"The episode... signaled the repudiation of an honored and admired intellectual archetype – the curmudgeon."

"I'm not a close friend, but, as a book writer and former critic myself, I've encountered [Carlin] Romano over the years, and I'd describe him as something of a throwback to an earlier era, when a crusty, Socratic, erudite style carried with it a certain charm. But that's one of the ways Romano seems no longer to fit in. One critics circle board member, Columbia University professor John McWhorter, an African American, agreed with him on the substance of the anti-racism pledge, but told the website Vulture that Romano's way of expressing his dissent was a bit tone-deaf. He 'was not being a modern person in the way he responded' to the anti-racism pledge, McWhorter said, perhaps referring to Romano’s charge that some of the arguments of the anti-racism pledge were 'absolute nonsense.'"

From "Inside an Elite Cancel Culture Session, Where Leftists Met the Enemy and It Was ... One of Them" by Richard Bernstein (RealClearInvestigations).

I'm most fascinated by the question what it means to be "a modern person" these days. The meaning of "modern" is changing!

I googled the phrase and quickly got to Carl Jung's "Modern Man in Search of a Soul":

[T]he man we call modern, the man who is aware of the immediate present, is by no means the average man. He is rather the man who stands upon a peak, or at the very edge of the world, the abyss of the future before him, above him the heavens, and below him the whole of mankind with a history that disappears in primeval mists. The modern man—or, let us say again, the man of the immediate present—is rarely met with. There are few who live up to the name, for they must be conscious to a superlative degree. Since to be wholly of the present means to be fully conscious of one's existence as a man, it requires the most intensive and extensive consciousness, with a minimum of unconsciousness. It must be clearly understood that the mere fact of living in the present does not make a man modern, for in that case everyone at present alive would be so. He alone is modern who is fully conscious of the present.

The man whom we can with justice call "modern" is solitary. He is so of necessity and at all times, for every step towards a fuller consciousness of the present removes him further from his original "participation mystique" with the mass of men—from submersion in a common unconsciousness. Every step forward means an act of tearing himself loose from that all-embracing, pristine unconsciousness which claims the bulk of mankind almost entirely. Even in our civilizations the people who form, psychologically speaking, the lowest stratum, live almost as unconsciously as primitive races. Those of the succeeding stratum manifest a level of consciousness which corresponds to the beginnings of human culture, while those of the highest stratum have a consciousness capable of keeping step with the life of the last few centuries. Only the man who is modern in our meaning of the term really lives in the present; he alone has a present-day consciousness, and he alone finds that the ways of life which correspond to earlier levels pall upon him. The values and strivings of those past worlds no longer interest him save from the historical standpoint. Thus he has become "unhistorical" in the deepest sense and has estranged himself from the mass of men who live entirely within the bounds of tradition. Indeed, he is completely modern only when he has come to the very edge of the world, leaving behind him all that has been discarded and outgrown, and acknowledging that he stands before a void out of which all things may grow.

These words may be thought to be but empty sound, and their meaning reduced to mere banality. Nothing is easier than to affect a consciousness of the present. As a matter of fact, a great horde of worthless people give themselves the air of being modern by overleaping the various stages of development and the tasks of life they represent.

ADDED: Here is the Vulture article with the McWhorter quote, "The National Book Critics Circle Has Imploded" (June 16, 2020):

A week ago, as protesters rallied around the world against systemic racism and police brutality, 12 board members of the National Book Critics Circle, an organization of some 800 critics that gives out a number of annual awards, began to draft a statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Noting that the publishing industry has long been overwhelmingly white from top to bottom, they wrote of their “culpability in this system of erasure” of black and indigenous voices from the cultural conversation and outlined a series of steps that their organization could take to support critics of color and amplify their voices, such as expanding the organization’s mentorship program and establishing a diversity committee. Just 30 percent of last year’s winners and finalists were writers of color, they wrote: “We can and must do better.”...

Just as the group was about to share the statement with the world, their organization began to fracture and then implode.... Over the past several days, more than half of the National Book Critics Circle’s 24 board members, which had included six people of color, have resigned in a flurry of recriminations over racism, privacy concerns, and political correctness.....

One board member, Carlin Romano, said he disagreed with some of the claims in the letter but didn’t want to “distract the great majority of the Board from its mission.” Nevertheless, he went on to detail his objections to a number of those claims, dismissing the statement’s fundamental premise as “absolute nonsense.”...

When Hope Wabuke, a Ugandan-American author who had suggested writing the statement in the first place, read this exchange between Romano and Hertzel, she was outraged.... A wave of resignations followed, which in turn unleashed a second wave, and a third....

Romano, who once made headlines for writing a review in which he imagined raping the author of the book, has intermittently sat on the board since the mid-’90s. According to nearly a dozen current and former members, he has developed a reputation in the organization as a bully. ...

Over the weekend, as the board continued to disintegrate, some members hoped they could salvage the situation by removing Romano....

Each of the black board members who stepped down did so for different reasons. John McWhorter, an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, stressed that he did not support Wabuke. Like Romano, he disputed the idea that the publishing industry is plagued by racism. “The way he said it was an unideal,” McWhorter said. “He was not being a modern person in the way he responded.” Still, McWhorter added, “all racial disparities are not due to bigotry or even structural barriers.”

He left, he said, because he felt like he no longer fit into the culture of the board. “There’s an idea that we’re supposed to subscribe to these days. That to disagree with a black person’s views about something having to do with race is racist,” he told me. “I don’t subscribe to that.”