Linguist John McWhorter (Columbia) takes another stab at the topic (earlier attempt here):
Our national reckoning on race has brought to the fore a loose but committed assemblage of people given to the idea that social justice must be pursued via attempts to banish from the public sphere, as much as possible, all opinions that they interpret as insufficiently opposed to power differentials. Valid intellectual and artistic endeavor must hold the battle against white supremacy front and center, white people are to identify and expunge their complicity in this white supremacy with the assumption that this task can never be completed, and statements questioning this program constitute a form of “violence” that merits shaming and expulsion.
Skeptics have labeled this undertaking “cancel culture,” which of late has occasioned a pushback from its representatives. The goal, they suggest, is less to eliminate all signs of a person’s existence—which tends to be impractical anyway— than to supplement critique with punishment of some kind....An indication of how deeply this frame of mind has penetrated many of our movers and shakers is that they tend to see this punishment clause as self-evidently just, as opposed to the novel, censorious addendum that it is.
Professor McWhorter goes on to review various examples of cancelings, successful and attempted. One of his anecdotes concerns former philosophy PhD students:
I have heard from not one but two philosophy doctorates who left academia. One explained that he was driven out by the “accelerating creep of what felt to me a pretty stifling orthodoxy. The hiring market was dominated by a concern for diversity statements, the ability to teach fairly ideologically-slanted courses on philosophy and critical race theory or philosophy and gender, etc.; and more generally it felt progressively less like a profession where I could opt out of those trends while still being a competitive job applicant.”
There has certainly been a striking increase in job ads for philosophy of race and gender, but otherwise this may be a slight exaggeration about the state of the profession. (After all, despite my "unwoke" condition, this is still the most heavily trafficked philosophy blog in the world--admittedly, a minority of the benighted "woke" read to get aggravated!).
Let me conclude with a couple thoughts of my own. First, it is the hallmark of "cancel culture" that people try to get others fired or sanctioned for their lawful speech unrelated to their professional duties. Thus, it's not an instance of "cancel culture" to try to get someone who engages in sexually harassing speech in the workplace fired: those who abuse their professional role may lose their claim to it (recall, e.g., this case involving abuse of an editor's role at the APA Blog from last year--to its credit, the APA Blog took remedial action). Second, "cancel culture" operates primarily through mobs (these days, cyber-mobs) whose "secret desire to be tyrants is wrapped up in virtuous words" (to quote Nietzsche again). Third, the cancelers flagrantly misuse the language of "harm" and "violence" in carrying out their attempted purge. Fourth, academic cancelers have no understanding of, or interest, in the values associated with academic freedom. The hostility towards academic freedom--the foundation of serious disciplinary research in the universities--is probably the strongest reason why they themselves should not be hired into academic positions, where that is an option (this is a variation on the first point).
To be sure, the mindless "cancel culture" in parts of academia, including philosophy, is hardly the most important issue in America today--whether the authoritarian monster-child is re-elected, or allows himself to be un-re-elected looms rather larger! But the academic cancelers are just the mirror image of the Trumpistas, zealots and authoritarian wannabes, but with a different cause and less power--thus they try to exercise their power to destroy the one institution they might affect, namely, the academy. They are also aided and abetted by those dissemblers in the academy who pretend it isn't happening or isn't that widespread (yet!).
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