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Until several months before I started writing this book, I was convinced that being tolerant was the most crucial trait someone who identified with left-wing political ideology could espouse. I am not in alignment with all the ideas associated with the Left, but if you asked me before I wrote this book whether I would choose the Right or the Left, I would have gone for the latter under the assumption that the Left is more inclusive. However, I no longer identify with either of these two options because I see only dichotomous solutions proposed by political camps that omit other, more creative possibilities and inhibit questioning the fixed frame of a system I find fundamentally incompatible with human thriving.
I would like to reiterate: Sharing my disappointment with the Left does not mean that I turned to the opposite side. I just would not identify the Leftist category as my own. Indeed, it is thanks to my disillusionment (and subsequent disappointment) with the Left that I find myself courageous enough to define my ideological self around a third option, which I will detail later on.
I have been reprimanded for posting an article including a reference to the American podcaster Joe Rogan’s interview on Facebook. The person worried about my post wanted to enlighten me that Rogan is “neoliberal” and has “quite a few far-right ‘friends’ comparatively to any legitimate left-wing intellectual.” However, it is not so clear that Joe Rogan embraces neoliberalism based on his discussion in the interviews. On his platform, he also gave provided outlets for 2020 Presidential Democratic candidates Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard to say their piece and present their political cases. He invited the team of The Hill, which espouses an anti-neoliberal agenda.
However, what most interested me in my friend’s concerned comment was the underlying assumption that allowing far-right voices into political discourse disqualifies one from credibility of argument. I find this to be an oppressive example of ideological purity of the type frequently seen across social media platforms. Should we unfriend anyone who may endanger our ideological purity? Whom does ideological purity benefit? In my mind, having friends of distinct and different political leanings is a sign that a person might have had an opportunity to think their opinions through by being exposed to different angles of viewing an issue.
Feminists have often struggled to include women in public life and bring in female points of view. However, being a member of one oppressed group does not mean that one would not be engaged in exclusionary tactics against narratives that did not confirm their core ideologies. The incident Ivan Illich took part in in the 1980s provides a good illustration of such behavior. In an interview with David Cayley, Ivan Illich shared how his book, Gender, evoked backlash after presenting it to an audience composed mainly of feminist scholars. He received many hate letters for reporting about the pre-modern concept of female and male realms that had been separated and had not overlapped with each other. He said that he did not react to this because he did not want to stir further escalation.
You may see cancel culture as an innocent expression of opinions, but it can have real-life consequences. For example, a CEO of Mozilla resigned (not quite) “voluntarily” because his 2008 donation to support lobbying against gay marriage evoked backlash in his company in 2014.1 Taken to the extreme, job applicants would be required to disclose their opinions on every potentially contentious issue in interviews to meet this new hiring standard.
Cancel culture takes on a cruel tone when the targeted person belongs to lower social class because being fired has more consequences for people in this position. A truck driver, Emmanuel Cafferty, was fired after a photograph of him making a white-supremacist hand gesture was posted on Twitter. The gesture was provoked by another driver who took the picture. People called his company to demand his removal from the company. He defended himself, saying that he had not been aware of the fact that the alt-right appropriated the inverted “okay” symbol.2 One may wonder whether the Left still does stand for the defense of the interests of the working class.
Jordan Peterson has been one of the most famous targets of canceling in recent years. His talk at the University of Cambridge in 2018 was so popular that the event sold out and many interested attendees were left without tickets. A commentary about this event was entitled “Platforming Peterson was not an exercise in free speech, but a legitimation of transphobic ideas,”3 which summarizes the reason why some people at the University wanted him to be canceled. Furthermore, the cisgendered author maintained that organizing and participating in such an event was a “threat to the safety and wellbeing of Cambridge’s trans community.” After summarizing Peterson’s track of commenting on non-binary gender issues, the article concluded that inviting Peterson was “about whether non-binary and trans people deserve a level of respect that they shouldn’t have to earn – the same respect automatically given to cisgendered people – and a level of safety within our university that every student should be afforded.” Peterson’s opposition to the amendment of the Canadian Human Rights code regarding gender neutral-pronouns was interpreted as fear mongering or disrespect.4
One cannot expect a psychology professor to be able to interpret legal texts but interpreting his fear as ill-intentioned is also too much of a stretch. An example of a legal suing regarding pronoun use proves that the fear that mistakes in the use of pronouns when addressing gender-fluid individuals is not entirely baseless. In the UK, a transgender activist reported a man she had had a dispute with on Twitter to the police. She cited referring to her as “he” and with the names from before transition as the evidence for transphobia. The same trans woman pressurized a billboard company to remove a poster stating that a woman is defined as an “adult female human.”5 In the panel discussion in which Peterson opposed regulating the use of pronouns, a trans woman shared Peterson’s concern about expecting people to remember which pronoun to use when addressing them .6
In March 2019, the University of Cambridge rescinded Peterson’s research fellow award at the Divinity School. The vice-chancellor mentioned that the decision had been motivated by Peterson’s photograph with his arm around a man wearing a T-shirt with the slogan “I am a proud Islamophobe.” According to a counter-petition circulating on University’s social media, Peterson clarified later that he had not been aware of the T-shirt’s slogan and that he had done many such photographs with his fans approaching him after his events.7
People behind the petition were not supporting all of Peterson’s ideas. However, they were concerned with the fact that an academic was canceled and the wider implications of this cancellation for academia as a whole. What would happen if academia became an environment where people are afraid to be taken out if they voice their opinions? Where, some people wondered, was the line between shutting people down and radical cancel culture? Notably, several supporters of the petition wanted to stay anonymous out of fear for their future career, especially those planning to stay in academia.8
Student magazine, Varsity, cited student union’s words, namely it “said publicly that it was aware of the situation two hours before the University issued a statement that the offer had been rescinded, and there is no evidence that Cambridge’s decision was made as a result of external pressure (…).” However, it also expressed relief that Peterson’s fellowship was rescinded.9 In online discussions in the university community about this issue, the opponents of Peterson shared similar views to those presented in The Guardian and Varsity – both seen as left-leaning.10
The director of the Free Speech Union at the University of Cambridge, Toby Young, asked for Peterson’s re-invitation in December 2020 after a change in the university’s free speech policy was made. One of the initiators of this change was a reader in philosophy.11 Cambridge University’s new guidelines state that: “The University expects all staff and students to engage with intellectual and ideological challenges in a constructive, questioning and peaceable way, even if they find the viewpoints expressed to be disagreeable, unwelcome or distasteful.”12
I do not want to make an exhaustive list of the instances of canceling Jordan Peterson. I will just mention another one because, in this case, other creators are affected as well. A documentary movie by Patricia Marcoccia and Maziar Ghaderi, in which they portray Peterson and his rise to fame, was canceled several times in 2019.13 This provides a clear and troubling example of cancel culture’s inability to separate engaging with the individual with engaging with an ideology.
Another cancel act related to Jordan Peterson was targeted at a teaching assistant at the Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario. In 2017, Lindsay Shepherd was giving a lecture on gender pronouns and showed students panel discussion in which Jordan Peterson opposed the legal regulation imposing addressing gender-fluid people with their chosen pronouns. The panel allowed expressing various points of view and majority of participants had a gender-fluid background. I do not know which parts of the panel were presented by the teaching assistant. She explained that she wanted to introduce students to opposite views without taking a stance. However, she received a warning from her boss because she did not publicly disapprove of Peterson’s contribution to the panel. Her boss argued that she had created a toxic atmosphere during her classes. Furthermore, the alleged doxing of his students by Peterson was mentioned as the reason not to show any video featuring him without a condemnation. This admonition appears to be in reference to media reports about two of Peterson’s students in 2017 when he tweeted their Facebook profiles after they organized protests against him giving a public talk.14
Although Lindsay Shepherd has previously noted that she supported issues typically associated with the Left, she has often been depicted by some media as a right-wing free speech activist.
Supporters of Donald Trump have been another target of canceling by some people on the Left. Ironically, the movement that defends some groups against discrimination and marginalization is represented by voices calling for the silencing of their opponents. Canceling seems to be the natural way of expressing political opinion by the 1990s generation. On November 6th, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (born in 1989) posted a tweet: “Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future.” Washington Post columnist and MSNBC contributor, Jennifer Rubin, tweeted on the same day: “Any R now promoting rejection of an election or calling to not to follow the will of voters or making baseless allegations of fraud should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into “polite” society. We have a list.” On August 30th, 2019, Eric McCormack responded to a tweet announcing Trump’s fundraiser with a tweet: “kindly report on everyone attending this event, so the rest of us can be clear about who we don’t wanna work with.” The subsequent day, Debra Messing responded: “Please print a list of all attendees please. The public has a right to know” to the same tweet.
Keri Smith, who used to identify with the social justice movement, started to doubt her affiliation once she learned about physical attacks on Trump’s supporters from Leftist activists. Another event that contributed to her distancing from the Left was learning about shooting at police officers at a Black Lives Matter rally in Dallas, Texas. In her echo chamber, some people were making excuses for it. She cited a comedian saying, “A lot of White men will gonna have to die”.15
When it comes to the righteousness of free speech regulation, two opposing views can be crystallized in the debate: Popper’s and Orwell’s arguments. These two citations can summarize them:
- “We should [therefore] claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.” by Karl Popper 16
- “(…) if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.” by George Orwell 17
Observing current debates, one can attribute Popper’s argument predominantly to the Left and Orwell’s opinion to the Right. Popper may be right in the abstract world of ideas, but we are not living in this world. One cannot deny the power relations we are embedded in. His view paves the path towards legitimizing power grab over the truth and public sphere or even people’s intellectual dimension. Moreover, those who are the most powerful are the first to benefit from this intellectual buttressing.
Traditionally, science and intellectual life used to be an ongoing inquiry, constructing knowledge based on diverse contributions to create a more robust understanding. According to principles in science and intellectual life, evidence that supports a current understanding is always considered vulnerable to new research and findings and challenged accordingly. Karl Popper described the ideal of science as an ongoing conversation to find out the truth. It was supposed to be a democratic space. In contrast to science’s ethos, a subset of progressive ideology conceives of progress as the ability to hamstring dialogue. Corporations managing YouTube or Facebook deploy this control. Instead of engaging in others’ arguments, one bans people expressing the opposite views.
In the past, I would have said that I am a Leftist because I was against the dominant role of corporations in our lives. However, I do not see such a clear stance among Leftists. They are too busy with other topics. I am missing even a milder form of questioning the agendas of those in power without mentioning more uncomfortable acts like boycotting big corporations and changing consumption patterns, which would be too much to ask of an armchair activist. Paradoxically, I have observed more of this interrogation among people that the Left labels far-right or conspiracy theorists. Notice how the Left-Right divide structures our imagination, depriving us of a vision beyond corporate domination. The polarization disperses our energy and time. In this way, citizens have fewer resources to shape their environment because they are preoccupied with the abstract discussions prepared for them by the media. The Left-Right divide serves well the corporations and the elites at their helm in consolidating their power.
Nowadays, I place myself on the divide between those who go with the plan of corporate elites and those who make an effort to see through it and reject being instrumentalized. This divide is not voiced in the media unless it is ridiculed. This loud omission is an inherent part of this divide and gives leverage to the corporate camp. Wokeness has become a sign of alertness to the injustices for the woke and a sign of exaggeration for their opponents. I invite everyone to wake up and see that you are operating within a scenario benefiting the consolidation of power and control by the elites.
1Abby Ohlheiser (2014): Mozilla’s CEO Resigns Following Criticism of his Anti-Gay Marriage Donation. The Atlantic, April 3.
2Yascha Mounk (2020): Stop Firing the Innocent. The Atlantic, June 27.
3Tom Cleere (2018): Platforming Peterson was not an exercise in free speech, but a legitimation of transphobic ideas. Varsity, November 9.
4Tom Cleere (2018): Platforming Peterson was not an exercise in free speech, but a legitimation of transphobic ideas. Varsity, November 9.
5Josh Halliday (2018): Graham Linehan given police warning after complaint by transgender activist. The Guardian, October 7th.
6Panel debate (2016): Genders, Rights and Freedom of Speech. YouTube channel The Agenda with Steve Paikin, October 27.
7Rob Henderson (2019): What Jordan Peterson Did for Me. The New York Times, April 19; Anonymous (no date): Jordan Peterson’s visiting fellowship, students’ petition: Diversity, Inclusion and Free Speech. It was published on GoogleDocs.
8Anonymous source, December 2020.
9Katy Bennett (2019): Jordan Peterson criticises Cambridge’s decision to rescind fellowship offer. Varsity, March 21.
10Anonymous source with personal identity as apolitical and centrist, December 2020.
11Ben Quinn (2020): Cambridge University urged to re-invite rightwing academic Jordan Peterson. The Guardian, December 10.
12Cambridge University (2020): University Statement on Freedom of Speech. Approved by the University on December 9, 2020.
13Katie Herzog (2019): Jordan Peterson Documentary Faces Cancelation and Threats. The Stranger, October 14.
14Jillian Schuler (2017): Jordan Peterson doxxes two student activists. thevarsity.ca, October 30.
15Keri Smith interviewed in Triggernometry (2020): How I Left the Social Justice Cult – Keri Smith. YouTube channel Triggernometry, December 9.
16These word appeared in the 1945 book “The Open Society and Its Enemies.” His argument is often called the paradox of tolerance or Popper’s paradox.
17The New York Times republished the unpublished text on October 7, 1972 under the title “The freedom of the press,” with the copy rights attributed to Sonia Brownell Orwell. In this text, Orwell cites Voltaire’s words in order to describe his stance on free speech: “I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.”