statistics on this at the end of her piece.)
[T]here are two illiberal cultures swallowing up the country. I know because I live in blue America, in a world awash in NPR tote bags and front lawn signs proclaiming the social justice bonafides of the family inside.
In my America, the people who keep quiet don’t fear the wrath of Trump supporters. They fear the illiberal left.
…
Maybe you are among this self-silencing majority. There is a good chance that you are if the biologist Bret Weinstein is right when he observes that the population is composed of four groups: the few who actually hunt witches, a large group that goes along and a larger group that remains silent. There’s also a tiny group that opposes the hunt. And that “final group — as if by magic — become witches.”
…
That world I was born into was liberal. I don’t mean that in the partisan sense, but in the classical and therefore the most capacious sense of that word. It was a liberal consensus shared by liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats.
The consensus view relied on a few foundational truths that seemed as obvious as the blue of the sky: the belief that everyone is created in the image of God; the belief that everyone is equal because of it; the presumption of innocence; a revulsion to mob justice; a commitment to pluralism and free speech, and to liberty of thought and of faith.
…
Most importantly, this worldview insisted that what bound us together was not blood or soil, but a commitment to a shared set of ideas. Even with all of its failings, the thing that makes America exceptional is that it is a departure from the notion, still prevalent in so many other places, that biology, birthplace, class, rank, gender, race are destiny.
For some reason Weiss chooses a rather indirect way of saying that the American classical liberalism rests on a belief in individualism. Believing that your destiny springs from “biology, birthplace, class, rank, gender, race” are forms of collectivism.
This old consensus — every single aspect of it — has been run over by the new illiberal orthodoxy. Because this ideology cloaks itself in the language of progress, many understandably fall for its self-branding. Don’t. It promises revolutionary justice, but it threatens to drag us back into the mean of history, in which we are pitted against one another according to tribe. [Emphasis added.]
The primary mode of this ideological movement is not building or renewing or reforming, but tearing down. Persuasion is replaced with public shaming. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Mercy is replaced with vengeance. Pluralism with conformity; debate with de-platforming; facts with feelings; ideas with identity.
I highlighted the word tribe in the first paragraph above because Weiss identifies a key point: What people call progressive really is tribalism, a form of collectivism. Instead of progress, she notes that we are regressing to tribalism.
Victimhood, in this ideology, confers morality. “I think therefore I am” is replaced with: “I am therefore I know,” and “I know therefore I am right.”
I’d add “I’ve been wronged therefore I’m moral (and you’re not).”
At the beginning I noted I see only self-censoring by those on the right because New England leans (heavily) left politically. Weiss cites the results of a study on how we self-censor.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that a recent national study from the Cato Institute found that 62% of Americans say they self-censor. The more conservative a group is, the more likely they are to hide their views: 52% of Democrats confess to self-censoring compared with 77% of Republicans.
I find it interesting that roughly one out of two Democrats police their language while three out of four Republicans hide their beliefs.
Weiss then touches on some of the forces that could have contributed to cancel culture and protective self-censorship.
The rise of this movement has taken place against the backdrop of major changes in American life — the tearing apart of our social fabric; the loss of religion and the decline of civic organizations; the opioid crisis; the collapse of American industries; the rise of big tech; the loss of faith in meritocracy; the arrogance of our elites; successive financial crises; a toxic public discourse; crushing student debt; the death of trust.
That’s fine but we could dig more for what has brought us to this state. I’ve reviewed in this blog an important book that tries to ferret out the deeper reasons: The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. They claim that the cancel culture generation has fallen under the sway of three “untruths.” They are: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people.
As I said in my review of Lukianoff’s and Haidt’s book, they don’t identify the deeper premises behind the subjectivity prevalent in our universities and culture. (Note: I’m not saying everything can be reduced only to the prevailing ideas. I’m trying to avoid the mistake of reducing everything to one dimension.) Nonetheless, I think we need to look philosophy for some answers. While most of us don’t deal directly with philosophical trends in our daily lives, universities are a major transmission belt for ideas to young people who can readily absorb the ideas pushed by their professors without the real-world experience to question whether these ideas are valid.
Hicks nicely captures the essence of postmodernism.
Metaphysically, postmodernism is anti-realist, holding that it is impossible to speak meaningfully about an independently existing reality. … Epistemologically, having rejected the notion of an independently existing reality, postmodernism denies that reason or any other method is a means of acquiring objective knowledge about that reality. Having substituted social-linguistic constructs for that reality, postmodernism emphasizes the subjectivity, conventionality, and incommensurability of those constructs. Postmodern accounts of human nature are consistently collectivist, holding that individuals’ identities are constructed largely by the social-linguistic groups that they are a part of. … Postmodern accounts of human nature also consistently emphasize relations of conflict between those groups; and given the de-emphasized or eliminated role of reason, postmodernism accounts hold that those conflicts are resolved primarily by the use of force. [Note: This was written in 2004 but accurately describes what Lukianoff and Haidt say is happening in universities today.]
In education, postmodernism rejects the notion that the purpose of education is primarily to train a child’s cognitive capacity for reason in order to produce an adult capable of functioning independently in the world. That view of education is replaced with the view that education is to take an essentially indeterminate being and give it a social identity. Education’s method of molding is linguistic, and so the language to be used is that which will create a human being sensitive to its racial, sexual and class identity. [Note: Hence the focus on language and microaggressions.]
To summarize, postmodernism says that there is no objective truth. Therefore, your feelings are as valid, if not more so, than critical, objective thinking, especially if you’re feeling oppressed. Power is used to “correct” the legacy of oppression. Therefore, it’s OK to suppress certain ideas and speakers because their oppressive ideas are dangerous, discredited, aggressive and oppressive. Power trumps truth because truth doesn’t exist; feelings trump reason and logic.
Let’s get back to Weiss’s article. I don’t know if you picked this up, but Weiss twice uses the word “pluralism” as a feature of classical liberalism. Pluralism has a number of definitions but for the purpose of this post I think the following description explains what Weiss means by pluralism.
The political philosophy of pluralism suggests that we really can and should “all just get along.” First recognized as an essential element of democracy by the philosophers of Ancient Greece, pluralism permits and even encourages a diversity of political opinion and participation. … Pluralism is a political philosophy holding that people of different beliefs, backgrounds, and lifestyles can coexist in the same society and participate equally in the political process.
It is also worth emphasising that moral value pluralism does not entail relativism. The idea is not that all values or value systems are equally true. Value pluralism is independent of any particular meta-ethical view. It is a claim about the normative domain: about what value looks like.
Commonsensically we talk about lots of different values—happiness, liberty, friendship, and so on. The question about pluralism in moral theory is whether these apparently different values are all reducible to one supervalue, or whether we should think that there really are several distinct values.
I’d describe pluralism in a different way. We can individually pursue our moral values using differing value hierarchies; our political system was designed to recognize this plurality and individualism by protecting our right to pursue these values as long as we don’t impinge on the rights of people to pursue their values.
As the entry above says, pluralism doesn’t entail relativism. I agree. But there is a problem. If postmodernism banishes objective truth, there is no principle to keep pluralism from spiraling into deuces-wild relativism. Because objective ways to negotiate differences of opinions are prohibited, it comes down to who has the most power. Instead of being able to work out our differences the people who happen to be in the minority (whether it’s conservatives in New England or liberals in Trump country) end up censoring themselves. This self-censorship doesn’t just threaten democracy. It damages our relationships and the ability for us to learn from each other.
