In a sharp essay in Liberal Currents, Adam Gurri looked at empirical evidence that might tell us how big a crisis academic cancellations really are, and he came away nonplussed. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, for example, documents 426 cases of scholars “targeted for sanction by ideological adversaries” since 2015, a relatively small number given the size of American higher education. “If any other problem in social life was occurring at this frequency and at this scale, we would consider it effectively solved,” writes Gurri.

Yet to many in elite enclaves, the problem feels far bigger than this — so big that it’s tempting to reach for dramatic historical analogies to describe it. The Economist compared today’s progressive cultural vanguard to the state churches of the 1600s. “In Restoration England, Oxford University burned the works of Hobbes and Milton in the great quad next to the Bodleian Library,” it said. “Today academics put trigger warnings on books, alerting students to the dangers of reading them. Young publishers try to get controversial books ‘canceled.’”

This is so histrionic that it suggests the usually sober Economist is in the grips of extremely strong emotions. One of these emotions, I believe, is loss. Many people I know over 40 — maybe 35 — resent new social mores that demand outsized sensitivity to causing harm. It has been jarring to go from an intellectual culture that prizes transgression to one that polices it. The shame of turning into the sort of old person repelled by the sensibilities of the young is a cause of real psychic pain.