Greg Lukianoff: Cancel Culture, Deplatforming, Censorship & Free Speech

... if the goal is the project of human knowledge, which is to know the world as it is, you cannot know the world as it is without knowing what people really think. What people really think is an incredibly important fact to know. Every time you're actually saying, "You can't say that," you're actually depriving yourself of the knowledge of what people really think. You're causing what [inaudible 00:00:24], who's on our Board of advisors calls preference falsification. You end up with an inaccurate picture of the world.

Now, dear friends, here's Greg Lukianoff. Let's start with a big question. What is cancel culture? Now, you've said that you don't like the term as it's been quote "dragged through the mud and abused endlessly" by a whole host of controversial figures. Nevertheless, we have the term, what is it? Cancel culture is the uptick of campaigns, especially successful campaigns starting around 2014 to get people fired, expelled, de-platformed, et cetera, for speech that would normally be protected by the First Amendment. I always say would be protected because we're talking about circumstances in which it isn't necessarily where the First Amendment applies.

Every time you say something I always have a million thoughts and a million questions that pop up. Since you mentioned there's a drift as you write about in the book and you mentioned now there's a drift towards the left in academia. We should also maybe draw a distinction here between the left and the right, and a cancel culture as you present in your book, is not necessarily associated with any one political viewpoint that there's mechanisms on both sides that result in cancellation and censorship in violation of freedom of speech.

Which was fascinating. It'd be interesting to ask, is there a tension between the study of religious texts or the following of religion and just believing in God and following the various aspects of religion with freedom of speech?

Where do I go? One interesting thing to get back to college campuses is FIRE keeps the college free speech rankings at rankings.thefire.org. I'm very proud of them.

So how do you push back on de-platforming? Well, who would do it? Is it other students? Is it faculty? Is it the administration? What's the dynamics of pushing back of, basically, because I imagine some of it is culture, but I imagine every university has a bunch of students who will protest basically every speaker. And it's a question of how you respond to that protest. Well, here's the dirty little secret about the big change in 2014 and FIRE, and me, and Height have been very clear that the big change that we saw on campus was that for most of my career, students were great on freedom of speech. They were the best constituency for free speech, absolutely unambiguously until about 2013, 2014. And it was only in 2014 where we had these very kind of sad for us experience where suddenly students were the ones advocating for de-platforming and new speech codes, in a similar way that they had been doing in say the mid-eighties, for example. But here's the dirty little secret.

It would actually be really fun to talk about this particular aspect of the book, and I highly recommend if you're listening to this, go pre-order the book now. When does it come out? October 17th.

We took a long dark journey from what about-ism, and related to that is straw-manning and steel-manning. So misrepresenting the perspective of the opposing perspective. And this is something also, I guess, it's very prevalent and it's difficult to do the reverse of that, which is, steel-manning requires empathy or requires eloquence. It requires understanding, actually doing the research and understanding the alternative perspective. My wonderful employee, Angel Eduardo, has something that he calls star-manning, and I find myself doing this a lot. It's nice to have two immigrant parents, because I remember being in San Francisco in the weird kind of a ACLU/Burning Man kind of cohort, and having a friend there who was an artist who would talk about hating Kansas. And that was his metaphor for middle America, is what he meant by it. But he was kind of proud of the fact that he hated Kansas. And I'm like, you got to understand, I still see all of you a little bit as foreigners and think about change the name of Kansas to Croatia, change the name of Kansas to some, that's what it sounds like to me.

It's really weird how that happened. Maybe you can explore why a thing that has, kind of sounds good at first, can become such a cruel weapon of canceling and hurting people and ignoring people. I mean, this is what you described with a perfect rhetorical fortress, which is a set of questions. Maybe you can elaborate on what the perfect rhetorical fortress is. So the perfect rhetorical fortress is the way that's been developed on the left to not ever get to someone's actual-

Censorship is censorship. If we can take that tangent briefly with DEI, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, what is the good and what is the harm of such programs? I know people who are DEI consultants. Actually, I have a dear friend who I love very much who does DEI. Absolutely decent people. What they want to do is create bonds of understanding, friendship, compassion among people who are different. Unfortunately, the research on what a lot of DEI actually does, there's oftentimes the opposite of that. I think that it's partially a problem with some of the ideology that comes from critical race theory, which is a real thing, by the way, that informs a lot of DEI that actually makes it something more likely to divide than unite. We talk about this in Coddling of the American Mind as the difference between common humanity identity politics and common enemy identity politics. I think that I know some of the people that I know who do DEI, they really want it to be common humanity identity politics, but some of the actual ideological assumptions that are baked in can actually cause people to feel more alienated from each other.

So maybe we can just discuss the current leaning of academia goes to the left, which you describe in various different perspectives. One, there's a voter registration ratio chart that you have by department, which I think is interesting. Can you explain this chart and can you explain what it shows? Yeah. When I started FIRE in 2001, I didn't take the viewpoint diversity issue as seriously. I thought it was just something that right-wingers complained about. But I really started to get what happens when you have a community with low viewpoint diversity, and actually, a lot of the research that I got most interested in was done in conjunction with the great Cass Sunstein who writes a lot about group polarization because as... The research on this is very strong that essentially, when you have groups with political diversity, and you can see this actually in judges, for example, it tends to produce reliably more moderate outcomes, whereas groups that have low political diversity tend to sort of spiral off in their own direction. When you have a super majority of people from just one political perspective, that's a problem for the production of ideas. It creates a situation where there are sacred ideas.

Yeah, because of that at the scale of the virality allows you to never get to the actual discussion of the point, but it's not just the left, it's the right. It's also a efficient rhetorical fortress, so something to be proud of on the right, it's more efficient so you don't have to listen to liberals, and anyone can be labeled a liberal if they have a wrong opinion. I've seen liberal and left and leftist all used in the same kind of way. That's leftist nonsense. You don't have to listen to experts, even conservative experts, if they have the wrong opinion. You don't have to listen to journalists, even conservative journalists, if they have the wrong opinion, and among the MAGA wing, there's a fourth provision. You don't need to listen to anyone who isn't pro-Trump. Yeah, and we call it efficient because it eliminates a lot of people you probably should listen to at least sometimes. We point out sometimes how cancel culture can interfere with faith and expertise, so we get kind of being a little suspicious of experts, but at the same time, if you follow that and you follow it mechanically, and I definitely... I think everybody in the US probably has some older uncle who exercises some of these. It is a really efficient way to wall yourself off from the rest of the world and dismiss at least some people you really should be listening to.

Well, this might be a good place to ask a little bit more about the freedom of speech. And so, you said that included in the freedom of speech is to say things that are wrong. Yep.

Sure. Interviewing folks and seeing this like a podcast as a platform and deciding who to talk to and not... That's something I have to come face to face with on occasion. My natural inclination before I started the podcast was I would talk to anyone and including people which I'm still interested in who are the current members of the KKK.

Also, saying things that actually do sound old-fashioned. I say things to my kids like, "Listen, if you enjoy study and work," both things that I very much enjoy, I do for fun, " your life is going to feel great and it's going to feel easy." So some of those old-fashioned virtues are things I try to preach. Counterintuitive stuff like outdoor time, playing, having time that are not intermediated experiences is really important. And little things like I talk about in the book about when my kids are watching something that's scary. And I'm not talking about zombie movies, I'm talking about a cartoon that has a scary moment and saying that they want to turn the TV off. And I talk to them and I say, "Listen, I'm going to sit next to you and we're going to finish this show and I want you to tell me what you think of this afterwards."

Let me ask you about, you mentioned going through some difficult moments in your life. Sure.

Yeah. What gives you hope about this whole thing? About this dark state that we're in as you describe, how can we get out, what gives you hope that we will get out? I think that people are sick of it. I think people are sick of not being able to be authentic. And that's really what censorship is, it's basically telling you don't be yourself, don't actually say what you think, don't show your personality, don't dissent, don't be weird, don't be wrong, and that's not sustainable. I think that people have had enough of it. But one thing I definitely want to say to your audience is it can't just be up to us arguers to try to fix this. And I think that, and this may sound like it's an unrelated problem, I think if there were highly respected, let's say extremely difficult ways to prove that you're extremely smart and hardworking, that cost little or nothing, that actually can give the Harvards and the Yales of the world a run for their money, I think that might be the most positive thing we could do to deal with a lot of these problems, and why.