Cancel Culture is Solvable

at University of California, Berkeley. People are talking a lot about what happened after a dinner date between the comedian as He's I'm Sorry and a young woman going by the name of Grace. In America's streets, across our university campuses and every day on social media, people are battling about what should be done to address racism, sexism, and other forms of historically embedded prejudice and justice. Battling power differentials that disadvantage people is the central goal of basically

being any kind of moral actor in society. As justified as this outrage is, it comes in places with its own intolerant edge, demands to conform rather than debate, to suppress, and punish rather than engage. In other words, cancel culture is a real thing. Many people say why do these people have to be so mean? But you wouldn't ask

that if it was about pedophilia. Nobody thinks that we should be very gentle in ejecting a pedophile from general society, but as firing someone always the right fix to shutting down debate equal progress. Has cancelation become a form of left wing McCarthyism. We haven't had an honest grappling with this yet, where a critical mass of people resist the stalinist extremes. John mcwarter is a professor of linguistics in

American history at Columbia University. He spends a lot of his time thinking about how we choose and use words, and he believes cancel culture is solvable. My co host Anna Applebaum talked with Nick Warder about how a linguist looks at the battles around free speech and how those unfairly caught in the crosshairs can respond to name calling without engaging in shouting matches. Here's their conversation. It's some

level cancel culture is. These are arguments about language, what you are and aren't allowed to say, how things are pronounced. How did you first fall in love with the quirks and hiccups of language. What drew you to this field. I'm a linguist, not for the reasons that I think many people might expect. It's not that I was especially well traveled as a child. Both of my parents spoke

only English. But if I hear somebody speaking something other than English, I have this visceral desire to want to do it too, Like I'd like to understand what they're saying, but also I want to be able to do that. The first time I heard anybody speaking something other than English, who was Hebrew? Actually, I found myself thinking, I am so jealous of that girl that she can talk in

that way that I can't understand. For me. Originally, it was just that they're these seven thousand different codes, and I don't want to know only one, so I also speak several languages. Tell me what you think about English. What does it do well and what does it do poorly? Do we debate a certain way in English? I think we do, actually, but I'd love to know what you think. We're an oddly unfussy language about all sorts of things that other languages make you mark and pay attention to.

Because we're a language of the long written history. We have a kind of artificially preserved, enormous vocabulary, and that's true of any language with a long written history, but English is one of them, and it means that you have unnecessarily large collections of synonyms that allow you to express yourself in various ways. I find English to be funny. People who are into the speeches of Winston Churchill, et cetera think I'm crazy, But I find English crude. You know,

it's it's fascinatingly streamlined. But it's other languages where I find myself just drowning in the subtleties and the things that they have to say that we have to leave the context. Yeah, I actually wonder if that isn't run of the reasons why English is the universal language, because in fact, it's pretty easy to speak bad English. It doesn't acquire a lot of grammatical knowledge. It's it has that symposim You can speak it badly quite easily, which

is not true of actually most language. Yes, exactly. You know, as a linguistic professor, do you know how do you navigate sensitive language debates? Is there a different way to do it? There are certain things that you're taught, you are not supposed to say in our society. I'm just somebody who one. I like to keep things tidy, I like to make a case. I think, really I should have been a lawyer. I don't know if I would have been a good one, but that's the kind of

mine that I think I have. And also I want to find stuff out. And I watch other people being told that they're not a allowed to and it certainly happened to me two or three times in my own academic career, and I don't think it's right. And I have a hard time keeping quiet when I don't think something is right. One person said about me once that when John gets mad, he writes a book, and that's more or less true. I just can't help it. I want things to be better than they are, and I'm cranky.

What do you think of the term cancel culture? What do you think it now means? Well, we're already getting beyond it in a way, or at least I hope we can. Because originally the idea was that if and originally by that I mean say two years ago, the idea was that if we find out something unsavory and often genuinely unsavory about some celebrity that we're supposed to flush them from our consciousness as much as possible, And so that has become more extreme lately, is accepted by

a larger number of people. And I think it's I could say dangerous, but it's also just really unfair, it's immoral, and yet I think most of us are inclined to pretend to go along with it because we're really frightened of a certain weapon that that crowd have, which is that they can call you a racist or a sexist. That's something that we need to renegotiate. And where is the desire to cancel people coming from? And you said that crowd or those people, who are they and what's

their motive? Do you think this is what it is? Critical race theory? What it is is people who have drunk in an idea that battling power differentials that disadvantage people is the central goal of basically being any kind of moral actor in society, and that it must center what we consider intellectual inquiry to be. It must center what we consider art to be, It must center what we consider humor to be. That that one thing must be what it's all about. That even civility goes out

the window, which is not crazy. Many people say, why do these people have to be so mean? But you wouldn't ask that if it was about petilia. Nobody thinks that we should be very gentle in ejecting a pedophile from general society. When I was at in college in the eighties, we had sort of there was a PC moment. Do you remember this? I was there for that, and then it went away, I'm told by people who are ten years younger than me, and then it came back

again in this new woke form. And the question is what's the mechanism of that. I almost think the mechanism is that the people younger than us pushed back against PC because they thought it was stupid, and then the people younger than them. You know, I wonder if there's almost like a cyclical generational Yeah. I don't know if there's some you know, if it's some youth culture thing, and that the pendulum will swing and that everybody will say, wait, this is nuts, and then it will go back again.

But nineteen ninety undergraduates were pushing back against the excesses of PC. Then everything was quiet. Woke is exactly what PC was back in the eighties. It's the same. It's the same alignment. And you know, to tell you the truth, I'm often asked, how do you work on a college campus? And I generally say that, frankly, I get the feeling most undergraduates in Morningside Heights see what's wrong here. It's just that there's a certain vocal minority that they always

tell me they're scared blankless of. And so yeah, I think that there's already that pushback, just as an asside. I taught a class at Johns Hopkins last fall and I assigned them a book by Milan Kundera, who the check writer, yeah who. On rereading, I found was unbelievably sexist. I mean that's just how he writes. You know. It's all about men sleeping with lots of women. It's on right.

And I, having assigned this book and having reread it in advance of the class, I suddenly worried, oh my god, I've just given this book to, you know, a bunch of twenty year olds. You know what if they're all really angry? And I said the first thing I said in the classroom the next day, it was, was anybody bothered by this book? And they looked at me like I was nuts. They were like, no, you know, just

a you know check novelist. Right, I've done that. You know, I will play something on YouTube or assign some paths for some reason. And before anybody was calling it trigger warning, I would just say to the class, this was written a long time ago. There certain kind of language, there, certain assumptions, Um, I know you understand that I'm not assigning because of that. It's because it shows something else.

And most of the class nods, and if I know of two or three of them being in their actual lives the sort of Wokester types, they don't bring it to class. So even in that setting, they don't say anything, partly because I guess I'm a figure of authority, but partly because they know they're outnumbered. And so it seems that we're dealing with a minority group with disproportionate influence.

And isn't part of their disproportionate influence also just to do with social media, I mean, because they can broadcast you know what, you know, they can they can reach huge audiences with Twitter and video clips and um, you know and so on, and that that gives them a kind of power that they would never have had before. Yeah, I think twenty twelve is when that crests, and that's why we're where we are today. If there were no such thing as this thing called Twitter, as handy as

it can be, this wouldn't have happened. We're too connected. But we can't reverse that. So what do we do about it? We have, as you say, people who are now afraid of being called out, people who are maybe just defiably afraid of being attacked on social media. Senior people, professors, editors of newspapers have all become wary about how they speak because they're afraid of name calling. What's the solution.

It has to start slowly. It can't be everybody who stands up to this woke mob as it's often called, because for some people it really is a matter of job security. It would interfere with their livelihoods. But they're

cases that are hazier. If you're sitting on a school board, if you are a writer and you look and see what people are saying about you on Twitter, if you are just a person in your neighborhood having a conversation with other people like you on a play date or the like, it's gone to the point where we need to consider that the sky won't always fall in if

somebody calls you a certain name. We have to think of the kind of person who's ready to call you a really dirty name on the basis of something that doesn't merit that approach as a shark. And I hear that with sharks, one way that you can make them

leave you alone is to bop them on the nose. Now, I am not remotely saying that anybody should be punched in the nose or bopped or physically abused in any way, but metaphorically, these people need to be seen as the kinds where they'll say, well, now I guess you're just a racist, Well that's really problematic, you're a sexist when the charge is clearly not deserved and you can tell

everybody around you agrees. And people need to be able to start saying I disagree with you on these issues, but I don't think it makes me a racist, and I'm not going to back down, and the person will yell louder. I frankly have been dealing with this kind of person for the past twenty five years, so I know this from experience. The person will yell louder and then you just say sorry. And what it would do

is not eliminate a kind of point of view. I don't think we should try to eliminate the woosters anymore than they should be trying to eliminate us. But the ideas for them to sit back down with the rest of us, and the only way to do that is to metaphorically, metaphorically bought them on the nose like a shark. So how do we set the limits of you know,

what is acceptable and unacceptable? We talk a lot about free speech and the free press, but in fact, there have always been certain kinds of topics and subjects and certain kinds of speech that have been out of bounds, whether it's shouting fire in a crowded theater or you know, or screaming hateful things at a mob. You know. So there have always been outer limits. Yeah, but who decides

what those outer limits are? And how can we come to a broader agreement, if only within universities, about about where those lie? You know? And I can't answer that because we haven't had an honest grappling with this yet. Where a critical mass of people resist the stalinist extremes. I would like to see what sort of middle ground we find. And I don't know if I can put a label to it, but I think the idea. Unfortunately people love to call me conservative. I guess this is conservative.

We need to go back to where things like this were in roughly two thousand seven or eight, which is that, yes, we're going to think of racism as societal as well as attitudinal, and yes we want to make change. Nevertheless, the idea can't be something rather obsessive and based more on reforming personal psychology and on society itself, etc. Where you draw the line, people will vary as society has

to settle gradually upon that. In the Burkeyan sense, I would say in this case that a pendulum has gone too far? Would we want to go back to nineteen thirty five? Goodness gracious no, But what's happening now where we're about to be in say twenty twenty five. If we don't put a check on this is a pendulum in the other direction, it's a new kind of repression. So John, what is step one? You know how we can stop, as you say, this pendulum from swinging too far.

Do you have to be confronted or can you be proactive well with the way things are today, you don't have to wait. This has become a major part of the warp and woof of a great deal of American society, especially since last spring. I would just say, and I'm basing this on the depressing and massive amount of feedback that people like me and my aspiring colleague Glenn Lowrie get from aggrieved people of all colors all over this country, not to mention in Canada and often for some reason,

in Germany and Scandinavia. This is now a problem that spreads even beyond these shores. And if you are the kind of person where this is rearing its ugly head in your workplace or on the co op of your apartment, or in some organization that you serve in, or frankly, even your relatives, try it out. Some of you will be more up for it than others. I understand. Not everybody is into conflict, not everybody is into being yelled back, So sorry to interrupt. Try it out. I means saying no,

I'm not a racist and I disagree with you. Is it just that simple? Yeah, just say no, I'm not a racist and I disagree with you and treat it the way many people treat trying to talk about religion, that the conversation has to end there, just like you cannot teach a person not to have faith in Jesus. That's going to be one out of fifty thousand people that you're going to convince of that if that's what you were trying to convince somebody of. You can't usually

teach somebody out of this frame of mind. But you have to reach a point where you say, not only I don't want to talk about it, because then what that person learns is that you are not awake and you haven't done the work, and that they have further work to do to change. You tell them, no, I'm not a racist. I know we're not going to agree, however,

and so I'm afraid this is over. And they'll say, but you about patriarch, Yeah, complicit, and just say no, I don't agree that I'm a racist and I'm not going to Your solution is actually just like I mean, it's almost like not even that there's no way to make it sound sophisticated, but I know what I mean. It's not like it's not like we need like this special kind of electricity infrastructure in this village. Right, yeah, we need like village levels. You know, there was all

these like complications. This one doesn't have that kind of ted talk answer, but I think that it really is a matter of a kind of consciousness raising. Hopefully we'll see. What would you say to people listening who want to know, Um, you know, what can I do? What are three things that I can do to make this better without making

the situation angrier or or more contentious? Why not just go out and do real work, like grassroots activism and getting out the vote and really thinking about houses works. How society works is not whether or not you fully understand the black condition. By the time you do, you're going to die. So that's something that I would also ask people to consider. Look at some black people. Just

look and listen. Remember that we're talking about real human beings, not the idealization of this punitive, zen like structure that we were being taught is the new big thing. John mcwarter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University. A contributing writer at the Atlantic. He hosts the podcast Lexicon Valley. You should check it out and remember to check out our show notes for lengths and suggestions about how you can get involved. Solvable is brought to you by Pushkin Industries.

Our show is produced by Camille Baptista, Senior producer Jocelyn Frame. Catherine Girdoe is our managing producer, and our executive producer is Mia Loebell. Special thanks go to Heather Fane, Eric Sandler, Harley Migliori and Kedjia Holland. I'm Jacob Weisberg.