Some thoughts on the Harpers letter. I support it in spirit: the world would be a better place if people could be more tolerant and open minded. But I think their argument is oversimplified to make the problem seem easier than it really is. /1
Cancellation is not new. Consider holocaust deniers. If the chairman of your history department announces that the Holocaust never happened, she is going to be canceled, and this was true long before Twitter. Why, exactly? /2
There are two reasons: 1) The Holocaust has already been sufficiently litigated and there is nothing useful to add, and 2) Insisting on re-litigating it is disrespectful and potentially harmful to people who died and people who survived. /3
Now consider my one bit of expertise in this domain: race, IQ and genetics. IMHO people who endorse the idea that IQ gaps between so-called races have a genetic basis deserve to be condemned, and potentially denied professional privileges that are not protected by tenure. /4
The reasons are the same as for Holocaust denial: it has been litigated, there is no substantial reason to think it’s true, nothing new, and in the meantime it is disrespectful and harmful. /5
I concede the problem: race and genetics just happens to be my thing, and nowadays everyone has their own. Once you let the cancellation genie out of the bottle it’s hard to get him back in. What is to be done? /6
On the one hand, we can agree with the signatories that we can all make an effort to be a little more understanding of people we disagree with. /7
But the signatories could try to understand that the current boundaries of discourse-- Holocaust denialism is unacceptable, but suggesting that African people have evolved to be dumber than Europeans is a topic for civil scientific debate-- weren’t passed down on tablets. /8
Those boundaries were invented, mostly by rich tenured white people like me. The cancellation debate isn’t ultimately about a commitment to civil discourse, it is a debate about where revised boundaries should lie. /end
