The Limitations of Courage
An impromptu post responding to some rather problematic commentary the other day…
In a widely shared Slow Boring essay entitled “More Courage, Less Fear,” Matthew Yglesias argued that accounts of cancel culture and excessive ‘wokeness’ tend to have become overblown, especially since the peak of Black Lives Matter in 2020, and that “exaggerated criticism can generate exaggerated fears.”
In a memorable turn of phrase, he suggested that events like the Heterodox Academy conference can “tip over into a kind of counterproductive pity party, with people telling each other spooky campfire stories about the cancel cult and the DEI gestapo.”
Yglesias concluded that many and maybe most of the horror stories amount to overheated clickbait that make what was a somewhat minor issue somewhat worse:
Again, I won’t deny that there are problems in this space, but I want to make the point that the problems are not as bad as some people say. While exaggerated claims can be good marketing, they are counterproductive in part because they make more junior people more scared than they need to be.
On Twitter, Columbia sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi enthusiastically concurred:
…
While they do make an important point—there are indeed grifters and a ton of thoughtless hyperbole in the ‘war on woke’—I respectfully suggest that perhaps each has become enviably insulated in the prestigious positions they occupy: Yglesias, as the foremost center-left pundit of his now-established generation; and al-Gharbi as a rising star academic and public intellectual.
Just because the issue has been demagogued, or some anecdotes may be more nuanced than they initially sound, doesn’t mean that the reality isn’t bleak and getting bleaker; it’s not simply worrywarts making mountains out of molehills.
True, most workaday folks can skip pronouns in their emails, or kvetch about open borders or affirmative action. The vast majority of those living relatively quiet lives will not be targeted by a cancel mob or called before some tribunal to answer for their wrongthink. And even most professionals have little to fear, for now.
But among today’s ambitious climbers in prestigious places, whether of law or academia or media or business or politics, the types who hope to filter into the leadership class, it’s a dramatically different picture. The competition is such that few, and especially not those lacking favored demographic traits, can afford the slightest ding to their reputations—so much debt, so many years invested, that even for freer thinkers failure is not an option. Social death would mean professional death, and vice versa.
I had less to lose than many, and was never quite on a conventional track, but learned quick to keep my mouth shut to remain viable in the contracting universe of New York journalism/institutions. It meant enduring countless symposia, lectures, and meetings where people of my approximate description were blamed and berated for all the problems in the world, but for a lot of years I was always discreet.
I’d never have stuck my neck out for a quixotic endeavor like The Ivy Exile if I didn’t still hold out some hope for change. But things are bad out there, and particularly for those well under 30. Yglesias himself, a more senior millennial, was famously defenestrated a few years back from the progressive outlet he’d cofounded, Vox, for signing an anodyne statement in Harper’s Weekly in support of freedom of expression.
It ended up working out great for him, but only because he’d already been able to build his brand and cred for many years. In this day and age, with journalism and academia supersaturated way beyond the dwindling pool of job opportunities, aspiring talent is forced to be more cutthroat than many might really wish to be, while there are certainly plenty who don’t mind.
There have been a number of mildly encouraging signs the past few months that the fever may have temporarily broken: the outcry at Stanford Law students’ noisy censoriousness prompting ass-covering responses from university leadership; Cornell suddenly centering free discourse; and Harvard faculty founding a new Council on Academic Freedom.
That’s all well and good, but geared more to near-term fundraising and shoring up eroding institutional legitimacy than truly confronting systemic problems. Whatever the narrative line, as Eric Kaufmann notes in UnHerd:
In the long run, liberalism is giving way to progressivism in elite spaces... The steady erosion of free speech values is generational. Today’s young people are far more censorious than the young people of 1980 or even 2000, and they won’t grow out of it… Administrations’ occasional rebukes of student activists or adoption of high-minded academic freedom resolutions will make little difference to this speech climate.
Courage is key, by all means let’s foster maximum conversation, but let’s also not kid ourselves that a few grants and initiatives are going to change the hegemonic culture and incentives. In the long run individual courage is harder to sustain than institutional imperative.
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Yglesias: "So I wish the anti-cancellers would chill out a bit, do a bit more helping and a bit less warning, and also try to be more precise and accurate in the claims that they are making."
This is a great example of mealy-mouthed nonsense and intellectual quislingism.
Translating from the original weasel-speak it reads as:
"I know that our culture and discourse have been captured by ideological zealots who demand we all praise the Emperor's New Clothes and proclaim that math is racist and women can have penises, but could we just keep our voices down and speak in a kinder tone? When someone demonizes you for wrongthink and attempts to get you fired, be the bigger person and respond calmly w precise and accurate facts [as if this has ever worked!]...Also, me and some other famous journalists are doing well, so it can't be so bad, right?"
Liberals are just congenitally incapable of confronting Leftists, they are too afraid of being accused of being conservative-adjacent and are always supine before anyone pushing an Egalitarian agenda (however spurious), and thus will always and forever be Useful Idiots.
Al-Gharbi here.
So, I may be at Columbia now, but I started at a community college, attended a public land grant, and starting in the fall, will be back at a public land grant (Stony Brook).
I know a thing or two about the risks involved in speaking up. I was successfully 'cancelled' by Fox News from my teaching appointment at University of Arizona (discussed here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/musa-al-gharbi-academic-truth-duncan-moench). It didn't lead me to grow bitter or extreme (as sometimes happens), nor did it lead me to keep my mouth shut.
Granted, I managed to 'fail upwards,' and I'm now at Columbia. But again, I was doing what I'm doing now long before I was at an Ivy League school, and I'll continue doing it as a tenure-track person at a public land grant university starting in the fall. I don't need to wait for tenure to do this. Nor do I need to be at Columbia.
Put another way, I don't speak up because I have institutional privilege at an Ivy League school, or a secure academic post. I'm driven instead by my conviction and my confidence that, in fact, most of my peers are also supportive of these ideals. And in a world where they weren't, I'd just do something else with my life. I only recently began to think of myself as an 'academic' (and came to view that term in a non-pejorative way). If this line of work actually did make it impossible to study the things I want to and speak the truth as I see it, I'd do something else with my life.
More broadly, I think people fool themselves when they say, 'if only I wait for security, then I'll speak my mind.' If someone keeps their head down and their mouth shut for 4 years while getting their BA, 5 more to get their PhD, another 6 while working through the tenure track -- at the end of this 15 year process, they are no longer the type of person who says bold things. They're a person who keeps their head down and colors within the lines. So my choice has always been to be the kind of scholar I want to be -- from the outset through the present. And if I can't be the kind of scholar I want to be, then I will choose not to be a scholar.
I didn't wait until I got into grad school to speak out. I didn't wait until after the job market to speak up. I didn't wait until I got tenure to speak up. I started doing the public-facing work I do as an undergrad, and I haven't stopped. The freedom I feel comes not from privilege, but from a confidence that, even if I were cancelled (again), life moves on. I'd do something else. It'd be alright. The other ways one can make a living are not a horror or social death for me. They're what I more-or-less expected to do with my life until circa 2016.