
Steven Pinker: Cancel Culture Is Orwellian - fermienrico
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/steven-pinker-i-had-to-speak-out-cancel-culture-is-orwellian-sr2q03nh6
======
smt88
I still haven't seen anyone suggest a solution to so-called "cancel culture"
that doesn't involve equally Orwellian restrictions against various important
freedoms (e.g. speech, what to buy, whom to employ, etc.)

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.

~~~
robjan
The entity who performs the act of cancelling isn't the employer who fires the
"offender", but the angry mob who lobbies the employer to fire said person.

The only solutions I can think of involve limiting the dissemination of false
or exaggerated information and fact checking.

~~~
krapp
> The entity who performs the act of cancelling isn't the employer who fires
> the "offender", but the angry mob who lobbies the employer to fire said
> person.

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.

~~~
082349872349872
If work in the US weren't "at will", wouldn't an employer be _legally unable_
to fire someone just because of an angry mob?

(:philosoraptor:)

~~~
krapp
Probably, but it is, so they do.

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.

------
fermienrico
Archive: [http://archive.is/rhc5P](http://archive.is/rhc5P)

~~~
nkurz
Good article, thanks for posting. Could you possibly fix the spelling in the
title while you still have time?

~~~
eesmith
Really? I found Pinker's points entirely too meta to be understandable.

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.

~~~
nkurz
You raise good points, but it's well past midnight here on the East Coast of
the US and I need to go to sleep. So in lieu of attempting an adequate
response, did you see Scott Aaronson's parallel piece:
[https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4892](https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4892).
I think it tries to answer some of your questions, although I'm not sure if it
succeeds. And this one by Sarah Jeong is more sympathetic to the cancelling
side, but might do a little better on the "amorphousness" aspect:
[https://www.theverge.com/21320338/letter-harpers-writers-
fre...](https://www.theverge.com/21320338/letter-harpers-writers-free-speech-
canceled-social-media-illiberalism).

~~~
eesmith
I read Scott Aaronson's piece but don't see how it fits.

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.

------
yoav
Isn’t “cancel culture” just a new word for “capitalism” and “let the market
decide”?

~~~
orwin
"Cancel culture" is a new word for boycott and voting with your wallet.

------
orwin
"Cancel culture" is what you get when you tell a whole generation that the
political apparel can't do anything and the only way of beating either climate
change/racism/sexism is voting with your wallet. It was inconsequential when
the millenials were between 5 and 25, now its not anymore.

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?

