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Jonathan Haidt has posted an excerpt from the new book The Canceling of the American Mind and it is clear from his rhetoric that his claims to represent a return to classic liberalism is a facade hiding a disavowed investment in Right-wing ideology.
As one of the founders of the Heterodox Academy, Haidt wants to argue that we need to promote the diversity of ideas in higher education, and this means the promotion of free speech and hiring of more Right-wing professors to counter the perceived Left-wing dominance. While I am also critical of many recent Leftist academic policies and practices, I do not think the solution is to balance one extreme ideology with another; rather, we should affirm that higher education is about the pursuit of facts and not opinions or beliefs.
Viral Rhetoric on the Right
If we want to defend the values of classic liberalism, then we need to advocate for the application of unbiased reason in the law, science, education, and journalism. However, a quick look at Haidt’s rhetoric shows that his discourse is anything but rational and unbiased; instead, he employs misleading metaphors to fuel a state of moral panic, which is ironic since he is trying to attack the Left for producing their own moral panic.
In articulating the origins of campus cancel culture, he states: “Sometime around 2014, something big changed in American society. It was as if a flock of demons was unleashed upon the world, and the first place they flocked to was American college campuses.” By referring to demons, Haidt repeats the way current moral panics are derived from earlier religious conflicts. Thus, as he blames the Left for censoring and shaming people in a way that copies former religious attacks on blasphemy, he repeats the very thing that he is critiquing.
In this structure of projective identification, Haidt attacks his other for what he is doing himself, and therefore, we are a long way from the unbiased search to separate truth from fiction. Moreover, his evocation of religious rhetoric is coupled with the use of medical and biological metaphors, which further remove his discourse from reason and impartiality.
For instance, in the following passage, he compares cancel culture to a biological disorder: “The disease continued to mutate and spread, so we dove much deeper into its origins and effects in our 2018 book with the same title.” In referring to mutation and spreading, Haidt is playing on the biological processes shaping viruses, and in this combination of culture and biology, culture is naturalized as nature is anthropomorphized.
As I argue in my book Viral Rhetoric, one of the dangers of treating culture and politics as if they are biological forces is that we begin to see these social formations as being inevitable and unchangeable. We also at the same time project human psychology onto nature as we engage in what Freud called animistic thought.
A Religious Panic?
In seeing cancel culture as not only a religious moral panic but also a virus that is infecting all aspects of our society, Haidt seeks to instill fear in his readers so that they will join him and take up the fight against the Left: “In the five years since The Coddling was published, the disease has metastasized and spread far beyond universities. It now infects journalism, the arts, non-profits, K-12 education, and even medicine.” Like so many other current ideologues who like to pretend that they are not supporting the Left or the Right, Haidt reveals his true bias by spending most of his attention criticizing the Left.
Trapped in an imaginary, mirroring relation, Haidt cannot help but to repeat the extreme rhetoric he rejects as he continues to project his own repressed aggression onto others. Moreover, his desire to promote a diversity of ideas is a way of both copying and undermining the Left-leaning project of promoting a more diverse society. Since the Right wants to reverse racial diversity policies, it has taken the strategies and rhetoric from the Left to copy and block its enemy at the same time. Locked into this imaginary fun house world of mirroring and projection, both extreme positions become more extreme and hyperbolic.
Haidt must know on some level that is it the Right that is now weaponizing free speech, and so his focus on the censoring of speech at universities and beyond only plays into the hands of libertarian extremists. He thus only pretends to be in the middle as he really coddles the Right and focuses his attacks on the Left.
In order to breakout of this type of mirroring relationship, we need to realize that the modern liberal institutions of universities, science, journalism, and democratic law rely on the unbiased application of reason to empirical evidence. Furthermore, this promotion of rationality over ideology and belief also implies a critical rejection of manipulative rhetoric.
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