Just disagreeing with today’s list
Ross Douthat on cancel culture:
All cultures cancel; the question is for what, how widely and through what means.
There is no human society where you can say or do anything you like and expect to keep your reputation and your job. Reputational cancellation hung over the heads of Edith Wharton’s heroines; professional cancellation shadowed 20th-century figures like Lenny Bruce. Today, almost all critics of cancel culture have some line they draw, some figure — usually a racist or anti-Semite — that they would cancel, too. And social conservatives who criticize cancel culture, especially, have to acknowledge that we’re partly just disagreeing with today’s list of cancellation-worthy sins.
This is what I keep saying. (It surprises me to agree with Douthat, but there you go.) It’s not a matter of Absolute Freedom but of the particulars. I think Trump should be canceled, for a start. I don’t think Twitter should have banned Meghan Murphy.
Cancellation isn’t exactly about free speech, but a liberal society should theoretically cancel less frequently than its rivals.
The canceled individual hasn’t lost any First Amendment rights, because there is no constitutional right to a particular job or reputation. At the same time, under its own self-understanding, liberalism is supposed to clear a wider space for debate than other political systems and allow a wider range of personal expression. So you would expect a liberal society to be slower to cancel, more inclined to separate the personal and the professional (or the ideological and the artistic), and quicker to offer opportunities to regain one’s reputation and start one’s professional life anew.
Then of course we also think illiberal societies should become more liberal in that way. We don’t think China should be shutting down all criticism and rebellion in Hong Kong; we don’t think Putin should have his critics thrown out of windows; we don’t think Mohammed bin Salman should have had Jamal Khashoggi chopped into pieces.
Cancel culture is most effective against people who are still rising in their fields, and it influences many people who don’t actually get canceled.
The point of cancellation is ultimately to establish norms for the majority, not to bring the stars back down to earth. So a climate of cancellation can succeed in changing the way people talk and argue and behave even if it doesn’t succeed in destroying the careers of some of the famous people that it targets. You don’t need to cancel Rowling if you can cancel the lesser-known novelist who takes her side; you don’t have to take down the famous academics who signed last week’s Harper’s Magazine letter attacking cancel culture if you can discourage people half their age from saying what they think. The goal isn’t to punish everyone, or even very many someones; it’s to shame or scare just enough people to make the rest conform.
And it works. It works like a bastard. We know this from all the many many reports by the unsilenced TERFs of countless closet TERFs who thank the unsilenced and wish they could join them but can’t if they want to keep their jobs or chances of promotion or friends. That’s cancel culture working.
H/t Sackbut among others
Shunning is used as a punishment by religions and cults. This is the new religions of Wokeness and Transgenderism trying to shun the vast majority of people into compliance with their demands. Problem for them is that non-believers can and will reach a point where they decide that being told to bow to the dogma of some faith is just not going to happen and sometimes they do so peacefully and sometimes not so peacefully.
Way back in the mists of time not long after the dinosaurs died I was taught about a group of people who tried to impose their way of thinking onto the general populace and, in parallel with todays wokesters and trans activists, cried persecution when their demands went unheeded. Eventually this group of outliers found a solution whereby they could ensure that everybody around them danced to their tune, and it’s one that I dearly wish todays would-be thought controllers might consider taking.
The group I learnt about in school named their ship The Mayflower. I’m sure there are still some uninhabited places for a Mayflower II to head for.
I’ve been thinking about it… If Monica Lewinsky was Patient Zero, Gamergate was Wuhan (maybe Italy, take your pick), we’re now smack dab in the middle of social media cancel culture.
Honorable mention goes to Kaepernick… It’s not just a liberal thing, but since conservatives enjoy access to the levers of state power the first amendment restrains them.
The more worrying aspects are viral amplification and arbitrariness. It’s easy to feel as though we’re in a panopticon. In fact it’s worse than a panopticon because anything we’ve done in the past can arbitrarily become a sin at any time, too so to be safe we don’t just have to refrain from behaving in ways currently considered bad, we have to actively denounce bad behaviour and pre-apologise for whatever we’ve done that might become bad in the future.
We know that it can’t be reliably predicted what will go viral and we know that even well-meaning people can have a devastating effect on individuals who don’t deserve it. When you add in virtue signaling, fear of shunning and good old-fashioned self-righteousness, we have an environment more suited to stifling than to free thought, to put it mildly.
I have been thinking quite a bit about this, and have come to the provisional conclusion that this cancel culture bullshit is entry level totalitarianism. It could be rebadged as Darkness at Noon for Toddlers, or perhaps Darkness at Noon for Toddlers not Named Donald Trump in case Trump gets word of it. None the less, cancel Trump and you cancel the world.
It reminds me of Evgenia Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind about life in Stalin’s Russia. I have been searching page by page through my old index-free copy looking for the exact quote (nothing worthwhile found online) but she says something to the effect that by about 1937, the Stalinist Terror had so permeated Soviet society that people had stopped communicating with friends and neighbours about anything more serious than the weather, lest they let slip something that could land them in trouble. Which happened to Ginzburg who was sent to the Gulag and lost her family in the process. Denouncing heretics and traitors had its reward: it bought the denouncer time out of the gaze of the thought police; at least until the denunciations ran out. Then, often enough, the denouncer was arrested for not reporting something allegedly known to him or her.
TERFS hiding away in closets is the start of a slippery slope that leads Christ knows where; because liberalism is indivisible. If free communication is shut down in one area, the contagion can spread like a fungus from there over time until it becomes the norm. Thus anything subject to such prohibition should be shouted from the rooftops and light up blogs all over the World Wide Web.
As Voltaire is often quoted as having said, “I do not agree with a word you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.” Or as Joni Mitchell famously said: “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”
Proto-totalitarianism should be squashed like a bug, wherever it rears its ugly little head.
I’ve been annoyed at otherwise smart people producing the Gotcha! that big names write about cancel culture and keep their stellar careers. It’s obvious this applies to the smaller fry.
Also “cancel culture” is far too broad – as you say, it’s specific incidents.
It’s very low stakes for the would-be cancellers, who even if they fail, lose nothing. For the institutions they lobby, it’s higher stakes. Firing/refusing to hire the odd employee won’t hurt them that much. They would have to be equally afraid of being stigmatised for their cowardice. For the cancelled, if they’re rising in their careers, it could be a disaster. So why risk it?
Re Voltaire: I think someone else already posted a link to this essay, but it’s relevant. The author, Mary Leng, posits a “Reverse Voltaire” move: “I agree completely with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death to prevent you from saying it.”
She talks about people who, if pressed, actually agree with statements they’ve denounced as hateful.
https://medium.com/@mary.leng/harry-potter-and-the-reverse-voltaire-4c7f3a07241
Douthat is curiously willing to come out and say that it’s all about power. Which is a scary reminder that nice, mild-mannered, Ross Douthat would cheerily toss all of us in prison or worse if his fellow theocrats were able to seize power, on no better grounds than “because we can.”
Many U.S. states had it written into their constitutions (some I think still do, though the provisions are considered unenforceable) that atheists were ineligible for public office. Publicly declaring your atheism was professional and/or social suicide in many times and places. What is that if not “cancel culture”?
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” was considered the reasonable moderate compromise just 30 years ago, but it was a form of cancel culture, too — you can be gay in the military, but you’d better keep your mouth shut about it!
KBPlayer @6:
“I’ve been annoyed at otherwise smart people producing the Gotcha! that big names write about cancel culture and keep their stellar careers. It’s obvious this applies to the smaller fry.”
Point taken in the case where the attack is that the author is a big fish but is defending the rights of small fish. But far too often, the big fish are just defending themselves or their fellow big fish, as in the case of all those lamenting poor, poor Bari Weiss, who just quit a (presumably) six-figure sinecure for which she was grievously unqualified, and is widely suspected to be about to accept a new, well-funded position elsewhere.
I also have a hard time listening to hugely successful comedians like Joe Rogan lament how you supposedly can’t say anything offensive any more, yet about half of the comedy specials on Netflix are titled “Triggered” (I believe that’s one of Rogan’s) or “Cancelled” or some such thing to signify that this “brave” comedian is going to Say The Things You’re Not Allowed to Say. In other words, not only is it not harmful to their careers, it’s actually a marketing tool.
Somewhat tangential to the topic: I have to confess that I have always found that Voltaire quote rather irritating, because it’s often used (though Omar did not do so in his comment upthread) in a pompous way. Whenever I have seen someone tell another person “I disagree…. but will fight to the death…” I usually find myself giggling, because the writer typically does not come off as the sort of person who will really be taking up arms to defend someone else’s contrary opinion. Bonus giggles when the topic under discussion is something really trivial. “DodgerFan253’s right to an opinion on the designated hitter rule is under attack! TO ARMS, my friends, TO ARMS!!!!!!”
However, the Voltaire quote is but a distant second to the #1 pompously reused quote of all time, that being RFK’s “Some people see things that are and ask why; I see things that could be and ask why not?” Yeah, declaring yourself a unique visionary is not at all egotistical….
I’m not familiar with this author, Nicholas Grossman, but this post about free speech and the Harper’s letter articulates some of the thoughts I’ve been having.
Grossman’s point is that there is actually fairly broad agreement that:
He goes on to give some examples of things that were socially acceptable in the past but no longer are, due to social pressure of a type that could be described as cancel culture.
The money quote for me is this:
@Screechy Monkey,
“The definition of inanity is repeating the same quote over and over and expecting it to sound profound.”
–A.* Einstein
*That’s Albert’s younger, forgotten brother Alfred.
Screechy, do you have any reason to believe that Douthat would throw unbelievers “in prison or worse”?
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/opinion/american-theocracy-revisited.html
I can’t agree that it’s *just* the particulars. It’s true we can’t point to a bright clear line between proto-totalitarianism on one side and healthy social intolerance of harmful ideas on the other. But that doesn’t mean we can’t object when we feel the balance tipping too far to one side. (Oops, mixed metaphor. Sorry.)
I’m not sure, but isn’t that a version of the Univariate Fallacy? “The claim that if there is no single, defining trait that can be used to separate two or more categories, then those categories do not exist.”? (Colin Wright).
We can point out that the line is currently being drawn based on unsubstantiated claims and a dubious definition of “harm”. That there’s a big difference between calling some people subhuman and disagreeing with specific claims made by political activists. We can argue for more reason-based arguments and less “Shut up, that’s why” reactions in general.
I thought Albert’s younger brother was called Arfur: same as Arfur Daley.
Lady M – but I didn’t say it’s just the particulars. I said it’s not a matter of Absolute Freedom but of the particulars – which is much the same as saying we can’t point to a bright clear line but that doesn’t mean we can’t object when we feel the balance tipping too far to one side.
O–you’re right. I ass-umed that “just”. Sorry!
I like this point of Douthat’s:
(Emphasis added.)
Lady M,
I’m not going to embark on a detailed research project on the intellectual history of Ross Douthat to justify an aside on a collateral topic. I’ll also stipulate that this is an inference on my part: I doubt that he has been so foolish as to state in writing that he’d like to lock up nonbelievers in his ideal world.
If you want the basis for that inference, well, Douthat is pretty well established as a religious conservative. My impression is that he’d be so delighted at a theocracy, and would justify punishing nonbelievers on the grounds that the state, by creating a strong material incentive to “find” faith, is literally saving the souls of millions.
But the column you link to is a good start. Douthat laments:
In other words, “don’t worry about us religious conservatives, because our leaders keep selling us out.” That’s not terribly comforting, because what happens on that “great gettin’ up day” when a Dear Leader doesn’t sell them out but rather brings about the Republic of Gilead? Pardon me if I’m not impressed that Douthat references some “problematic” tendencies.
If you’d like another concrete example: the favorite Supreme Court Justice of most religious conservatives is Clarence Thomas. Justice Thomas doesn’t believe that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment applies to the states. (This is well-settled under existing Supreme Court precedent, but Thomas doesn’t give a shit about precedent.) In other words, in Thomas’s world, nothing stops the State of Alabama from forming the Official Church of Alabama. See, e.g. Town of Greece v. Galloway, 572 U.S. 565 (2014) (concurring opinion of Thomas, J.). Ask yourself what a court full of Thomases would do to religious freedom.
Anyway, if you think I have grievously wronged Douthat, well, I’ll live with your critique.
Yeah, describing Christian conservatism’s black and white thinking and “apocalyptic enthusiams” as part of “a host” of “legitimately problematic tendencies” is no reason to think the dude wouldn’t throw unbelievers into prison if he had the chance.
Thanks for answering my question.