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Unfortunately there’s more bad news to report on the clear skies front. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center, reports that 73.3% of images the agency’s new SPHEREx space telescope collected between May and September of last year were contaminated by at least one artificial satellite trail. And it’s only going to get worse from here.

Ostracizing antisemites like Nick Fuentes is necessary and just. The cancel culture concept only obscures what’s wrong with today’s political culture.

What‘s the difference between cancel culture and shaming toxic people who infect one’s political movement?

This question recently embroiled the American conservative movement after Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts refused to denounce Tucker Carlson for his interview with antisemite Nick Fuentes. Roberts said that Heritage rejects the policy of “canceling our own people,” and specifically objected to canceling both Carlson and Fuentes.1

Roberts was widely rebuked by other conservatives for his statement and for defending his association with Carlson in the name of opposing cancel culture. There’s a world of difference, say his critics, between the behavior of woke activists in 2020 after the George Floyd protests, and sensible work to critique bad actors who’ve gained too much influence inside conservatism. 

There is a difference, but is simply criticizing vile characters like Fuentes enough for a movement to maintain its dignity? And if Fuentes is disinvited from podcasts, is that cancel culture? What even is cancel culture, and does treating it as an uncontested political sin help us understand what’s happening in our political culture? Or does doing so play into the hands of attention-hungry trolls like Fuentes, who profit from the platform conservatives now reflexively give to victims of cancellation? 

It’s not cancel culture to criticize. 

Why don’t critics of Kevin Roberts think they’re engaging in cancel culture? 

Writing in The Free Press, Eli Lake attempts an answer.2 It was “cancellation,” he says, when the editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer resigned over writing the headline “Buildings Matter, Too” during the George Floyd protests in 2020, and it was cancellation when a high school student was denied admission to college because of old tasteless internet posts. By contrast, criticizing Carlson for his amicable conversation with a rabid antisemite is only “doing the hard work of policing one’s coalition.” 

But why should we criticize Carlson? Not, apparently, for inviting Fuentes on the podcast in the first place, but simply because he didn’t grill him hard enough. Lake recommends William F. Buckley’s approach in a 1968 interview with the rapist-turned-Black Panther advocate of terrorist violence, Eldridge Cleaver.3 Buckley gets Cleaver to admit he endorses the assassination of Richard Nixon, and other odious positions. But it’s noteworthy that Buckley does not actually criticize, let alone condemn, any of these positions in the interview. He at most asks tongue-in-cheek questions that relay others’ criticism to elicit Cleaver’s response. He actually grills him little better than Carlson did Fuentes. 

You can’t shame a shameless troll, you can only embolden him.

Lake’s idea is that since Buckley is only using speech to try to discredit Cleaver, it can’t be cancel culture and so can’t be bad. But Buckley’s tactic is no model here. Even if he had been more vocally critical it would not have erased the dramatic effect of treating an agitator for crude mob violence as worthy of civilized conversation. To be sure, Buckley had the free speech right to platform a spokesman for thuggish Marxist viewpoints. But not every exercise of free speech is wise. 

By the same token, it was Carlson’s right to host Fuentes, but in exercising his rights he also elevated and dignified an obscene antisemitic troll. In the weeks since Carlson’s interview, Fuentes has now done a grand tour of the podcast circuit and has even made it onto TV interview programs like Piers Morgan’s, where the host tried to be critical but is widely seen even by critics of Fuentes as having been bested by him.4 You can’t shame a shameless troll, you can only embolden him. 

The Confused Definition of Cancel Culture 

It’s now widely thought that cancel culture is an offense against free speech. We see this in the closest thing to a textbook definition of cancel culture we can find, in Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s 2023 book The Canceling of the American Mind. They define cancel culture as “the uptick beginning around 2014, and accelerating in 2017 and after, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is—or would be—protected by First Amendment standards and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted from this uptick.” 

Read carefully, this definition is ambiguous. Does it mean that cancel culture is itself legally forbidden by the First Amendment (because it punishes people for speech that should be free), or just that it’s a personal moral offense perpetrated against those who are legally exercising their free speech rights? 

If it means the first, then the definition does not cover all of the outrageous cancellations by woke activists. Some deplatformings really did violate someone’s free speech rights, as when a student mob shut down Judge Kyle Duncan’s speech before the Federalist Society at Stanford in 2023. But not all did. When The Philadelphia Inquirer editor Stan Wischnowski resigned in 2020 because of outrage over his decision to publish an article bemoaning the impact of Black Lives Matters protests on urban areas, he was well within his First Amendment rights to resign, and the paper would have been within its rights to fire him. Even if the editor’s article made a valid point and we think the paper’s ideological agenda is misguided, the editor does not have a right to his job, and the First Amendment protects a paper’s right not to have to fund a dissenting employee’s speech. 

But if we take the definition of cancel culture to mean some personal moral offense against those who exercise legally protected speech, then many of Carlson’s critics are engaging in it in spite of themselves. However abhorrent Fuentes’s racist views may be, they’re also protected by the First Amendment. So, unless we adopt the social justice activist view that hate speech is actually violence, his critics are trying to punish him—if only through social shaming—for his protected free speech. That’s certainly true for any who say Fuentes should not be on conservative podcasts: they want to deplatform him, and other antisemites may now fear they will suffer the same consequences. But even those who just want to criticize him more harshly, on or off a podcast, are still otherwise punishing him. 

Not every exercise of First Amendment rights is rational or wise.

So even the textbook definition of cancel culture is confused. Either it doesn’t explain what was wrong with core examples of the most objectionable cancel campaigns, or it actually classifies totally reasonable efforts to ostracize unreasonable people—itself the exercise of the rights of free speech and free association—as some kind of moral offense. 

We need another framework for understanding what was wrong with cases like the 2020 Philadelphia Inquirer firing. 

An Alternative Conceptualization 

Not every exercise of First Amendment rights is rational or wise. Buckley unwisely platformed Cleaver as many today are unwisely platforming Fuentes. Some free speech is even overtly irrational. What made the Inquirer firing so bad was simply that it was driven by a kind of religious fervor to ferret out heretics who offend against a cherished but irrational orthodoxy. 

But this kind of fervor is what defines a concept that is older and better-tested than cancel culture. A religiously driven social campaign to root out and punish heretics is what defines a witch hunt. 

Cancel culture is a not very descriptive name for simply the latest chapter in humanity’s long history of irrational, inquisitor-driven persecution campaigns, from the literal medieval witch hunts targeting heretical devil worshipers, to Stalin’s party purges of traitors to the communist party. The ideologies driving these campaigns have varied, but all mobilized mobs who cared little about evidence to root out some unorthodox other. 

The problem isn’t cancellation per se, it’s the canceling, smearing, persecutions, and sometimes prosecution of scapegoats because of the delusions and madness of crowds.

And while witch hunting campaigns often involve resorting to state force to suppress dissent or silence speech, they do not always. The Satanic panic in the 1980s included (futile) campaigns to censor rock and roll music and even prosecutions (which were eventually overturned)5 of child care workers alleged to be Satanic abusers. Over 12,000 cases of abuse were reported in this period, none ever substantiated as Satanic.6 But the campaign, which originated in Evangelical churches and drew on now-discredited psychological theories of recovered memories, also involved voluntary boycott and smear campaigns that simply worked to impugn reputations without violating anyone’s rights. Everyone—from Procter & Gamble7 (because it had a logo confused with Satanic symbols), to the makers of Dungeons & Dragons8 and The Smurfs,9 to (naturally) heavy metal musicians like Ozzy Osbourne—was a target. Some of these alleged witches were tried in real courts, many were simply tried (or mistried) in the court of public opinion. 

To chalk this up to cancel culture is to dramatically understate what makes the underlying culture outrageous. The term alludes to the cancellation of TV programs by networks, and was first used after notable celebrities had opportunities canceled because of various scandals. But it was of course no outrage that Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby were canceled after dozens of credible accusations of sexual assault. It is outrageous when others had opportunities revoked because of unfounded accusations of wrongdoing—or credible accusations of manufactured wrongs—spread by online cancel mobs. 

The problem isn’t cancellation per se, it’s the canceling, smearing, persecutions, and sometimes prosecution of scapegoats because of the delusions and madness of crowds. 

As Stalin’s party purges demonstrate, witch hunts don’t need to be justified in the name of explicit, overt religiosity to be pursued with religious fervor. Nominally atheistic movements like communism can draw inspiration from religious models. (A relevant symbol here is that Stalin himself spent five years in seminary training to become an orthodox priest before he became enamored of communism.10) 

Fast forward to the 21st century. As John McWhorter has argued persuasively in Woke Racism, the social justice egalitarianism of the last few decades bears all the hallmarks (in the words of his subtitle) of a new religion. The movement has its own articles of faith (that any inequality represents injustice), its own sacred texts (DiAngelo and Kendi), its own conception of original sin (white privilege), and its overwhelming demand for repentance and submission, in the name of which so many cancel campaigns have been launched. 

As I’ve argued elsewhere, that demand for submission is what empowers all the rest of the religious fervor of the woke movement.11 And the moral code behind the demand is something that woke egalitarianism actually inherits from old-fashioned Judeo-Christian religion. 

But if the real problem with woke inquisitions and heretic hunting is its religious fervor, will religious conservative critics of cancel culture be willing to admit this? 

The Blind Spot for MAGA Witch Hunting 

Surely many religious people are willing to condemn inquisitorial witch hunts of religion’s past. But are they willing to condemn them because of their religious fervor? And will they be willing to confront baseless persecution when it arises again? 

This question is pressing because anyone critical of woke witch hunting has to confront the fact that the MAGA movement is prone to it as well. They need to confront this even if MAGA doesn’t hunt for its heretics in the same way or to the same degree. 

In The Canceling of the American Mind, Lukianoff and Schlott do offer three whole chapters detailing very recent campaigns against free speech launched by politicians on what they characterize as the right. As I’ve argued, actual free speech violations (e.g., when student mobs pushed speakers off stage) were only among the worst offenses of the woke witch hunters. If there’s not even respect for free speech among the activists and politicians more broadly on the right, then surely MAGA activists are capable of engaging in witch-hunting campaigns whether or not they target free speech. As just an early indication of this, Lukianoff and Schlott note that in 2017 there were more attempts to fire university professors launched by the right than were by the left. 

The George Floyd Moment on the Right 

If the killing of George Floyd and his portrayal as a fallen martyr inflamed the woke hunt for heretics, shouldn’t we be willing to talk about how the killing of Charlie Kirk did something very similar among the MAGA faithful? 

Make no mistake, as conservatives have eagerly insisted, Kirk’s mourners did not riot in the streets over Charlie Kirk’s death, and there were many differences between Kirk and Floyd and in the circumstances of their deaths.12 What’s more, many of those who openly celebrated Kirk’s assassination or political violence against people who share a similar viewpoint, or who claimed that Kirk had it coming, certainly did deserve to lose their jobs or otherwise face public shaming. Just as we rightly deplatform Nazis, we also rightly ostracize advocates of violence. 

At the same time, some of those punished in connection with statements made about the assassination surely did not deserve it, and the only way to explain why they were punished is to point to a kind of witch hunting mentality in the MAGA crowd. 

Consider the case of Darren Michael, a theater professor at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee, who was fired for posting a headline to Facebook saying “Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths ‘Unfortunately’ Worth it to Keep 2nd Amendment.”13 Michael was expressing disagreement with Kirk’s position on gun control, citing the tragedy of his death as a reason. Or consider Marjean Corkran, who was fired by Enterprise State Community College in Alabama for posting “Let us not forget some other children were shot in another (expletive) school today.”14 Or Suzanne Swierc, another university employee who was fired by Ball State University in Indiana, for posting “If you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends.”15

Joshua Bregy of Clemson University in South Carolina shared a post privately with friends on Facebook.16 It opened with an explicit denunciation of political violence and closed by noting that he grieved the tragic loss of Kirk. But it also took issue with Kirk’s views on guns and with the idea of treating him as a martyr. Someone from the Clemson College Republicans on his friend list shared a screen shot of the post.17 This was then reshared by influencers and politicians until President Trump himself called for defunding Clemson.18 At this point, Bregy (along with others who made more inflammatory statements) was dismissed. 

They may have lacked tact, but they did not call for or celebrate violence. 

More recently Greg Lukianoff himself has written about how his organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), has counted 80 attempts to discipline academic employees about statements on Kirk’s death since September 10th, compared to 98 comparable attempts in all of 2020 to do the same after Floyd’s Death.19 The Chronicle of Higher Education has also kept a record of academic employees fired for comments on Kirk’s death.20

Sorting through the data reveals many academic employees who said things that betrayed a severe lack of judgment, fully warranting their dismissal. (Could some dismissed after George Floyd have deserved it as well?) But Michael, Corkran, Swierc, and Bregy seem to have done nothing more than commit the faux pas of speaking ill of the dead by disagreeing with Kirk’s worldview. They may have lacked tact, but they did not call for or celebrate violence. 

No one has a right to a job. Advocates of violence certainly shouldn’t expect to keep their jobs in spite of their gross display of bad judgment. And perhaps we can understand why some fans of Kirk, in their grief and anger, were erroneously swept up in an online movement to ferret out genuine offenders. But the effect of the campaign’s lack of concern for evidence—like other witch hunting campaigns—was the targeting of many innocent victims. 

The campaign had its inquisitors: online influencers like Chaya Raichik, who became a clearing house for indiscriminate allegations of heresy against Kirk. In just the first two days after she declared “This is war,” I count on her feed at least three very public accusations directed against individuals who did little more than express perhaps tactless disagreement with Kirk.21, 22, 23, 24

It’s fundamentally a religious culture that underpins the recent uptick in witch hunting. And it’s virulent, to one degree or another, in key sectors of both political camps. 

Charlie Kirk’s death should have been condemned. But he has also been sanctified into a conservative martyr. Speakers at his heavily scripted and deeply religious memorial service compared him not only to St. Stephen25 but to Jesus Christ himself.26 In a movement that already revels in its religious faith, in its acceptance of dogmas strictly on the basis of traditional authorities, it should come as no shock that in their grief and anger over their martyr, emotion and not evidence would push some to hunt the latest new category of witch, those who refuse to recognize their martyr. 

Conservatives did not riot in the streets after Kirk’s assassination. But they also didn’t need to: they held political power. And notably, as Lukianoff and Schlott argue in their book, when they lost power on January 6, 2021, some MAGA activists did riot. And even for those conservatives who would never do such a thing, there’s an uncanny reluctance to recognize that the fundamental psychology behind these activist movements in their midst have many of the same signs of witch hunting by the woke. 

It’s fundamentally a religious culture that underpins the recent uptick in witch hunting. And it’s virulent, to one degree or another, in key sectors of both political camps. 

Breaking the Witch Hunters’ Spell of Cancel Culture 

For those of us who don’t have tribal loyalty to any political camp, it should only be liberating to abandon the cancel culture concept in favor of a clearer conceptualization. 

If we understand what’s been called cancel culture as just another witch hunt motivated by the latest religious-like reawakening, we can understand the difference between tribal campaigns to smear, deplatform, and persecute heretics, and rational efforts to ostracize bad actors. The campaign to canonize George Floyd and sniff out any objections to this orthodoxy were driven by irrational fervor that often targeted innocent victims. But campaigning to deprive Nick Fuentes of undeserved publicity can be a principled exercise of justice itself. 

Antisemitism itself has always been an essentially religious call for witch hunting, where the Jew plays the role of the witch.

Such an effort to ostracize the likes of Fuentes is not just fundamentally different from a witch hunt. It actually represents the conscious opposition to the whole phenomenon of witch hunting because it’s working to expel an active witch hunter from polite circles. 

Antisemitism itself has always been an essentially religious call for witch hunting, where the Jew plays the role of the witch. Motivated by Christianity, neo-pagan Nazism, or Islam, antisemites blame all the problems of the world on powerful Jews. Medieval inquisitions hunted witches and Jews alike. Ostracizing the witch hunters means expressly rejecting the religious fervor of the incitement to launch pogroms. 

Don’t let witch hunters like Fuentes use their cancel culture spell to make it seem like they’re on the side of reason, freedom, and justice.

The ekpyrotic theory tries to beat inflation with bouncing higher-dimensional branes, no singularity, and a universe that has always existed. A tour of the prettiest version of the idea and how it claims to handle flatness, dark energy, and the entropy that doomed earlier cyclic models.

Anthropic has warned that recursive-self-improving AI could be on the horizon, but the truth is the company is more immediately concerned with marketing itself for a blockbuster initial public offering on the stock market, says Matthew Sparkes

We witnessed a surprise outburst late last week, from a lesser known periodic comet. Posts flashed across message boards late last week, alerting comet watchers to a dramatic change in brightness for periodic comet 220P McNaught. Though it wasn’t on our list for bright comets to watch for in 2026, Comet 220P is now in range of binoculars or a small telescope, low to the east at dawn as it heads towards perihelion this coming weekend.

The out-of-Africa migration, in which ancient humans went on to inhabit every other continent except Antarctica, may not have been one moment in time, but a long and slow process. Columnist Michael Marshall examines how archaeologists are rethinking this critical part of our history

Lapses in memory are a normal part of ageing but can also be signs of dementia. Here’s how to distinguish between typical brain ageing and cognitive decline

A diverse range of bird species has been recorded at a solar park on rewetted peatland in Germany, suggesting that combining energy generation with habitat restoration could benefit biodiversity, the climate and the economy

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has warned tech firms, including Apple and Google, that they must voluntarily implement tools to stop children sharing explicit images, but experts warn this is easier said than done

Over the years I’ve developed a set of posting guidelines, affectionately known as “Da Roolz” in Chicagospeak. You can find them on the left sidebar, or by clicking here. If you’re new here, or haven’t yet read them, I urge you to do so, as it will facilitate discussion as well as making my job easier. I’ll just point out three of them that are particularly important these days.

a) f you’re a first-time poster, I have to approve your initial comment. This won’t necessarily be immediate, as it depends on my checking email.  After that, posting is automatic unless you become moderated for some reason.

Sometimes first-time posters assume that their comment was fouled up because it didn’t appear. And that could lead to them trying to make the same comment several times.  Not necessary: first comments need to be approved and thereafter, if you’re not moderated (some people are), your comments should appear automatically. I do appreciate people using their real names, but understand if you have good reasons not to do so.

b) Try not to dominate threads, particularly in a one-on-one argument. I’ve found that those are rarely informative, and the participants never reach agreement. A good guideline is that if your comments constitute over 10% of the comments on a thread, you’re posting too much.

This guidelines is often violated, and I vary in how much I feel like enforcing it. If there’s a good back and forth going on, I am not strict about it. But some persons feel that they have to respond to every comment, and in that case I will warn people. I almost never remove comments when they’re posted.

c.)  Be judicious about posting videos and very long comments.  I like good discussion, but essays are not on, particularly if you have your own website where you can post it.  Embedded videos are okay, but please think before posting: do they add to the discussion? If your comment is longer than, say, 400 words, it is probably too long. If you want to write stuff longer than that, please get your own website!

This guideline I do try to enforce, either by emailing the person with logorrhea or by adding a “reply” saying that “this comment is over the word limit; please try to post shorter comments”.  Comments are just that—comments and not essays.  Also, please try to keep your comments in line with what the post is about, though sometimes readers can introduce a diversion if it’s timely or important.

If we’re to reach another star, chemical propulsion will not get us there in any reasonable time frame. We’re going to need a different propulsion technology, and one of the most promising seems to be a solar sail. These giant reflective surfaces form the basis of many interstellar missions. Combined with giant lasers pushing them, they can be accelerated to speeds unreachable by any other current technologies. However, according to a new paper available on arXiv from Chao Shen and Jiaze Li of the Harbin Institute of Technology, once those missions start reaching a significant percentage of the speed of light they’re going to run into a drag force from the light itself.

Each decade the world is losing over 7 per cent of its freshwater storage capacity to sediment build-up, according to an analysis of over half a million reservoirs

Daniel Diermeier, the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, was previously the Provost of the University of Chicago. He was deeply invested in the Chicago Principles, which include free speech, institutional neutrality, and scholarship and teaching (adjudicated purely by merit) as the two overarching goals of a University.  I hoped he would succeed Bob Zimmer as President of our University, but after Zimmer fell ill with a brain tumor, Diermeier got the offer from Vanderbilt, and since Zimmer did not resign (sadly, he died later), Diermeier left.

At Vanderbilt he’s putting into place the Chicago Principles, and enforcing them more rigorously than we do here. When students held a sit-in in the administration offices, for example, he had them expelled and arrested. And he’s been busy writing and speaking about the goals of academia and how the principles first forged here promote those goals (see here and here, for example). When someone recently referred to Vanderbilt as “The University of Chicago of the South”, someone else responded, “No, Chicago is now the Vanderbilt University of the north.”

Along with Andrew Martin, the chancellor of St. Louis’s Washington University, Deirmeier commissioned a group of ten scholars to examine the issue of how scholarship in the humanities has become politicized, something that the two thought was endangering the value of the humanities and, indeed, of universities themselves. Headed by Paul Boghossian, a Professor of Philosophy at NYU (not to be confused with Peter B.), the group of ten produced a long report (29 pages when I printed out the pdf, which can be found here). The upshot is that yes, the humanities are becoming politicized and endanger scholarship in many ways (see below).  Although the ten authors do consider empirically-laden humanities areas like economics, history, and anthropology, they deliberately leave out science, though there is no end of discussion of how science, too, is becoming politicized to its detriment (see, for example, “The ideological subversion of biology,” by Luana Maroja and me, or “The peril of politicizing science” by Anna Krylov).

If you click on the first screenshot below you’ll go to the report (more information is apparently forthcoming), and the second screenshot gives a summary of the report by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which you’ll find more digestible.  Note that while the Chronicle piece refers to “The Left” as ruining humanities, the Boghossian et al. report explicitly assert that the erosion of the humanities is not due to the Left per se, but to the fact that most professors are on the Left, and that the Left has adopted some principles (e.g., relativism and postmodernism) that has played a role in eroding scholarship.  But they add that this is a danger of any ideology that infects academia, whether it be from the Left, the Right, or something else.

The Chronicle summary; click to read.  Brian Leiter at our Law School has also written his comments on the report, which are generally favorable, but see below.

What I’m going to do is simply group a few quotes from the big report (indented) under bold headings that I made myself.  The point of the Boghossian et al. report is not to indict anybody, or conclude what needs to be done, but simply to raise the problem as a serious issue, intending to promote discussion about what needs to be done. (And yes, they do think that something needs to be done, particularly in anthropology, which comes in for a drubbing.)

The problem:

The report is prompted by the widespread sense that, despite their value and their promise, the humanistic disciplines are in trouble. It is, of course, widely recognized that undergraduate enrollments in these disciplines have plummeted and that there have been numerous complaints about the content of syllabi.2 However, with rare exceptions, our committee has not focused on these issues. Our concern has rather been the quality of academic scholarship in this domain.

Scholarship on matters of human concern has been a source of controversy from the start — witness the trial of Socrates for corrupting the youth of Athens. In recent years, however, the complaint has assumed a more specific form, namely, that the traditional goal of coming to understand the human world through careful scholarship has been subordinated to, or even displaced by, a “political” goal: the aim of realizing a conception of social justice nowadays associated with the progressive left. More specifically, the complaint is that scholarly standards for the assessment of academic work have been distorted within these disciplines both to privilege work on topics that are taken to be relevant to social justice, and much more importantly, to replace more traditional standards for assessing academic scholarship with political standards designed to ensure that only politically acceptable work is published, taught and valorized (§3 below). The sharpest version of the complaint traces this distortion in scholarly standards to a pervasive repudiation of the very idea of scholarly objectivity in favor of the view that since claims to knowledge are inevitably ideological, it is fair game to assess academic scholarship on political and social grounds (§4 below). The result of this distortion, the complaint continues, is an academic ecosystem in which much of what passes as scholarship in the humanistic disciplines is in fact a mix of tendentious, biased research, feeble academic agitprop and jargon-laden nonsense. To the extent that this is so, the complaint concludes, these scholarly disciplines can no longer play the valuable role they have traditionally played in the advancement of human knowledge and so risk forfeiting their claims to deference from concerned administrators and support from the wider public. . .

The importance of the humanities (There’s a nice discussion of this in the report, bearing on why they are worth saving through unpolluted scholarship.)

But who is going to help you decide what satisfactions are really worth pursuing? Which outcomes are worth aiming for? What is worth wanting? Who will help you decide whether John Stuart Mill was right to say that “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied” (Mill 1985)? Indeed, who will let you know this question is even worth asking? And where will you learn that one reason for studying the nomothetic sciences is that understanding how the universe works and how we fit into it would be worthwhile in itself, even if we never put the knowledge to profitable use?

The answer, we think, is clear. These are the questions you learn to answer, however provisionally, with the help of literature and the arts, critically appreciated, through the study of philosophy and history and sociology and anthropology. Some humanistic disciplines take matters of value and meaning as a central focus; others aim to describe and explain the human world without pronouncing judgment; but all play an indispensable role in refining our conception of what is possible for human beings and which social arrangements we wish to aim for. If these disciplines are to help us answer these important questions, it is crucial that they use the right methods in search of the right answers. Their task is not to manipulate us into following a party line but to provide each free person with the tools for making their own informed choices.

The disciplines we are discussing prepare us for a free life by developing critical thinking and analytical skills, enhancing cultural understanding and empathy in a world of increasing global interconnections, teaching ethical reasoning and civic responsibility, and providing intellectual resources for creativity and innovation. Because their study is intrinsically worthwhile, they contribute directly to the intellectual and imaginative flourishing of those who study them. By defending and investing in the humanistic disciplines, we affirm our commitment to a society that values critical inquiry, empathy and the full spectrum of human potential, all informed by a clear-eyed view of who we are and where we’ve come from.

This goes along with my own view, though the report focuses on “good scholarship” in the humanities as “good scholarship that produces truth.” I’ve discussed before to what extent “truth”—in the sense of what exists in the universe and can be verified empirically—actually exists in the humanities. I concluded that in the arts, like music, literature, and so on, that no, there is no “truth” to be found; there are only different interpretations.  I suppose you can say that some interpretations are better than others, but such claims must be supported by facts. Other areas of humanities, including economics, history, and anthropology, do make assertions about what exists, and in those cases there is a provisional “truth” that can be adjuciated empirically.  These considerations are completely missing from the report, which suffers from a dearth of real examples (to be fair, the authors don’t want to demonize anyone).

The focus on good scholarship

Our focus is rather the quality of scholarship: the research produced by professors employed by colleges and universities and published (for the most part) in academic journals and scholarly monographs. The critique we take seriously is that this scholarly enterprise has been damaged in recent decades, not just by a general erosion of standards, but also by a reconceptualization of scholarship as a form of political activity, answerable in part to extra-academic standards.

The three ways that scholarship can be politicized. This is the heart of the discussion.

We have identified three main forms of politicized distortion in recent humanistic scholarship.

a. On the first track, scholarly claims are constrained by the requirement that they cohere with an antecedently accepted political goal, although this is not how the constraint is explicitly described. Rather, unwelcome results or debates are dismissed as having been rendered moot by “settled science.”

b. On the second track, the scholarly goal of understanding the world is displaced by, or supplemented with, the aim of telling stories that serve a pragmatic purpose. On this track, the existence of discourse-independent facts is not denied. Rather, it is claimed that, for epistemological reasons, our scholarly representations can only be partially constrained by such facts, the rest of the slack being taken up by the practical purposes that we allegedly have in devising these accounts.

c. On the third track, the idea that there are genuine facts about the world or about what the evidence supports independently of our political commitments is rejected. On this view, good scholarship cannot be distorted by political values because it is, at bottom, irredeemably constituted by such values.

The first of these routes is not philosophically problematic, in the sense that it makes no questionable claims about the nature of truth, evidence and so forth. However, this style of scholarship is deeply problematic, especially when questions are closed by demonizing opponents to suppress dissent. It is often bad scholarship, since it treats questions as closed that have not in fact been resolved by appropriate scholarly standards; but it is not bad philosophy.

One example of erosion: sex differences

The most straightforward form of distortion arises when otherwise traditional scholarship is constrained by disciplinary norms to yield results that have been determined in advance to be required by a political or social project. If scholars committed to social justice believe that the cause can only be advanced by finding, for example, that there are no behavioral differences between men and women traceable to biology, they will be under enormous pressure from their own commitments and from their colleagues to find no such differences. Either the research will not be done, or if it is done and the results look bad, the finding will be suppressed or the evidence reinterpreted so as to obscure it.12 Distortions of this sort can be harmless if they are isolated, since the politically motivated blind spots of one researcher will be exposed by others. When whole disciplines or subdisciplines prejudge substantive questions on political grounds, on the other hand, the upshot can be a serious distortion of the scholarly enterprise.

This is something that Luana and I discuss in our paper. There is in a fact a moiety of scholars who don’t think that there are real differences between the sexes, or if there are such differences, they are due entirely to socialization and bigotry.  What is taboo is the idea that such differences might be “innate,” that is, the result of evolution shaping which genes are turned on in which sex, and perhaps those evolutionary differences might be explained by natural selection. This is the subject of Steve Stewart-Williams’s new book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences: How Evolution Shapes the Minds of Men and Women, a good book that came out just two days ago.

The article talks about the wellsprings that can lead to distorted scholarship, including postmodernism and especially its scion: relativism—the idea that there is no absolute truth or knowledge, but there many different and equally valid truths and “ways of knowing”.  Relativism can be used, says the report, to dismiss scholarship on the grounds that it’s simply one scholar’s view of truth, and there are other views. But the report also shows why relativism is self-refuting:

The problem with relativism

While the political appeal of such relativistic views is well-understood, so, too, are their theoretical problems. For it is in fact extremely hard to make sense of the idea that there can be
no such thing as a purely epistemic reason for believing something. The idea that there must be such reasons seems to lie at the root of any viable conception of knowledge and inquiry. We can see this in a variety of ways.

Consider first that the relativism is rarely applied consistently by the relativists themselves. Ifsomeone really believed that all knowledge claims depend on contingent background nonepistemic values, they would have to admit that while they believe that climate change is real,
given their progressive values, the MAGA folks might be entitled to believe that climate change is a hoax, given their conservative values. Similarly, for claims about how many sexes there are, or whether race is real, and so on.

No one takes this tolerant attitude towards such disagreements, least of all the scholars who officially espouse the relativistic views. But with what right do they dismiss these opposing claims, if it really is true that every claim to knowledge depends on a variable non-epistemic context? On a relativistic view of justification, the only way in which such an intolerance could be justified is if there were something privileging one set of background values over the others. But it would be odd to be an objectivist about the non-epistemic values that inform the social construction of knowledge (privileging some over others) while being an anti-objectivist about the natural facts studied by biology and physics.

Moreover, even if proponents of such relativistic views could find it in themselves to be tolerant of these substantive disagreements, they could still not be fully consistent relativists, for
a familiar reason: The relativist would have to admit at least one exception to the relativistic thesis about knowledge, and that would be the thesis of relativism itself.

In his own summary, Brian Leiter, while positive on the report, takes issue with what he sees as its somewhat dogmatic stand on relativism. Leiter says this:

There is quite a lot of analytic philosophy in this report, unsurprisingly given the authors: besides Boghossian, also Anthony Appiah, Kit Fine, Gideon Rosen, plus some linguists, sociologists, psychologists historians and other humanistic scholars. This explains some of the rather surprising claims in the report, such as that “the intellectual case against relativism about knowledge is overwhelming” (the main citations are to Boghossian’s book and work by his NYU colleague Thomas Nagel). So much for Carnap’s “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology” and some ways of understanding Quine–not to mention Herder, F.C.S. Schiller, and many other serious humanists. (And what about Boghossian’s colleague Hartry Field?) The report would make itself less vulnerable to dismissal had it not taken that position.

Brian clearly knows a lot more than I about the reach and validity of relativism, but I don’t know what he’s saying here; and I will ask him.

h/t: Greg Mayer

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