Mick Hartley

Toby Young, head of the Free Speech Union, thinks that Steven Pinker’s idea of “common knowledge” – as outlined in his new book – explains cancel culture and academic pile-ons against heretics. Thus:

As Pinker says: “People will expose themselves to the risk of reprisal by a despotic regime only if they know that others are exposing themselves to that risk at the same time.” A good example of this self-censorship was provided by Václav Havel, the great Czech dissident. In a communist society, he said, it’s easy to imagine a greengrocer displaying a sign in his shop window saying “Workers of the World Unite”, even though his faith in Marxism has long since lapsed….

The suppression of what Pinker calls “common knowledge” — knowing that a particular point of view is widely shared, as well as knowing that those who hold it know it’s shared — is also how ideological dogmas are enforced in universities. Those dogmas may only be adhered to by a tiny minority, but so long as anyone challenging them is dealt a swift punishment, the extent of the dissent isn’t “common knowledge”.

Take the example of a group of professors at the University of Auckland, who were targeted by their colleagues four years ago. These professors wrote a letter to the New Zealand Listener that took issue with a proposal by a government working group that schools should give the same weight to Māori mythology as they do to science in the classroom. That is, that the Māori understanding that all living things originated with Rangi and Papa, the sky mother and sky god, should be presented as just as valid as the theories of Newton, Darwin and Einstein, which the group labelled “Western science”. The authors of the letter were careful to say that indigenous knowledge was “critical for the preservation and perpetuation of culture and local practices” — just not treated as on a par with physics, chemistry and biology.

In a rational world, this point of view would be incontestable. Surely, the argument about whether to teach schoolchildren scientific or religious explanations for the origins of the universe and the ascent of man was settled a hundred years ago? But the moment it was published all hell broke loose. The views of the authors were denounced by the Royal Society of New Zealand, the Association of Scientists and the Tertiary Education Union — as well as their own vice-chancellor.

Needless to say, two of the authors’ colleagues issued an “open letter” condemning them for causing “untold harm and hurt” and 2,000 academics added their names to it.

As Pinker says, “If scientific beliefs are just a particular culture’s mythology, how come we can cure smallpox and get to the Moon, and traditional cultures can’t?” And you can bet your bottom dollar that if any of the signatories of that “open letter” had a heart attack, their first call would not be to a Māori healer. Yet the fact that, deep down, they probably all thought scientific knowledge was superior to Māori mythology was not “common knowledge”. On the contrary, they harboured this belief like a guilty secret and felt obliged to advertise their fealty to what they took to be the prevailing orthodoxy for fear of being singled out as heretics if they didn’t.

This, Pinker says, is why academics are so quick to participate in mobbings against their colleagues. They’re terrified of being cancelled themselves, particularly if they’re only precariously employed, which many of them are. In private, most professors would scoff at the woke nonsense they feel obliged to pay lip service to. But because their scepticism isn’t “common knowledge”, these orthodoxies are energetically enforced by people who’ve long since stopped believing in them.

But this is confused. Yes, the common knowledge issue has some relevance – and no doubt plays a part in totalitarian societies where people assume that they’re alone in dissenting from the general ideology. But here, as Young (and Pinker) admit, the academics do what they do because they’re “terrified of being cancelled themselves”. That’s not the common knowledge issue: that’s cowardice. They join the herd not because they think they’re alone, but because they’re intimidated. They don’t speak up, not because they assume that everyone else actually believes this nonsense – Maori tradition as equal to science, gender ideology – but because they assume that all the other bastards will report them and get them in trouble.

And, given the state of academia now, they’re probably right. It’s precisely by signaling their commitment to an ideology they know to be nonsense that they demonstrate their loyalty to the cause.