It's high time we cancel "cancel culture"
Due process, free speech, and other Enlightenment values look increasingly old-fashioned but are more important than ever.
It will surprise no one who has been paying attention that I am anti-cancel culture. But the problem with taking this stance, while not also being a raging right winger, is that I all too often find that my ostensible allies in this struggle are of the “enemy of my enemy” variety, an odious sort I’d rather not associate myself with. Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, Marjorie Taylor-Greene. Worst of all, of course, is Donald Trump. As USA Today pointed out, Trump is a giant hypocrite on this issue (as he is with most issues, other than the ones where he’s just an incoherent clown).
This is all very frustrating, because I can see plainly that this kind of woke policing of speech is a real thing, and something that old school liberals like myself ought to stand strongly against. So it’s extremely refreshing when a Pulitzer Prize-winning member of the MSM confirms that, yes: it’s real, and it’s a serious problem. Anne Applebaum has written an excellent piece on the topic in the Atlantic, and everyone should read it in full. But here are some particularly choice excerpts to whet your appetite:
Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago. Some have made egregious errors of judgment. Some have done nothing at all. It is not always easy to tell.
[U]niversities, newspapers, foundations, [and] museums…sometimes impose the equivalent of lifetime scarlet letters on people who have not been accused of anything remotely resembling a crime. Instead of courts, they use secretive bureaucracies. Instead of hearing evidence and witnesses, they make judgments behind closed doors.[…]
There are currently no laws that shape what academics or journalists can say; there is no government censor, no ruling-party censor. But fear of the internet mob, the office mob, or the peer-group mob is producing some similar outcomes.
Applebaum cites many specific examples, but this one turns my stomach the most:
After Daniel Elder, a prizewinning composer (and a political liberal) posted a statement on Instagram condemning arson in his hometown of Nashville, where Black Lives Matter protesters had set the courthouse on fire after the killing of George Floyd, he discovered that his publisher would not print his music and choirs would not sing it…Elder’s music publishers asked him to make a groveling apology—they even went so far as to write it for him—but he refused.
Good for him! The idea that he should have to apologize for condemning arson, I mean…what are we doing?!?
Applebaum notes that my favorite philosopher, John Stuart Mill, was on the case more than 150 years ago:
Much of his most famous book, On Liberty, is dedicated not to governmental restraints on human liberty but to the threat posed by social conformism, by “the demand that all other people shall resemble ourselves.”
She also identifies another insidious dynamic that is often at play:
At least two of the people I interviewed believe that they were punished because a white, male boss felt he had to publicly sacrifice another white man in order to protect his own position.
More broadly, I believe this is why in many cases white liberals are the most stridently woke (significantly more so than Black Democrats):
Some of it is basic white liberal guilt, of course; but I think for people at the executive level of institutions especially, they are desperately afraid that if they, as a white person (especially as a straight white man) do not bend over backward to take aggressive action against anyone with a whiff of a politically incorrect “scandal” about them, it won’t be long before the fingers are pointed at them—and their demographic identity will make it impossible for them to defend a moderate, reasonable “let’s get the facts and preserve due process” stance.
We have seen collective hysterias in the modern world before that constantly upped the ante, looking ever-harder for the most minute offenses to punish. The signal examples of this kind of mass moral panic are the high phase of the French Revolution, known as “The Terror”, and the Cultural Revolution in China in the mid-twentieth century. In both cases, there came a point where people seemed to collectively realize that they had descended into madness, and suddenly snapped out of it.
Applebaum was also a signatory to the excellent “Harper’s letter” of summer 2020, along with such luminaries as Margaret Atwood, Michelle Goldberg, Gloria Steinem, Fareed Zakaria, and even a few hardcore left wingers like Zephyr Teachout, Noam Chomsky, and Cornel West. Let’s hope these are encouraging signs the fever is about to break, and not just too-little-too-late shrieks into the void. Otherwise, Applebaum warns,
we will become a flatter, duller, less interesting society, a place where manuscripts sit in drawers for fear of arbitrary judgments. The arts, the humanities, and the media will become stiff, predictable, and mediocre. Democratic principles like the rule of law, the right to self-defense, the right to a just trial—even the right to be forgiven—will wither.