Cancelling Cancel Culture

(Lev Radin/Pacific-Press/Newscom)

"Data: Police don't shoot Blacks disproportionately. Problem: Not race, but too many police shootings."
"[To understand who is getting shot by police and why], you have to count all the whites as well as the Blacks [since a focus on race distinguishing one victim group could lead to a distorted reading of data, inaccurate conclusions and bad policy]."
"[I] felt some distress [on reading the letter] but I was gratified when other people quickly leapt to my defence."
"A number of linguists threatened to resign from the society if they accepted the letter [and the president of the society] didn't express any sympathy for the letter and the society itself repudiated it."
"My concern is ... for less powerful scholars who are intimidated from expressing opinions that depart from the hard-Left orthodoxy,"
"People feel they're infallible, especially when it comes to moral convictions -- we are apt to treat dissenting opinions as heresies, that certain thoughts are immoral to think."
"[At the root of the Enlightenment, the intellectual basis for free society was] humility ... skepticism, the fact that we cannot trust orthodoxy, dogma, scripture or received wisdom ... We are not omniscient; therefore the only real route to knowledge is approaching hypotheses and evaluating them for their logic and consistency of data."
"[Cancel culture expresses the] same psychology of religion [seen in] other episodes of intellectual oppression, such as the Stalinist terror ... or McCarthyite repression in the United States."
"It's a vulnerability in the human mind. That's why the principles of open debate and free expression have to be defended with each generation."
Steven Pinker, author, public speaker, Harvard professor

Academia has accommodated itself to the public mood of 'progressivism' rejecting all conversations that might hint on questioning the validity of the close-minded public discourse of the day that holds some things to be sacred; anti-racism, LGBTQ-2 rights, Indigenous and Black experiences and feminism. All claims and demands emanating from these groups, irrespective of how grating to the human condition and the function of science and the culture of the social weal to be given solemn, unquestioning respect.

The foul odour of social conservatism, of white privilege, of cavilling over rights and privileges are to be expunged after the holders of such views have been shamed, called out, their privilege as white colonialists yanked out from under. Anyone exuding a whiff of hesitation to join the popular movements ennobling and upholding the rights of the under-privileged to demand their due at the expense of those they have shifted to the realm of de-privileged is not fit for polite company. Truth to tell there is little 'polite' over the shrill demands of minority groups for the majority to genuflect.

Protests from outraged leftists over giving conservative voices the right to speak in their own defence have intimidated those who invited them to speak, and those whose intention it is to hear the speakers. Steven Pinker, an intellectual whose mind is open to discussing differences of opinion, and whose arguments arise from viewing matters under discussion in the round, is one of those whom the passionate left despise.

A letter dismissing the logic of his voice and reasoning, as an insult to the greater good of humankind signed by several hundred academics, graduate students and lecturers was sent to the Linguistic Society of America -- of which Professor Pinker is an esteemed member -- demanding he be removed from the list of distinguished fellows at the Linguistic Society; a reputational assault all too familiar to all too many of a vanishing academic breed, conservative-minded academics.

Accusing the 65-year-old author of "drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence", "misrepresenting facts", and "moving in the proximity" of "scientific racism", the letter-signers were motivated to deep-six the man's reputation and the future of his academic standing. Quoting six tweets launched in 2014 and two words extracted from a 2011 book he wrote, the "offence archaeology" network set out to damage Pinker's career and believability.

To counter this and other examples of 'cancel culture', another letter went the rounds, signed by cultural and academic icons, when 150 prominent intellectuals and authors that included Pinker himself, with the addition of Salman Rushdie, JK Rowling and Marget Atwood among others, essayed against cancel culture with the warning that it has become "all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought". An "atmosphere" that will "ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time."