WHEN THE CANCELLERS ARE SCHEDULED FOR CANCELLATION:
This is an utterly uncompromising assault on context, the study of history, and the value of unfettered intellectual debate. It is a wonder that the executors of this cultural revolution are shocked to find that some people don’t take too kindly to the effort. What’s more, some of those who aren’t comfortable with this campaign of historical revisionism helm some rather powerful institutions. And those institutions, some of which are not beholden to America’s constitutional protections on speech and expression, are fighting back.
The government of France, for example, has all but declared war on the woke. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,” French President Emmanuel Macron averred. In France, a nascent intellectual movement alleges that some of the tenets of modern social justice, particularly the activists’ view that racial characteristics are linked to immutable habits of mind, are an assault on the preferred French conception of race as a subjective condition. In the view of its opponents, these uniquely American ideas poison the water, sow discord, and give comfort to an “Islamo-leftism [that] corrupts all of society.” And now, the heavy hand of French cultural policing has descended on universities that lend credence to these views.
A similar backlash is underway on the other side of the Channel. “I am deeply worried about the chilling effect on campuses of unacceptable silencing and censoring,” British Education Secretary Gavin Williamson declared in a speech last week. “That is why we must strengthen free speech in higher education by bolstering the existing legal duties and ensuring strong, robust action is taken if these are breached.” The speech was accompanied by a declaration of the British government’s intention to impose legal mandates on universities to actively promote free expression and fine those institutions that fail to uphold this charge.
Framing the issue in no uncertain terms, Secretary of State and Housing Robert Jenrick vowed to “save Britain’s statues from the woke militants who want to censor our past.” The government’s move has been bolstered by private British institutions, which are ramping up their efforts to petition courts for redress on behalf of those who face professional consequences for violating social justice’s tenets.
It shouldn’t be, but it is somewhat surprising that the most aggressive defenders of social justice’s campaign of intimidation are horrified by the counterattack.
A year ago, the Wall Street Journal noted:
The French critic Pascal Bruckner has described the current atmosphere as a result of an “import-export transaction” between France and the U.S. “The identity politics and the P.C. culture that is central to the campus ideology in America came out of French theory,” he said, referring to the work of influential thinkers of the 1970s such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. “We’ve invented this, and now it’s coming back,” Mr. Bruckner said.
In France as in the U.S., the debate over freedom of speech scrambles the usual political divides. According to Nathalie Heinich, a sociologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, “The peculiar aspect of this wave is that censorship was historically associated with right-wing authoritarianism, while for the first time in our generation it comes from the left.”
Given the French roots of cancel culture, it’s good to see them fighting back. As Steve Hayward wrote last week at Power Line in a post headlined,“Will *France* Save America?”, “imagine the reaction on American campuses to any American politician who proposes a similar review of our university curricula. (Memo to red state governors: You may just want to do this.) It gives you the same kind of warm glow as a double-shot of whisky.”