Essay:Greg Lukianoff vs. Scientific Orthodoxy

In the new book, The Canceling of the American Mind: How Cancel Culture Undermines Trust, by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott, the authors discuss incidents of "cancel culture" in the United States over the last few years and how freedom of speech can be maintained as an ideal in civic life. This isn't a bad premise in and of itself, but my main issue with the book stems from how Lukianoff and Schlott sometimes use misleading rhetoric in order to make their point, and nowhere is that more evident than in the section on COVID-19. Given his age and years of experience compared to Schlott, I suspect that it was Lukianoff who wrote the greater part of the book, so I feel comfortable attributing this section and its numerous errors to him and him alone, though that assessment could change over time as more information about the book's writing process is disclosed to the public.

EDIT: Anthony Fauci- the man himself- has written a new piece for The Atlantic, "The First Three Months," in which he writes about the initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic from the government and medical institutions, as well as his experience on briefing the public on COVID-19 during the pandemic's early stages. I highly recommend reading it if you want to know more about the pandemic and how people responded to it, which you can do here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/07/anthony-fauci-covid-trump-white-house-response/678491/. I'd also recommend the pandemic-focused Summer 2022 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, which you can read at https://pandemic.cjr.org.

Lukianoff's claim:

My observations:

Intro

COVID death statistics among youth

"By the end of 2020 there had been only 199 deaths from Covid-19 among American children (0-17 years old)[7], and 70 percent of Covid-related deaths among those under 25 years old involved a pre-existing condition[8]... [Policy makers emphasized] the small risk to children's health from Covid... Shuttering children inside, gluing their eyes to Zoom screens, and robbing them of social contact were the policy response to a disease that killed less than one-third the number of American children in 2020 as pneumonia did that year."

Both of these footnotes refer to the same source, the CDC's provisional counts for COVID-19, and are specifically dated to March 8, 2023. The website currently displays an archived version of the data from September 27, 2023, several months later, but that shouldn't be a problem for our purposes, since Lukianoff only uses data from the year 2020. Looking at it, we can see that the total number of deaths involving COVID-19 during 2020 for those in the age group "0-17 years" is 199, while the total number of deaths involving pneumonia during 2020 for the same age group is 629. However, Lukianoff fails to take into account the fact that school closures were widespread across the United States at this time, with 77% of public schools and 73% of private schools shifting to virtual learning, in whole or in part, in early 2020. This change would have the effect of reducing the infection rate, and therefore, the mortality rate, of COVID-19 among children aged 0 to 17 during this timeframe. In short, Lukianoff's analysis suffers from the lack of a control group (i.e. data collected from schools that remained open throughout 2020).

"How Covid Cancel Culture Undermined Faith in Expertise"

The "Noble Lie"

"We had been told by government officials that you shouldn't wear masks because they wouldn't keep you from getting sick[, but also] because they needed to be reserved for medical responders... If masks couldn't keep civilians from getting sick, then why would they protect frontline medical workers? Official policy... remained a confusing morass of sometimes self-contradictory advice. The face-mask bait and switch right at the beginning of a pandemic was the most harmful kind of misstep. It wasn't a mistake. It was a 'noble lie,' in which authorities were apparently trying to convince people to do the right thing (save masks for frontline medical workers) by lying to them rather than explaining their rationale."

Would you be surprised to learn that this entire section includes not so much as one footnote? There are bold, but also verifiable, claims being made here, and the authors did not even attempt to back them up with anything other than mere speculation. For the record, I was able to find an article from Scientific American criticizing the WHO's "contradictory messaging" during the pandemic, and which also clearly states that the WHO wanted to prevent the hoarding of face masks in order to save them for the people who needed them most: medical personnel dealing with COVID-19 cases. The problem here is that Lukianoff presents this information in an overtly conspiratorial manner, omitting this key detail- one which gives important context as to the WHO's actions- and thereby fostering a distrust of medical institutions overall where none is warranted.

Tom Jefferson study

"By 2023, the most comprehensive study of its kind about mask mandate efficacy would find, in the words of its author Tom Jefferson, that 'there is no evidence that they make any difference. Full stop.'[12]"

I was skeptical of this claim, so I decided to follow the footnote to see the original study for myself. However, this footnote doesn't reference the original study, but rather, an article about this study which was published in City Journal, a conservative magazine. The actual study reads as follows (emphasis mine): "The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions. There were additional RCTs [randomized controlled trials] during the pandemic related to physical interventions but a relative paucity given the importance of the question of masking and its relative effectiveness... There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks."

New York Times article on Sen. Tom Cotton

"The New York Times even called out Cotton [for promoting the lab leak theory] in February 2020 with the headline 'Senator Tom Cotton Repeats Fringe Theory of Coronavirus Origins.'[17]"

Except this was from February 2020, when Lukianoff's evidence giving credence to the lab leak theory didn't even exist yet, as the earliest report he cites on the subject came from 2021. Cotton was repeating this theory with little to no evidence backing him up at the time, so why are you acting shocked that people didn't believe him?

Great Barrington Declaration signatories

"The Great Barrington Declaration has since amassed nearly a million signatures from those who viewed it as a sensible approach to lockdown policy."

According to the Great Barrington Declaration's official website, the declaration has received over 900,000 signatures, including 16,000 from "Medical and Public Health Scientists," 47,000 from "Medical practitioners," and 876,000 from "Concerned Citizens". The website does not list the names of signatories to the declaration publicly, but secondhand reporting has revealed the presence of clearly-fake names that have been added to the list, such as "Dr. Johnny Bananas," "Dr. I. P. Freely," and even "Dr. Person Fakename". Looking at the form to sign the declaration, you'll find that one must include their name, postal code, email address, and consent to privacy policy, as well as a checkmark indicating whether they are signing as a "Concerned Citizen," "Medical and Public Health Scientists (sic)," or "Medical practitioner". However, the form lacks any feature that would help certify signatories' identities and stated credentials, and there doesn't seem to be a limit on how many times the form can be signed by the same user, rendering the official number of signatories incredibly suspect. Bhattacharya himself even commented on how the presence of fake names as signatories to the declaration has degraded pubic trust in himself and his colleagues, though he nevertheless cites the "volume of correspondence" received by medical professionals as proof of their support.

The definition of "fringe"

"In an email to Dr. Anthony Fauci, [Dr. Francis] Collins responded to the declaration by describing Bhattacharya and his co-authors as a group of 'fringe epidemiologists'[, even though they came from] Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford.[27]"

Earlier in this same section, Lukianoff cites the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for its definition of the word "epistemology," so I have decided to follow suit. According to the third edition of the OED, one of the definitions for "fringe" is "irrelevant matter" or "an outer edge or margin of any kind, material or immaterial"; this definition remains unchanged from the first edition. Most of the modern examples cited in this definition are referring to heterodox beliefs and the people who hold them, regardless of their level of education or expertise in their respective fields. The way that Collins is using the word "fringe," then, seems perfectly in line with the definition provided by the OED.

Conclusion

Alleged groupthink in the medical world

"If experts are all compelled to think the same way and say the same things, how can we trust them to tell us the truth?"

Because that's not what happened. What happened was that there was an initial failure of communication between medical institutions when it came to dealing with the ongoing pandemic, which led to bad-faith actors using the opportunity to spread disinformation and sow doubt in the scientific consensus around COVID-19.

Who is at fault here?

"The antidote to an epistemic crisis... means not canceling the dissenters who challenge the prevailing tides."

Lukianoff defines cancel culture as "campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is- or would be- protected by First Amendment standards and the climate of fear and conformity that [comes about as a result of these campaigns]". While some of the examples that Lukianoff cites, like the online harassment targeted at Jennifer Sey and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, clearly fit this definition, Lukianoff frames the scientists and the medical experts as the ones who were encouraging this harassment, even though there's absolutely nothing to indicate that this was the case.

Final observations

Before I get into my broader criticisms, I just want to say that I have nothing against Greg Lukianoff personally; based on everything I've read about him, he seems to be genuinely dedicated to protecting free speech as a civic virtue and promoting a "free speech culture" so as to encourage thoughtful, nuanced debate between adherents of opposing viewpoints, without the conversation devolving into a shouting match or flame war, and I think most people would agree that that's something worth advocating for. Furthermore, I would argue that the work of FIRE and similar groups is more relevant now than ever, given today's increasingly polarized political climate. For this reason, I feel that Lukianoff and other members of FIRE have a responsibility to their audience of communicating their message clearly and without distorting the facts, so that the public can be better informed on FIRE's mission and goals.

Regrettably, as seen in the above examples, this section of Lukianoff's book falls short of that standard: not only does it misrepresent the material it's discussing, but it also grossly mischaracterizes, and at times, even demonizes, the response of the medical establishment towards alternative COVID-19 theories, conflating legitimate criticism of Bhattacharya and others by experienced medical professionals with Internet-based harassment by anonymous users. Lukianoff's behavior here is not only disingenuous, in that it smuggles in conspiratorial COVID-19 speculation to gullible readers, but it also goes against the book's core message about the importance of protecting free speech. The doctors who criticized Bhattacharya have just as much of a right to their opinion as Bhattacharya did for his opinion, and one could even argue that Bhattacharya made more of an effort to promote his own views surrounding COVID-19 to the masses than the doctors did, though that's a conversation for another time. What's clear is that Lukianoff had a personal agenda in mind while writing this book- one that was sympathetic to Bhattacharya and other like-minded individuals- and he wasn't above weaseling some of that agenda into his book under the guise of encouraging a broader diversity of opinions within American public discourse. I expect better from him, and you should, too.