By Greg Weiner
Thursday, September 10, 2020
Greg Patton — a business professor, for now, at the
University of Southern California, who committed the outrage of repeating
a Chinese expression that sounds similar to a racist slur in English — is
the latest scholar to fall prey to campus cancel culture. His case also serves
as a warning that, while cancel culture is a real phenomenon that presents a
clear and present danger to academic freedom, a more insidious peril lurks: the
soft despotism of presumed conformity.
Patton’s name is now known, and should be, to defenders
of academic freedom. His case illustrates the bizarre entanglements to which
cancellation is prone. He was educating students about Chinese language and
culture, yet was canceled in the name of cultural diversity. Patton’s lesson
pertained to the use of language, yet his dean, Geoffrey Garrett, misused the
obligatory word “safety” (Oxford English Dictionary: “the state of being
protected from or guarded against hurt or injury”) to describe the anxieties
offended students felt.
All these episodes are problematic. They invert the
purpose of learning, which inherently entails discomfort, as well as a baseline
condition for scholarly inquiry, which is academic freedom. Patton’s
cancellation occupies a special, and perhaps especially absurd, category in the
sense that he did not even express a controversial idea of the sort academic
freedom should protect.
But there is an advantage to these explicit illustrations
of cancel culture: They are visible and known. The more egregious they are, the
more attention they draw. A larger question looms behind them: Who never speaks
in the first place? One can imagine junior faculty, in particular, treating
Patton as a cautionary tale: Offend students, get suspended. But even that is
rooted in the shock and awe of prominent cases.
The more difficult cases — largely unknown because they
are, unlike discrete and reportable events, unknowable — are those in which
scholars restrain their own language not out of fear but rather out of
weariness. For them, the question may be less what consequences will ensue from
controversy than whether they have the time and energy to engage in it.
Resistance is not futile; it is simply exhausting. Purported offenses and the
silencing that attends them are identifiable events that tend, at least in the
circles that care about them, to make news. Self-censorship, if it is even
self-conscious, is the dog that never barked and is not news precisely for that
reason.
The dynamic of cancellation, too, is at least tangible.
People are offended. They protest audibly and demand redress. Often, their
intent is reeducation and suppression. But we know when it occurs and can
oppose it. To be sure, cancellation is a cudgel for conformity. Its influence
as a background condition is undeniable.
But the intent of those who seek compliance more softly
is not necessarily hostile or heavy-handed. They may, on the contrary,
sincerely perceive themselves as charitable. The resulting dynamic is less
severe and arguably more insidious: those who police, or rather shape, speech
not with an intent to suppress dissent but rather on what they view to be the
benevolent assumption that everyone agrees with them.
This attitude is familiar in academia and, doubtless,
beyond. It is evident in conversations that are not intended to reeducate but
rather to reenforce what everyone assumes everyone else already believes. Many
proponents of critical race theory — whose animating idea is that race is the
one thing needful, the single lens through which all other phenomena should be
viewed — are indeed trying to compel compliance. But even more simply operate
on the belief that everyone agrees with them. For this crowd, that is an act of
sincere charity: Reasonable people agree with me, and the people I encounter
are reasonable.
One suspects, for example, that the training in critical
race theory that President Trump recently suspended in federal agencies is
often less intended to force every individual to comply than to reflect an
assumption that everyone already does. True, that gives it a bizarre cast:
uniformity in the name of diversity; education centered on what is purported
already to be known. But while the tone of news reporting tends to pit
proponents of critical race theory against its adversaries, the most common
purveyors of the softer approach to conformity may not be social-justice
warriors. Warriors relish the fight. This is less war than bureaucracy. It
assumes a uniformity of opinion that requires no fight, only repetitive
procedures that reflect a victory already achieved. It is a mindset likelier to
be puzzled than outraged by Trump’s move.
That manifests in the steady deflation of language.
Programs based on critical race theory, in a recent Politico headline, were
matter-of-factly described as “racial
equity training.” Did the headline writer consciously intend to render the
language benign so as to conceal the controversy that actually surrounded it?
Perhaps. But, and this is the subtler and therefore more dangerous possibility,
perhaps not. The casual and uncritical repetition of terms such as “systemic
racism” suggests similar assumptions. Why, one might ask, are Americans signing
petitions demanding individual indictments when those individual behaviors are
the product of “systems”? Journalists have an interest in the integrity of
words. They are a writer’s raw materials. A business model that devalues them
will not long sustain purveyors of those goods. A polity that traffics in
contradictions will become further divided because many people will see
themselves as speaking another language.
Similarly, coverage of Professor Jessica Krug — a white
George Washington University professor who posed for years as African-American
— paid no heed to the flagrant inversion of language in the Maoist
self-denunciation (“you should absolutely cancel me; and I absolutely cancel
myself”) she
posted on Medium.com. Krug confessed to lying. A lie (OED: “a false
statement made with intent to deceive”) involves the misuse of words. Yet so
did the confession.
One need read no further than the headline over Krug’s
Medium.com post — “The Truth, and the Anti-Black Violence of My Lies” — to see
that no one gave a second look to the fundamental fact that she admitted lies
by deploying words as instruments of will rather than meaning. Yet on what
grounds do those for whom words are fungible denounce lies? Krug’s body of
scholarly work was manifestly and ideologically pro-black, at least as
she conceives the term. Her “lies,” consisting of words, were not “violent.”
Among the premises of political life — Aristotle: “man is by nature a political
animal”; “man alone among the animals has speech” — is that words are an
explicit alternative to violence.
The inattention to some of the more shocking assertions
in the post — “I don’t believe that any anti-Black life has inherent value” —
may reflect an assumption of consensus both as to what constitutes being
“anti-Black” and the irredeemable consequences of those so characterized.
There was a similar inversion of words in a recent online
town-hall meeting at Northwestern University’s law school. It featured the
spectacle — at once bizarre and predictable — of individuals denouncing
themselves as racists and promising to “do better” in the future. Here, too,
the Maosim was chilling. So was the accompanying degradation of words. The
whole point of the exercise was to demonstrate that the individuals were not
racist. The only way they could prove it was to declare exactly the opposite.
There is no small element of virtue signaling in all
this. But the signal can be received only on a frequency on which it is
presupposed to be virtuous. That notion of virtue is undermined by the
inability to protest what is unjust without limitlessly extending the scope of
accusation.
In that vein, it is worth noting two facts. One is that
society is reckoning with issues of race right now because acts of racism are
immoral and unjust. These acts should be confronted on their own terms.
Yet the premise of critical race theory is that race
permeates everything. The second fact is therefore inescapable: On issues of
race, the history of the United States is one of progress. The story is uneven,
but the trajectory is upward. This does not mean that enough progress has been
made or that acts of racism should not be confronted. But it is revealing that
we are discovering that race permeates everything around us at exactly the same
moment that permeation is at or near a historic low, viewed in the broad sweep
of historical time. That is different from saying it is low enough. But the
trajectory of allegation is almost precisely the opposite of the trajectory of
progress. Among those most committed to the idea that race is everything, is it
possible that race becoming less prominent is a threat?
The consensus these softer advocates of conformity assume
is a twist on Tocqueville’s “omnipotence of the majority.” Tocqueville
predicted that majority opinion would silence dissent in democracies, if only
by making egalitarian individuals doubt their own opinions exactly because the
multitude, composed of their equals, disagreed. Yet the assumption behind this
softer and more insidious version is that no one disagrees to begin with. It is
not an attempt to tyrannize through dominant opinion. It rests, rather, on an
unreflective presupposition that dominant opinion is universally shared. This
is not cancel culture. It is conformity culture. Each fuels the other, but the
latter may prove to be a more corrosive force.
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