Speaker 1: Pushkin, this is solvable. I'm Jacob Weisberg. America is being
Speaker 1: called out. There's a reckoning taking place, and at times
Speaker 1: a quite confrontational push to face up to our country's
Speaker 1: racist roots. One hundred and fifty demonstrators just gathered and
Speaker 1: they have just torn down the statue of Christopher Columbus. Yesterday,
Speaker 1: Cult announced that she would not make a planned appearance
Speaker 1: at University of California, Berkeley. People are talking a lot
Speaker 1: about what happened after a dinner date between the comedian
Speaker 1: as He's I'm Sorry and a young woman going by
Speaker 1: the name of Grace. In America's streets, across our university
Speaker 1: campuses and every day on social media, people are battling
Speaker 1: about what should be done to address racism, sexism, and
Speaker 1: other forms of historically embedded prejudice and justice. Battling power
Speaker 1: differentials that disadvantage people is the central goal of basically
Speaker 1: being any kind of moral actor in society. As justified
Speaker 1: as this outrage is, it comes in places with its
Speaker 1: own intolerant edge, demands to conform rather than debate, to suppress,
Speaker 1: and punish rather than engage. In other words, cancel culture
Speaker 1: is a real thing. Many people say why do these
Speaker 1: people have to be so mean? But you wouldn't ask
Speaker 1: that if it was about pedophilia. Nobody thinks that we
Speaker 1: should be very gentle in ejecting a pedophile from general society,
Speaker 1: but as firing someone always the right fix to shutting
Speaker 1: down debate equal progress. Has cancelation become a form of
Speaker 1: left wing McCarthyism. We haven't had an honest grappling with
Speaker 1: this yet, where a critical mass of people resist the
Speaker 1: stalinist extremes. John mcwarter is a professor of linguistics in
Speaker 1: American history at Columbia University. He spends a lot of
Speaker 1: his time thinking about how we choose and use words,
Speaker 1: and he believes cancel culture is solvable. My co host
Speaker 1: Anna Applebaum talked with Nick Warder about how a linguist
Speaker 1: looks at the battles around free speech and how those
Speaker 1: unfairly caught in the crosshairs can respond to name calling
Speaker 1: without engaging in shouting matches. Here's their conversation. It's some
Speaker 1: level cancel culture is. These are arguments about language, what
Speaker 1: you are and aren't allowed to say, how things are pronounced.
Speaker 1: How did you first fall in love with the quirks
Speaker 1: and hiccups of language. What drew you to this field.
Speaker 1: I'm a linguist, not for the reasons that I think
Speaker 1: many people might expect. It's not that I was especially
Speaker 1: well traveled as a child. Both of my parents spoke
Speaker 1: only English. But if I hear somebody speaking something other
Speaker 1: than English, I have this visceral desire to want to
Speaker 1: do it too, Like I'd like to understand what they're saying,
Speaker 1: but also I want to be able to do that.
Speaker 1: The first time I heard anybody speaking something other than English,
Speaker 1: who was Hebrew? Actually, I found myself thinking, I am
Speaker 1: so jealous of that girl that she can talk in
Speaker 1: that way that I can't understand. For me. Originally, it
Speaker 1: was just that they're these seven thousand different codes, and
Speaker 1: I don't want to know only one, so I also
Speaker 1: speak several languages. Tell me what you think about English.
Speaker 1: What does it do well and what does it do poorly?
Speaker 1: Do we debate a certain way in English? I think
Speaker 1: we do, actually, but I'd love to know what you think.
Speaker 1: We're an oddly unfussy language about all sorts of things
Speaker 1: that other languages make you mark and pay attention to.
Speaker 1: Because we're a language of the long written history. We
Speaker 1: have a kind of artificially preserved, enormous vocabulary, and that's
Speaker 1: true of any language with a long written history, but
Speaker 1: English is one of them, and it means that you
Speaker 1: have unnecessarily large collections of synonyms that allow you to
Speaker 1: express yourself in various ways. I find English to be funny.
Speaker 1: People who are into the speeches of Winston Churchill, et
Speaker 1: cetera think I'm crazy, But I find English crude. You know,
Speaker 1: it's it's fascinatingly streamlined. But it's other languages where I
Speaker 1: find myself just drowning in the subtleties and the things
Speaker 1: that they have to say that we have to leave
Speaker 1: the context. Yeah, I actually wonder if that isn't run
Speaker 1: of the reasons why English is the universal language, because
Speaker 1: in fact, it's pretty easy to speak bad English. It
Speaker 1: doesn't acquire a lot of grammatical knowledge. It's it has
Speaker 1: that symposim You can speak it badly quite easily, which
Speaker 1: is not true of actually most language. Yes, exactly. You know,
Speaker 1: as a linguistic professor, do you know how do you
Speaker 1: navigate sensitive language debates? Is there a different way to
Speaker 1: do it? There are certain things that you're taught, you
Speaker 1: are not supposed to say in our society. I'm just
Speaker 1: somebody who one. I like to keep things tidy, I
Speaker 1: like to make a case. I think, really I should
Speaker 1: have been a lawyer. I don't know if I would
Speaker 1: have been a good one, but that's the kind of
Speaker 1: mine that I think I have. And also I want
Speaker 1: to find stuff out. And I watch other people being
Speaker 1: told that they're not a allowed to and it certainly
Speaker 1: happened to me two or three times in my own
Speaker 1: academic career, and I don't think it's right. And I
Speaker 1: have a hard time keeping quiet when I don't think
Speaker 1: something is right. One person said about me once that
Speaker 1: when John gets mad, he writes a book, and that's
Speaker 1: more or less true. I just can't help it. I
Speaker 1: want things to be better than they are, and I'm cranky.
Speaker 1: What do you think of the term cancel culture? What
Speaker 1: do you think it now means? Well, we're already getting
Speaker 1: beyond it in a way, or at least I hope
Speaker 1: we can. Because originally the idea was that if and
Speaker 1: originally by that I mean say two years ago, the
Speaker 1: idea was that if we find out something unsavory and
Speaker 1: often genuinely unsavory about some celebrity that we're supposed to
Speaker 1: flush them from our consciousness as much as possible, And
Speaker 1: so that has become more extreme lately, is accepted by
Speaker 1: a larger number of people. And I think it's I
Speaker 1: could say dangerous, but it's also just really unfair, it's immoral,
Speaker 1: and yet I think most of us are inclined to
Speaker 1: pretend to go along with it because we're really frightened
Speaker 1: of a certain weapon that that crowd have, which is
Speaker 1: that they can call you a racist or a sexist.
Speaker 1: That's something that we need to renegotiate. And where is
Speaker 1: the desire to cancel people coming from? And you said
Speaker 1: that crowd or those people, who are they and what's
Speaker 1: their motive? Do you think this is what it is?
Speaker 1: Critical race theory? What it is is people who have
Speaker 1: drunk in an idea that battling power differentials that disadvantage
Speaker 1: people is the central goal of basically being any kind
Speaker 1: of moral actor in society, and that it must center
Speaker 1: what we consider intellectual inquiry to be. It must center
Speaker 1: what we consider art to be, It must center what
Speaker 1: we consider humor to be. That that one thing must
Speaker 1: be what it's all about. That even civility goes out
Speaker 1: the window, which is not crazy. Many people say, why
Speaker 1: do these people have to be so mean? But you
Speaker 1: wouldn't ask that if it was about petilia. Nobody thinks
Speaker 1: that we should be very gentle in ejecting a pedophile
Speaker 1: from general society. When I was at in college in
Speaker 1: the eighties, we had sort of there was a PC moment.
Speaker 1: Do you remember this? I was there for that, and
Speaker 1: then it went away, I'm told by people who are
Speaker 1: ten years younger than me, and then it came back
Speaker 1: again in this new woke form. And the question is
Speaker 1: what's the mechanism of that. I almost think the mechanism
Speaker 1: is that the people younger than us pushed back against
Speaker 1: PC because they thought it was stupid, and then the
Speaker 1: people younger than them. You know, I wonder if there's
Speaker 1: almost like a cyclical generational Yeah. I don't know if
Speaker 1: there's some you know, if it's some youth culture thing,
Speaker 1: and that the pendulum will swing and that everybody will say, wait,
Speaker 1: this is nuts, and then it will go back again.
Speaker 1: But nineteen ninety undergraduates were pushing back against the excesses
Speaker 1: of PC. Then everything was quiet. Woke is exactly what
Speaker 1: PC was back in the eighties. It's the same. It's
Speaker 1: the same alignment. And you know, to tell you the truth,
Speaker 1: I'm often asked, how do you work on a college campus?
Speaker 1: And I generally say that, frankly, I get the feeling
Speaker 1: most undergraduates in Morningside Heights see what's wrong here. It's
Speaker 1: just that there's a certain vocal minority that they always
Speaker 1: tell me they're scared blankless of. And so yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that there's already that pushback, just as an asside.
Speaker 1: I taught a class at Johns Hopkins last fall and
Speaker 1: I assigned them a book by Milan Kundera, who the
Speaker 1: check writer, yeah who. On rereading, I found was unbelievably sexist.
Speaker 1: I mean that's just how he writes. You know. It's
Speaker 1: all about men sleeping with lots of women. It's on right.
Speaker 1: And I, having assigned this book and having reread it
Speaker 1: in advance of the class, I suddenly worried, oh my god,
Speaker 1: I've just given this book to, you know, a bunch
Speaker 1: of twenty year olds. You know what if they're all
Speaker 1: really angry? And I said the first thing I said
Speaker 1: in the classroom the next day, it was, was anybody
Speaker 1: bothered by this book? And they looked at me like
Speaker 1: I was nuts. They were like, no, you know, just
Speaker 1: a you know check novelist. Right, I've done that. You know,
Speaker 1: I will play something on YouTube or assign some paths
Speaker 1: for some reason. And before anybody was calling it trigger warning,
Speaker 1: I would just say to the class, this was written
Speaker 1: a long time ago. There certain kind of language, there,
Speaker 1: certain assumptions, Um, I know you understand that I'm not
Speaker 1: assigning because of that. It's because it shows something else.
Speaker 1: And most of the class nods, and if I know
Speaker 1: of two or three of them being in their actual
Speaker 1: lives the sort of Wokester types, they don't bring it
Speaker 1: to class. So even in that setting, they don't say anything,
Speaker 1: partly because I guess I'm a figure of authority, but
Speaker 1: partly because they know they're outnumbered. And so it seems
Speaker 1: that we're dealing with a minority group with disproportionate influence.
Speaker 1: And isn't part of their disproportionate influence also just to
Speaker 1: do with social media, I mean, because they can broadcast
Speaker 1: you know what, you know, they can they can reach
Speaker 1: huge audiences with Twitter and video clips and um, you
Speaker 1: know and so on, and that that gives them a
Speaker 1: kind of power that they would never have had before. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think twenty twelve is when that crests, and that's
Speaker 1: why we're where we are today. If there were no
Speaker 1: such thing as this thing called Twitter, as handy as
Speaker 1: it can be, this wouldn't have happened. We're too connected.
Speaker 1: But we can't reverse that. So what do we do
Speaker 1: about it? We have, as you say, people who are
Speaker 1: now afraid of being called out, people who are maybe
Speaker 1: just defiably afraid of being attacked on social media. Senior people, professors,
Speaker 1: editors of newspapers have all become wary about how they
Speaker 1: speak because they're afraid of name calling. What's the solution.
Speaker 1: It has to start slowly. It can't be everybody who
Speaker 1: stands up to this woke mob as it's often called,
Speaker 1: because for some people it really is a matter of
Speaker 1: job security. It would interfere with their livelihoods. But they're
Speaker 1: cases that are hazier. If you're sitting on a school board,
Speaker 1: if you are a writer and you look and see
Speaker 1: what people are saying about you on Twitter, if you
Speaker 1: are just a person in your neighborhood having a conversation
Speaker 1: with other people like you on a play date or
Speaker 1: the like, it's gone to the point where we need
Speaker 1: to consider that the sky won't always fall in if
Speaker 1: somebody calls you a certain name. We have to think
Speaker 1: of the kind of person who's ready to call you
Speaker 1: a really dirty name on the basis of something that
Speaker 1: doesn't merit that approach as a shark. And I hear
Speaker 1: that with sharks, one way that you can make them
Speaker 1: leave you alone is to bop them on the nose. Now,
Speaker 1: I am not remotely saying that anybody should be punched
Speaker 1: in the nose or bopped or physically abused in any way,
Speaker 1: but metaphorically, these people need to be seen as the
Speaker 1: kinds where they'll say, well, now I guess you're just
Speaker 1: a racist, Well that's really problematic, you're a sexist when
Speaker 1: the charge is clearly not deserved and you can tell
Speaker 1: everybody around you agrees. And people need to be able
Speaker 1: to start saying I disagree with you on these issues,
Speaker 1: but I don't think it makes me a racist, and
Speaker 1: I'm not going to back down, and the person will
Speaker 1: yell louder. I frankly have been dealing with this kind
Speaker 1: of person for the past twenty five years, so I
Speaker 1: know this from experience. The person will yell louder and
Speaker 1: then you just say sorry. And what it would do
Speaker 1: is not eliminate a kind of point of view. I
Speaker 1: don't think we should try to eliminate the woosters anymore
Speaker 1: than they should be trying to eliminate us. But the
Speaker 1: ideas for them to sit back down with the rest
Speaker 1: of us, and the only way to do that is
Speaker 1: to metaphorically, metaphorically bought them on the nose like a shark.
Speaker 1: So how do we set the limits of you know,
Speaker 1: what is acceptable and unacceptable? We talk a lot about
Speaker 1: free speech and the free press, but in fact, there
Speaker 1: have always been certain kinds of topics and subjects and
Speaker 1: certain kinds of speech that have been out of bounds,
Speaker 1: whether it's shouting fire in a crowded theater or you know,
Speaker 1: or screaming hateful things at a mob. You know. So
Speaker 1: there have always been outer limits. Yeah, but who decides
Speaker 1: what those outer limits are? And how can we come
Speaker 1: to a broader agreement, if only within universities, about about
Speaker 1: where those lie? You know? And I can't answer that
Speaker 1: because we haven't had an honest grappling with this yet.
Speaker 1: Where a critical mass of people resist the stalinist extremes.
Speaker 1: I would like to see what sort of middle ground
Speaker 1: we find. And I don't know if I can put
Speaker 1: a label to it, but I think the idea. Unfortunately
Speaker 1: people love to call me conservative. I guess this is conservative.
Speaker 1: We need to go back to where things like this
Speaker 1: were in roughly two thousand seven or eight, which is that, yes,
Speaker 1: we're going to think of racism as societal as well
Speaker 1: as attitudinal, and yes we want to make change. Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: the idea can't be something rather obsessive and based more
Speaker 1: on reforming personal psychology and on society itself, etc. Where
Speaker 1: you draw the line, people will vary as society has
Speaker 1: to settle gradually upon that. In the Burkeyan sense, I
Speaker 1: would say in this case that a pendulum has gone
Speaker 1: too far? Would we want to go back to nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty five? Goodness gracious no, But what's happening now where
Speaker 1: we're about to be in say twenty twenty five. If
Speaker 1: we don't put a check on this is a pendulum
Speaker 1: in the other direction, it's a new kind of repression.
Speaker 1: So John, what is step one? You know how we
Speaker 1: can stop, as you say, this pendulum from swinging too far.
Speaker 1: Do you have to be confronted or can you be
Speaker 1: proactive well with the way things are today, you don't
Speaker 1: have to wait. This has become a major part of
Speaker 1: the warp and woof of a great deal of American society,
Speaker 1: especially since last spring. I would just say, and I'm
Speaker 1: basing this on the depressing and massive amount of feedback
Speaker 1: that people like me and my aspiring colleague Glenn Lowrie
Speaker 1: get from aggrieved people of all colors all over this country,
Speaker 1: not to mention in Canada and often for some reason,
Speaker 1: in Germany and Scandinavia. This is now a problem that
Speaker 1: spreads even beyond these shores. And if you are the
Speaker 1: kind of person where this is rearing its ugly head
Speaker 1: in your workplace or on the co op of your apartment,
Speaker 1: or in some organization that you serve in, or frankly,
Speaker 1: even your relatives, try it out. Some of you will
Speaker 1: be more up for it than others. I understand. Not
Speaker 1: everybody is into conflict, not everybody is into being yelled back,
Speaker 1: So sorry to interrupt. Try it out. I means saying no,
Speaker 1: I'm not a racist and I disagree with you. Is
Speaker 1: it just that simple? Yeah, just say no, I'm not
Speaker 1: a racist and I disagree with you and treat it
Speaker 1: the way many people treat trying to talk about religion,
Speaker 1: that the conversation has to end there, just like you
Speaker 1: cannot teach a person not to have faith in Jesus.
Speaker 1: That's going to be one out of fifty thousand people
Speaker 1: that you're going to convince of that if that's what
Speaker 1: you were trying to convince somebody of. You can't usually
Speaker 1: teach somebody out of this frame of mind. But you
Speaker 1: have to reach a point where you say, not only
Speaker 1: I don't want to talk about it, because then what
Speaker 1: that person learns is that you are not awake and
Speaker 1: you haven't done the work, and that they have further
Speaker 1: work to do to change. You tell them, no, I'm
Speaker 1: not a racist. I know we're not going to agree, however,
Speaker 1: and so I'm afraid this is over. And they'll say,
Speaker 1: but you about patriarch, Yeah, complicit, and just say no,
Speaker 1: I don't agree that I'm a racist and I'm not
Speaker 1: going to Your solution is actually just like I mean,
Speaker 1: it's almost like not even that there's no way to
Speaker 1: make it sound sophisticated, but I know what I mean.
Speaker 1: It's not like it's not like we need like this
Speaker 1: special kind of electricity infrastructure in this village. Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: we need like village levels. You know, there was all
Speaker 1: these like complications. This one doesn't have that kind of
Speaker 1: ted talk answer, but I think that it really is
Speaker 1: a matter of a kind of consciousness raising. Hopefully we'll see.
Speaker 1: What would you say to people listening who want to know, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, what can I do? What are three things
Speaker 1: that I can do to make this better without making
Speaker 1: the situation angrier or or more contentious? Why not just
Speaker 1: go out and do real work, like grassroots activism and
Speaker 1: getting out the vote and really thinking about houses works.
Speaker 1: How society works is not whether or not you fully
Speaker 1: understand the black condition. By the time you do, you're
Speaker 1: going to die. So that's something that I would also
Speaker 1: ask people to consider. Look at some black people. Just
Speaker 1: look and listen. Remember that we're talking about real human beings,
Speaker 1: not the idealization of this punitive, zen like structure that
Speaker 1: we were being taught is the new big thing. John
Speaker 1: mcwarter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University. A contributing
Speaker 1: writer at the Atlantic. He hosts the podcast Lexicon Valley.
Speaker 1: You should check it out and remember to check out
Speaker 1: our show notes for lengths and suggestions about how you
Speaker 1: can get involved. Solvable is brought to you by Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: Our show is produced by Camille Baptista, Senior producer Jocelyn Frame.
Speaker 1: Catherine Girdoe is our managing producer, and our executive producer
Speaker 1: is Mia Loebell. Special thanks go to Heather Fane, Eric Sandler,
Speaker 1: Harley Migliori and Kedjia Holland. I'm Jacob Weisberg.