I feel the same way, but I think this era is much more directly similar to the "red guards" period during the Chinese cultural revolution than Soviet examples. Some of the parallels are just so direct -- students denouncing their professors, forcing them them to recant, the ideologies of the students growing more and more rigid and narrow through the conformity of the mob, until they often ended up even denouncing the professors who encouraged the movement to start.
No one ends up being safe from this kind of thing as it grows. Even Mao almost lost control of the tiger, even though he thought he could steer it. My grandfather fought the Japanese as a preteen and later fought with Mao, and even he was disappeared for three days by the mob during the cultural revolution because someone denounced him as not ideologically pure enough.
I think there are some important qualitative differences with the French Revolution, at least in its relationship with the academy (although I'm not an expert). During the French Revolution, most of the aristocratic cadre of scientists did lose their positions, but less than a year into the Terror, the Institut de France was established with more-or-less conventional takes on merit and the scientific method.
In the cultural revolution, it was different. More than three fourths of the members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences were persecuted, most of whose work did have scientific merit and had no direct nexus with politics. But that was the problem -- just doing science wasn't sufficiently political/ideological for the mob.
There was a section on this in the sci-fi novel Three Body Problem. The students force a professor of physics to recant his claim that relativity is a legitimate theory, and he refuses, then gets beaten by students.
I remember thinking at the time it was such a bizarre piece of fiction, then I later found out this kind of stuff really happened.
I see the similarities, but one big difference is that the Red Guards were created by Mao as a way to purge the party of his enemies and reshape society to serve him more fully.
What's happening in the US emerging from below, without anyone orchestrating it.
>one big difference is that the Red Guards were created by Mao as a way to purge the party of his enemies...
No -- that's not the case, and that's precisely why I think the parallel to what is happening now is so strong.
The Red Guards started in 1966 as a student movement. They later developed a manifesto, which Mao thought he could leverage to his own advantage, so he endorsed its broadcast. This fanned the flames of the movement (being a kind of political endorsement), and from that point Red Guard cells sprung up organically across the country. From that point, things became chaotic and the leadership in Beijing made a series of sometimes opposing moves, some of which tried to restrain the movement to preserve the government and others which fanned the flames.
This comment is 100% correct and the fact that most people here misunderstand the Red Guards movement is the terrifying proof that they have no idea what we're dealing with in the US right now.
This ideology is not something that strives for or can be steered into a productive outcome, it inherently wants to expand its reach and list of enemies until it takes over the entire world or someone shuts it down. It's the cultural analogue of a cancer, and it masks its initial growth phase by pretending to rally behind a virtuous cause, and then shutting down any criticism of it as anti-virtuous.
People from Cambodia, USSR, China, Vietnam, Germany, etc. have seen this before, but the current generation of westerners has not, so they're giving it the benefit of doubt and allowing it to gain momentum - it seems to be rallying behind a virtuous cause, after all. This is what GP and I are saying: alarm bells are going off in our heads because we have 1st or 2nd hand experience of how this plays out. And just like back then, people now are going 'naaaah, it'll be fine'.
Lord of the Flies should remain mandatory school reading forever. It's a warning tale exactly about this.
Lovely story! That said, lord of the flies had at least 20-30 boys involved, whereas this group was six boys who were already friends. More is different.
(Not arguing reality would go the way of lord of the flies, merely that the example above is not definitive. But boy would I like to see the movie they made!)
Keep in mind that the book that is from, Humankind, while a hope filled book (I enjoyed it thoroughly), makes the point that when we get together, the bonds between people can lead them to do horrendous things to others. Our power to cooperate is our superpower and our kryptonite.
My family in China are amazed that we in the US don't recognize the parallels between the marxist revolutionaries and violent Red Guards in China and today's US. The One Party that controls more and more of the institutions, the "news" reporters whose mission is obviously to sell the revolutionary narrative so the few stories that support the narrative are huge and meaningful while the much larger number of parallel examples that contradict the narrative are hidden by various means, all the entertainers gradually speaking with the same voice and same approved opinions as the "news", silencing of debate at the academies and ongoing purge of anyone suspected of harboring counter-revolutionary ideas there and in many other institutions and employers, young people taught that smart, independent thinkers such as themselves will become heroes by denouncing their parents and anyone they suspect of clinging to old ideas....
People who hear almost nothing that doesn't support the revolutionary narrative and are bombarded with stories about how those who "bravely" denounce dissenters are "heroes", and especially young people with little worldly success to be proud of, go on a rampage to feel the thrill of glory and power over others. The Red Guards are born. They burn whatever, destroy whatever, attack whomever, for whatever excuse they can come up, confident they'll be lauded as heroes by the "news" if they can somehow claim they are fighting enemies of the revolution, and if they can make it dramatic enough to compete with all the other aspiring heroes for attention. Because for most Red Guards, it's all about the thrill of feeling powerful and important.
My Chinese relatives frankly feel a bit of schadenfreude about it. "So, you were supposedly the ones with all the freedom to think and say whatever you wanted, criticize whoever you wanted, and freely argue for your own opinions. We were the ones who were forced to keep our mouths shut and not say what we really thought because we were still stuck with a conform-and-submit culture that wasn't yet enlightened."
In addition to Lord of the Flies, we had to watch a movie in my high school (long ago) about student movements getting out of hand, I think it was called The Wave.
As someone who grew up in China, I think this analogy is overblown. PG and others are up in arms about "cancel culture," but I'm not seeing substantial evidence of people's voices being suppressed by the masses. The few anecdotes cited (James Bennet fired by NYT, JK Rowling finally being called out for being anti-trans, random people being unfairly fired) don't seem to point toward a mass movement toward intolerance in the US.
On the other hand, it's clear, especially to young people, that traditional liberalism has failed at actually addressing inequality, racism, and other systemic problems that the US faces. A big part of what people refer to as "cancel culture" is frustration over the ineffectiveness of traditional liberalism, especially when the far right seems to play by a different set of rules.
I'm definitely concerned about far left zealotry, but I don't think that's what I'd happening in the US.
I understand why you would not think it is a problem. Unfortunately the only evidence for something like this is anecdotes, so unless you personally experience cancellation or are a member of a community where someone is cancelled, you won't notice. The lack of concern about the cancellation narrative makes sense in this respect.
Beyond "random people being fired", there are a number of notable examples in the programming community, like James Damore, Stallman, and Donglegate. After CoCs were added to open source projects, there are a handful of accounts of people being removed for their views expressed outside of the open source community.
In the wider world, things like the Harper's Magazine letter criticizing cancel culture (signed by many notable individuals, including Noam Chomsky), Obama's criticism of the "circular firing squad", leading philosophy researchers decrying sanctions for expressing ideas [1], the Joe Rogan discussion between Twitter Exec and Tim Pool on online censorship, the Evergreen College fiasco, and the rioting of Berkeley students into a Ben Shapiro lecture, paint the picture of a worrying trend: some subset of people on the left respond to argument not with argument, but with censorship, boycotts, and sometimes violence.
Apologies for the amp link. I would recommend looking at Twitter replies to the Harper's Mag letter about her being a signer, and then other discussions on it.
Turns out that we aren't electing a counsel composed of the liberals most active on twitter.
Lets look at the situation clearly.
I don't think JK Rowling is a bigot and yet and the internet hate machine is sure going full steam but her detractors are a smaller group than her fans and the woman is worth almost a billion dollars. She could burn dollar bills for warmth in her house for warmth for the rest of her life if she wanted. A minority of angry people on twitter can't cancel her life.
Cancel culture is a distraction from more relevant issues.
"A minority of angry people on twitter can't cancel her life.
Cancel culture is a distraction from more relevant issues."
Not true at all.
It's not about her money, it's about her ability to speak and to have a public opinion, and therefore a relationship with us - not about her 'personal wealth'.
She has specific views on gender, which she should be allowed to have and which I don't think are objectively 'anti trans'.
The statement above, ie that her views are 'anti trans' is really a problem.
'Shutting down her voice' is significantly worse than 'taking her money' - because it means the rest of us are not allowed to have a debate or to have our own opinions.
I generally agree with her assessment. It's nuanced, informed and not 'anti trans'.
Labelling it 'anti trans' is precisely the kind of 'Red Guards killing the unpure' we need to worry about.
'Cancel culture' has succeeded in banning speakers on most University campuses, and systematically disabled tons of voices from being heard. Speakers aren't even on the slot anymore 'can't afford the security' is now a common statement.
This is inexcusable.
The fact that 100 or so of the world's leading thinkers had to take out page to tamp down people in their own midst is crazy, and a sign of a problem.
It's a fairly existential problem right now.
A lot of this actually may be a kind of 'anti Trump' anger exhibiting in an odd kind of way, maybe it dies down a little bit, but the 'winds' are heading in one direction right now, and the press in particular seem to have joined in.
JK Rowling's views on trans people are also nearly the perfect demonstration that pg's "aggressive conformism" analysis is spot on. See, not too long ago those particular views were in fact something that was doing quite a bit of harm to trans people. They were being used to succesfully lobby for laws that did things like effectively deny trans women access to rape counselling and domestic violence services, and justify pretty awful campaigns of online harassment against any openly trans woman - not by JK Rowling, who seemed quite happy to just quietly hold her opinions, but by others. The reason you didn't hear much about this is because when these views actually had power, the loud, aggressive, well-connected warriors for social justice kind of supported them.
Now, it wasn't quite mandatory to hold these views back when I started following things about a decade, decade-and-a-half ago (though I remember Shit Reddit Says, the group trying to force Reddit to police its content based on their ideological demands, got quite close). What was mandatory was covering for them, shutting up about the laws they passed and the harm they did and pressuring everyone else to do so with allegations of misogyny. The arguments used to do this were quite reminiscent of present-day claims that "cancel culture" doesn't matter and people only object to it because they're bigots, now I think about it - supposedly the people pushing this didn't hold any power, and therefore the only reason for trans women to spend effort objecting to them rather than fighting non-feminist men, who by definition were the ones with real power, was because they had a misogynistic hatred of women. It was only when those views actually lost their power and relevance that the loud, aggressive, well-connected online activists switched from covering for them to demanding that everyone support beating up elderly lesbians for merely existing in public whilst holding transphobic views. (I am unfortunately not exaggerating, this actually happened - and yes, it was definitely the same people. pg's remark about "an exclamation point after a variable" is an extreme understatement.) This shift was quite recent too - maybe around 2016 or so?
There were of course actually non-conformist people with moral views that didn't just follow the crowd and various levels of aggressiveness who balked at this at the time. They just ended up being effectively irrelevant - too far from the status quo for its supporters, but so throughly and aggressively labeled as evil supporters of it by its organised, orthodox self-proclaimed challengers that few people seeking to challenge it would listen to the non-conformists.
"not too long ago those particular views were in fact something that was doing quite a bit of harm to trans people"
I understand what you are saying, but there's a pretty big concern right there in the conflation of 'intellectual position' vs. 'ammunition supporting specific movements'.
That some systems take another persons nuanced views, possibly out of context, and use them to promote their agenda, should not in any way stop people from being able to have public discourse about them.
The fact of the matter is, JK's views are not anti-trans, even if they could be used by others as such.
However much we can decry other parties for using her words in a manner in which we do not agree, the same thing applies in the other direction: we don't get to shut her down because she doesn't 'toe the line' on the current, 'new' orthodoxy.
JK's views are reasonable.
It doesn't matter that 'some other organisation using those words to do this or that'. It's relavent, but not to the extent of censoring her.
Now - if we're talking about crude, casual bigotry from 'powerful voices' and the public effects of that, i.e. a 'Famous Person' tweeting 'bad things' - then yes, this is just populism.
But anyone willing to make a serious point within the boundaries of civility needs to be able to make it, full stop.
People can debate with JK, they can even ask her to not make her statements public 'because bad people will use it as ammunition' - but there's no way her words cross the thresholds of uncivil, and she should be able to make them without fear of being banned.
I don't view trans women as 'the same as female women' either, to me, they are very objectively 'something else', 'not exactly like women', but I also have zero problems with them 'being women for the most part' and identifying as such if they want.
In my view, denying the glaringly obvious difference between 'trans women' and 'female women' is to deny reality, in the name of some cause.
Now, I have zero problem with people wanting to identify as women, if a trans woman wants me to call her 'she' - or whatever - it's fine by me. I hold zero concern or anything against them.
I will also tell you that in other cultures - particularly in Brasil wherein trans is far more common - that this is a popular view. The only trans women with whom I've ever had a conversation about the issue literally told me, unsolicited, that 'she is not like other women'. I kind of 'gasped' at the statement, but this woman was simply stating her mind and what to her was obvious. The statement was not ideological oriented, formed by 'mob opinion', and not a complex, intellectual thing. Just her view. Is this tans woman a bigot?
It's perfectly fine if people want to disagree with Rowling's view. I'm basically certain that Rowling doesn't mind a single bit if many would disagree with her.
The issue, is that she's not allowed to have her opinion because of the ostensibly ideologically held view that 'people who identify as women are women and that's it'.
And so this is one of the points made: "Agree with me on you're a bigot".
I meant for clarity that people are allowed to think JK rowling is a bigot and she is allowed to roll in pile of money while denying it and attacking her detractors.
It's not a linguistic question, it's a social question.
"Is a man who identifies as a woman, a woman, or a man?" - that's a pretty core question.
To be fair, it's pretty important to trans women that they identify and be referred to as 'women'. That's pretty core to the identity, so it's more than a word.
So, in that sense, I can understand how her arguments could be disconcerting to some.
But - when we talk about what is 'objectively a woman' or the policies we apply in sports, that kind of stuff, then it's an issue that transcends just self identification.
In terms of 'self identity' - well - 'who cares' really, I agree, but what about the legal requirement for others to use specific words, or sports, special facilities, access to gendered facilities and clubs etc. - then it becomes a real problem.
I think most people would admit he is a buffoon. I also think most people would not stand by if he did something obviously, materially, directly and apolitically harmful to people. I can't write people off if they continue to vote red until then. I also don't find republican rhetoric to be much different than democrat rhetoric. Both-sides-ism acknowledged, I think prominent Democrat and Republican and messaging both rely almost entirely on emotional argument. I think this is novel behavior for Republicans, since their old behavior was to meekly, logically and unsuccessfully argue their point. The change to unapologetic emotional argument is shocking to the left wing, but it prevails. A scream of "kids in cages" is no more convincing than a growl of "some of them are good people." A "womp womp" is as convicing as a "how absolutely dare you sir." You are right on the result: it pushes common people into irrelevant, trivial debates, preventing meaningful discussion.
What Mao did in secret may not be possible to know fully.
But are you really telling me that China in 1966 was a free enough society that students could just start an independent political movement that took over the country?
>But are you really telling me that China in 1966 was a free enough society that students could just start an independent political movement that took over the country?
It wasn't a free society by any stretch, but the students' radicalism was in line with the prevailing zeitgeist... they denounced university officials as intellectual elites, corrupted by bourgeois notions that threatened the success of the revolution. Meanwhile, Mao faced ongoing struggles to maintain and consolidate power, so he found endorsing their ideas useful. But the movement itself rapidly spun beyond his direct control.
Mao leveraged the movement to try and get himself back in the driver's seat, after he had been sidelined following the Great Leap Forward. He amplified them greatly for his own selfish reasons, which is also happening in our current moment, in different ways. They wound up being, surprise, unpredictable and destructive.
(A note, I read that book too, it's good but needs discounting for bias. Anybody who writes Beijing as 'Peking', or Zhou Enlai as "Chou En-lai" in the 21st century has clearly got a KMT-flavored axe to grind. But it also has some great original research.)
This is not just a factual historical account. It also takes a lot of opportunities to point out how awful a person Mao was, and makes claims about his motives, which don't always seem knowable.
Of course, when writing about one of the worst rulers in human history, being a bit judgemental is understandable. But it does make me want to check other sources.
On the fact level, there seems to be an enormous amount of work behind the book.
Partly, yes. But it is also being co-opted by people whose actual motives are very different from the perfectly justifiable demands for equality before the law.
> without anyone orchestrating it
It may have started without anyone orchestrating it, but I don't think it's that way now. See above.
This tends to be my gut reaction too. Maybe because I live in a very conservative area and come from a very conservative background. In my filter bubble I consistently see people saying really horrible, legitimately and unapologetically racist and mysoginist things and not being called out or cancelled in any meaningful way but actually encouraged. That makes it hard to take complaints about cancel culture seriously.
That being said I'm very sympathetic to people saying they've seen this before and know where it's headed. So I want to understand GP and try to act accordingly. I just can't stomach lending support to the gun-toting, trigger-happy, unapologetically authoritarian Trump regime.
So a key understanding here is the difference between common crude rhetoric - and other dynamics.
Concern over 'cancel culture' has nothing to do with the right for people to be racist jerkoffs.
It mostly a concern over people not to be able to hold opinions, intellectuals not allowed to speak, for actors not to be 'shamed' because they played someone of a different ethnicity - i.e. a lot of things for which there are thresholds of sensitivity but otherwise, most people are not offended because actions are not objectively offensive.
This idea that 'cancel culture' is defending the KKK or people calling people the 'n-word' is the biggest straw-man of the era.
Nobody cares about Nazis or Harvey Weinstein. But Nick Cannon, Kevin Hart, Jordan Peterson, JK Rowling etc. - this is ridiculous.
I'll bet $100 that the public at large is 'correct' in most cases of 'cancel culture'.
Should 'Weinstein' be cancelled? Probably 99% agree.
JK Rowling? Probably 1% agree.
Kevin Hart? Probably 2% agree.
People are not hopped up on ridiculousness and have some sensibility - the fighting is mostly on twitter and in the news.
Cancel culture is equally strong in the UK, where they have free public healthcare and the UK police kills about 2 people per year (usually well justified). These issues seem to be orthogonal.
The issues of cancel culture and "fighting for rights" should be unrelated. You can be against cancel culture and also against police brutality, for instance. The mob (and GP) wants to categorize you in an out-group so that one opinion you hold which they don't agree with means all your other opinions are irrelevant or invalid.
If you ask anyone on the Right what they think about police brutality or racism, more than 99% will agree with those on the Left that is an issue. We're pretty unanimous in this regard, but we disagree on what to do about it. The mob wants to sew division, so they will try to get you to "take the knee" to prove you're on the right side, but in fact, taking the knee is simply bowing down to the demands of the mob. If you don't take the knee, you're obviously "a racist" and deserve to be cancelled. The problem is the mob has a ringleader, the innocent sounding "Black Lives Matter", which is an openly Marxist organization which is using the race issue as a shield against criticism of its real aims. The clever naming means that when you criticize the organization, you're criticizing it's name, so you mustn't care about black lives - you're racist, again.
Everyone will agree that you have a right to life - there is no division here. In the US, this right, among others, are constitutionally protected so that lawmakers cannot (should not be able to) change the law to say otherwise.
Interestingly, those "fighting for human rights." are largely the same people trying to deny others their basic rights, such as possessing firearms for their personal protection.
In regards to "access to medicine", this is not a basic human right. GP is simply misunderstanding what is meant by the term. Anything that involves action from another person or group is not a right - it's a privilege. A right can only apply to an individual. You have a right to receive healthcare, go and forage for ingredients to make your own medicines, or provide healthcare to others - but there is no "right" that confers other people to provide you healthcare. Providers of healthcare and medicines have the right to request compensation for their services. How much compensation they want is up to them. The state should not be involved. The state cannot grant rights, it can only take them away.
It is state involvement which causes medicines to be so highly priced - because the State enforces patents - a tool which strips away your natural right to produce something because somebody else has declared a monopoly on doing so. If there were no patents in medicine, all medicines would become cheap generics, with the lower bound on price essentially being the cost to produce (which declines over time).
It is also state involvement which props up the salaries of healthcare providers, because they're protected from wider competition through licensing and regulatory capture. In the UK, however, the State involvement puts an upper cap on what most healthcare providers can earn - particularly nurses who are essentially minimum wage earners and can't take their services elsewhere, because there's (almost) no competition to the NHS, which of late has itself become part of the mob with the cult-like celebration of its workers. The conformists are precisely the Thursday evening clappers, and those who don't clap, for whatever reason, are terrible people who ought to be shamed.
> Interestingly, those "fighting for human rights." are largely the same people trying to deny others their basic rights, such as possessing firearms for their personal protection.
Gun ownership isn't a right. Yeah there's a piece of paper that says it is, but come on. It's dumb.
How on earth do you even find these things comparable? On one side, people literally dying because they can't afford insulin , on the other side someone wringing their hands because they think the government might forbid them from owning an AR-15.
Gun ownership is a natural right. You simply do not grasp the meaning of the word "right". It isn't what is in the constitution - that document simply puts a restraint on the US Government from taking away those natural rights.
Healthcare is not a right.
There is no "right" where others actions are required. Such thing cannot possibly be a "right" because it puts an obligation on another person to perform some action - hence, stripping that other person of their natural right to be sovereign over their own body.
A right is not something that can be granted - it simply exists. A right can only be taken away, through violence or the threat of violence.
I'm not suggesting that people shouldn't have access to affordable healthcare. I'm merely stating the fact that it is not a right.
No one ends up being safe from this kind of thing as it grows. Even Mao almost lost control of the tiger, even though he thought he could steer it. My grandfather fought the Japanese as a preteen and later fought with Mao, and even he was disappeared for three days by the mob during the cultural revolution because someone denounced him as not ideologically pure enough.