As far as I can tell, there are three aspects of cancel culture of concern to the old left:
1. They recall when cancel culture was used against the left.
2. They worry that it diverts attention from achieving socialist aims, and indeed makes it more difficult to do so.
3. They believe the younger generation is too soft.
The first point is obvious. Free speech has traditionally been a liberal idea. Those of my generation will recall the Berkeley free speech movement, and those a bit older will recall the Joe McCarthy era.
The second point is less obvious. Here’s Freddie deBoer expressing frustration with defenders of cancel culture:
[C]anceling is so powerless that Bacharach feels no compulsion to discuss it in terms of power. He literally does not discuss the efficacy of canceling. I scrolled down past the bottom thinking I had missed something. He is interested in undermining canceling’s critics, but he spends no time considering the actual material value of the tactic. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: canceling is a political tactic that is most often defended with reference to its powerlessness, and this is bizarre. Bacharach defines the negative consequences of canceling as “getting nitpicked by an editor, yelled at on social media, or losing an occasional opportunity to rile up an auditorium.” Jacob: if that’s the extent of canceling’s power, why are you bothering to defend it in one of the biggest magazines in the country? “I’m defending this method to hurt political enemies by pointing out that it doesn’t actually hurt” is not compelling. On the contrary, it demonstrates just how unhealthy and bizarre our political culture has become. . . .
There is indeed a conversation to be had about canceling on the individual level and whether people deserve basic fairness when accused, what kind of fairness if so, and debates to be had about who deserved it and who didn’t. But those have nothing at all to do with politics. Politics is about power. Cancel mobs don’t have it, and they never will.
You wanted reparations; you got Dr. Seuss. Maybe time to take a hard look at why.
Many people who are on the right on economic issues (including me) are frustrated that corporations have enthusiastically embraced cancel culture. But why shouldn’t they? Cancel culture is a distraction for the left. It has almost no impact on profits, whereas socialism would have a big impact. Actual socialists like deBoer understand this, and not surprisingly are frustrated.
There’s also a reverse class warfare aspect to cancel culture. In a Bari Weiss piece discussing the woke transformation of elite private schools, she mentions how woke culture is a tool for cool rich kids to bully less sophisticated kids:
Woe betide the working-class kid who arrives in college and uses Latino instead of “Latinx,” or who stumbles conjugating verbs because a classmate prefers to use the pronouns they/them. Fluency in woke is an effective class marker and key for these princelings to retain status in university and beyond. The parents know this, and so woke is now the lingua franca of the nation’s best prep schools. As one mother in Los Angeles puts it: “This is what all the colleges are doing, so we have to do it. The thinking is: if Harvard does it, it must be good.”
I cannot prove that old leftists believe the younger generation is too soft, but reading between the lines I suspect this is the case. In my view, modern cancel culture excesses often rely on a misapplication of utilitarian theory.
Older cancel cultures focused on “dangerous” ideas, such as atheism or communism. As the modern world has shifted in a more utilitarian direction, there is less interest in burning people at the stake for being atheists. Instead, the focus has shifted from dangerous speech to “offensive speech”. Utilitarians worry that if we allow lots of offensive speech, it will reduce the utility of victimized groups. While this claim seems plausible at first glance, I believe it’s too simple.
Let me use an analogy from camping. If you are used to a soft life, then camping can initially feel rather unpleasant. A stick might scratch your arm while you are walking through the woods. After a few days you get toughened up, and slight injuries that used to bother you in the city are hardly even noticeable.
Before you jump all over this analogy, let me make two points. First, one can also get serious injuries in the wild, such as a broken leg. Indeed some campers die while out hiking. I do realize that members of marginalized groups can be severely harmed by certain types of speech. Second, just because being scratched by a branch tends to toughen one up, there’s no point in doing so intentionally. Life will already throw plenty of discomfort your way, no need to go looking for it.
So the cancel culture is not completely wrong; there really are some types of behavior that deserve to be cancelled. Rather the actual problem is that cancel culture advocates often overlook the fact that vigorous debate makes people tougher, and that if you try to protect people from ever being offended, they’ll become softer and then will end up being offended by things that a person in a previous generation would have simply brushed off. Cancel culture advocates believe they are reducing the aggregate discomfort suffered by marginalized groups, and yet we may be approaching the point where the movement becomes counterproductive, at least the margin. And that can be true even if most recent cultural changes discouraging hate speech have been a net gain to society.
I don’t doubt that behavior toward marginalized groups is better today than a few decades ago, but I feel we reached a sort of hedonic treadmill, where increasing wokeness reduces offensive speech at roughly the same rate that it reduces our psychological defenses against insult. We are like a camper being too careful when walking through the woods. For instance, does anyone seriously believe that constantly changing terms (say cripple to handicapped to disabled) affects the psychology of the disabled person who hears those terms? Does a heavy person called obese in 2021 feel less bad than one called fat in 1971? In the 1970s, we learned that inflation only fools workers in the short run. The continual invention of euphemisms is sort of the verbal inflation of politeness. It is equivalent to manipulating the Phillips Curve, and is about as likely to be effective. In contrast, “fat-shaming” is always bad, whether you use the term ‘fat’ or the term ‘obese’.
The old left grew up in a different era and hence probably see the younger generation as being too soft—just as my parents’ generation felt that us boomers were too soft. But they also worry that cancel culture will push blue-collar whites, as well as many Asians and Hispanics, into the Republican Party. This is sort of the flip side of the worry within the GOP that Trumpism will push well-educated suburbanites over to the Democrats. If both changes occur, then no single party has much of a constituency for socialism. The old left probably senses that fact. (BTW, the right has its own cancel culture.)
My own views are hard to explain. I don’t have any magic formula for determining exactly what should be cancelled and what should not. But I do believe that a few sensible reforms would improve the situation. Thus universities could have a board with 10 members, of which at least 3 were liberal and at least 3 were conservative. Then, before sanctioning anyone for offensive speech, demand a vote of at least 9-1 in favor of sanctions. That would insure that the speech really was offensive, and that the person wasn’t just being sanctioned for political reasons. It’s an example of my preference for “rules utilitarianism.”
PS. If there are any universities that do not have at least three liberals and three conservatives, then cancel the entire university. Shut it down.
READER COMMENTS
Jonathan S
Mar 10 2021 at 3:13pm
“If there are any universities that do not have at least three liberals and three conservatives, then cancel the entire university. Shut it down.”
What about a university that is explicit in its bias, say Hillsdale or BYU?
Scott Sumner
Mar 10 2021 at 4:09pm
Well, I suppose I was saying it’s not a good idea to have a university with this sort of bias. I don’t expect them to seriously take my advice and shutdown. In any case, I suspect you could find at least 3 liberals and 3 conservatives at even that sort of university.
robc
Mar 11 2021 at 8:56am
I bet at least 3 Hillsdale profs identify as classical liberals. So that is covered.
zeke5123
Mar 10 2021 at 4:22pm
Is it possible that the Old Left values free speech due to epistemological humility? That is, free speech is valuable because what the majority believes to be true may not be true. Free speech allows for non-majority views to survive and maybe one of those non-majority views is actually true. After all, almost everything we believe now was once a non-majority view; why would we believe that our generation is different (i.e., we finally have all of the right views).
Scott Sumner
Mar 10 2021 at 5:24pm
Probably with some people on the left. But humility isn’t very common in any ideological camp.
Alan Goldhammer
Mar 10 2021 at 5:19pm
I was born on the cusp of the ‘old left’ and remember my mother going on during the Army/McCarthy hearings (we had just purchased our first TV and that was one of the first things on). What you say resonates with me. This whole business about ‘triggers’ is getting to be too much. The NY Times (a paper you have disdain for) had a great story on an incident at Smith College that was a classic example of this and two employees at the school had their reputations damaged as a result of administration policies that had no bearing in reality.
The Yanoppolous incident at Berkeley a couple of years ago was equally stupid. Let the guy speak and make a total fool of himself. If students can’t tell fact from fiction and rely on ‘cancel culture’ and ‘wokeness’ to do the job for them they probably should not be in college but should be working some minimum wage job to get over things. Similarly, the way Charles Murray has been treated over the past half dozen years is stupid. I don’t agree with all of his writings on IQ but he is on the mark in other areas.
We were not afraid to discuss things back when I was in college. It’s a shame that students of today are.
Scott Sumner
Mar 10 2021 at 5:23pm
You said:
“The NY Times (a paper you have disdain for) had a great story . . .”
Just to be clear, I agree that the NYT has some “great stories”. My disdain is for their excessive acceptance of cancel culture. I recall 3 recent firings over trivial issues. Obviously they have some fine reporters.
Lizard Man
Mar 11 2021 at 9:29pm
For the moment they still have some fine reporters. It is difficult to believe that reporters who are good enough to write their own ticket will want to stay there, as opposed to papers who don’t fire Pulitzer Prize nominees for no good reason.
nobody.really
Mar 15 2021 at 12:42pm
As KevinDC notes, The Coddling of the American Mind documents the argument that the younger generation of Americans seem to lack psychological resilience. Author Jonathan Haidt (who also wrote The Righteous Mind) makes a comparison not to camping, but to peanut allergies. In the past, we let kids eat peanuts everywhere, and this could pose hardships–occasionally lethal hardships–to kids with peanut allergies. So we’ve adopted policies to reduce peanut exposure. As a result, incidence of peanut allergies have INCREASED; through well-intended policies, Haidt argues, we’ve made the problem worse.
Frank
Mar 10 2021 at 5:38pm
Wokeness and associated cancellation are not centrally directed, just as McCarthyism was not. No government forced Hollywood to make blacklists, and today no government forces Dr. Seuss’ heirs to cancel Dr. Seuss. It is true in both cases that the firms have less to lose blowing in the wind than not.
It is now as then, some mass psychological phenomenon. It, too, shall pass.
Lizard Man
Mar 11 2021 at 9:30pm
I am not sure that it will pass. Anti-semitism has lasted for a very long time, just to give an example.
KevinDC
Mar 10 2021 at 8:09pm
I think this is true. Nassim Taleb talks of three different concepts – fragile, resilient, and antifragile. Fragile things are like wine glasses – easily broken if dropped. A plastic cup would be resilient – if dropped, it just bounces and takes no real damage. But other things are antifragile – they need to be stressed to become strong, and they become weak if protected from stress. Bones, muscles, and the immune system are antifragile. If you raised someone from birth in a zero gravity environment while in a sterile bubble free of germs to protect them from all physical strains, you wouldn’t make them stronger. You’d create the weakest and most fragile person possible. In the same way, humans are also emotionally and psychologically antifragile. Keeping people in a state where you try to eliminate all tension, discord, and conflict doesn’t make society more harmonious. You just create people with no social immune system who collapse under the slightest strain, the same way a person who is protected from all germs will fall into severe sickness if exposed to the common cold.
I think there’s a social element to it as well – to what degree is taking offense encouraged or discouraged? An interesting comment from a YouTuber I rather enjoy came to mind, when he described how those dynamics played out in his schooling:
zeke5123
Mar 11 2021 at 9:36am
You wonder if the rates of depression and anxiety in the first world (not seen in the third world) is because society has removed necessary stressors?
KevinDC
Mar 11 2021 at 10:12am
I’ve seen arguments to that effect – much of it is summarized by in the book The Coddling of the American Mind. I find the case plausible, but I’m obviously no expert on that topic so my opinion is moderated with a large sprinkling of salt there.
Phil H
Mar 10 2021 at 8:18pm
I know you won’t believe me, but just a reminder that cancel culture is not a real thing. It’s just a label slapped on many different events by anyone who happens to disagree with them. When I was a teenager, the equivalent was “political correctness gone mad!” The words themselves don’t have any meaning, it’s just an expression of general I-don’t-understand-the-yoof-things-were-much-better-in-my-day.
None of this matters much, but don’t waste your time trying to analyse something that isn’t a coherent concept.
Scott Sumner
Mar 10 2021 at 9:27pm
I know you won’t believe me, but shoes aren’t a real thing. There are slippers, sneakers, sandals, ski boots, moccasins, wooden clogs, stockings, and many other foot coverings. Who is to say what a “shoe” is?
I understand that some people aren’t able to see cancel culture, just as some people don’t see structural racism. I am one of those who can see both.
Phil H
Mar 10 2021 at 11:24pm
Sure. It’s a reasonable response. The difference the two things is that one is an eternal theme; the other is historically situated in our specific context.
I didn’t offer an argument, so this is not an attempt to persuade anyone who has already developed an opinion. Just a note to any casual reader who has never seen it said before: Consider the possibility that this bogeyman you’ve heard so much about literally doesn’t exist. Next time someone points to something and say, “that’s cancel culture,” ask yourself if it’s really the same thing as the other examples you’ve seen.
Mark Z
Mar 11 2021 at 11:06am
I’m going to try to make what you’re saying into a coherent point just to respond to it. Maybe what you’re trying to say is: people being fired for nonsensical political reasons (or books being banned or what have you for nonsensical political reasons) is a timeless thing, not a new phenomenon, and may not even be any worse today than in previous eras, it’s just more reported on today than preious eras. You of course seems to see people’s objection to book-bannings and blacklisting as ‘the problem’ that is timeless, but I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree there.
Even if that were true (it’s difficult to quantify whether ‘cancellation’ has increased or not), its relevance is limited. Police shootings have gone down, not up, in recent years. All of our newfound ire over police shootings (specifically of black people) is also a product of increases in reporting of such events, not actual changes in reality. But someone can just as easily say, “it’s not that we’re too concerned about it now; rather, we weren’t concerned enough about it 20 years ago.” The original McCarthyism actually provides a nice example as well. I imagine a right wing Phil H in 1954 might just as well have said, “these communists complaining about their ‘mistreatment’ is nothing new, it’s just that for some reason people care more now; we all shrugged our shoulders at the Palmer raids 30 years ago, why shouldn’t shrug our shoulders at this?” Or maybe the mistake was that people should’ve been as outraged by the Palmer raids as they were at McCarthyism.
J Mann
Mar 11 2021 at 11:37am
I don’t think that’s likely. It looks to me that there is an increasing trend that (1) individuals will try to get others disciplined, fired, deplatformed, etc. for expressing opinions that offend them and that (2) the range of offensive opinions is shifting and increasing, and in many cases now includes opinions held by the majority.
I’d be interested in evidence to the contrary, of course, but I’m not sure of the value of asking if something “is really the same thing.” If one guy gets fired for criticizing Israel and another gets fired for sharing a study arguing that non-violent protest is more effective than violent protest, can’t I believe both are wrong?
If they’re different, it may be the case that one class of “cancellation” is increasing and another is not, and if so, that would be interesting to learn, but wouldn’t invalidate the concern, IMHO.
Scott Sumner
Mar 11 2021 at 1:13pm
I personally know people who have been damaged by cancel culture, so obviously I’m not going to be persuaded by your claims that it doesn’t exist.
zeke5123
Mar 11 2021 at 9:38am
Cancel culture doesn’t exist, and you totally deserved getting cancelled you bigot…
At this point, stating cancel culture doesn’t exist ignores the mountain of evidence.
Scott Sumner
Mar 11 2021 at 1:14pm
That’s why it’s weird that people deny the existence of cancel culture. The people doing the cancelling (on both the left and the right) don’t even try to hide the fact that they are trying to cancel people.
KevinDC
Mar 11 2021 at 9:58am
To claim that “cancel culture” is a label assigned to dissimilar events by those who oppose what happened in those events is just false. In point of fact, the term “cancel culture” is a term embraced by people who engage in those practices, which is why you can easily find articles like this where the author not only defines cancel culture in a way that’s immediately recognizable to cancel culture’s critics, but argues that cancel culture is actually a good thing. I disagree with her case, but if what you said was true, then she wouldn’t be able to offer a clear definition of cancel culture, shared by cancel cultures critics, identify specific instances of cancelling which are also shared by critics of cancel culture, and argue in favor of why such cancellations are good. But she’s able to do so precisely because the term is clearly defined – or as clearly defined as any term about social phenomenon can be. Like all social terms, the boundaries are fuzzy and there will be odd edge cases that people can disagree about in good faith. But to suggest that it’s just a haphazardly applied label with no unifying theme other than personal opposition simply isn’t true.
This makes a testable prediction – if your analysis of things was true, then we should expect to see concern for cancel culture especially concentrated among the older generation and barely present among the youth. (Or “yoof,” if you prefer.) And that’s also false – there is only a slight difference of opinion on cancel culture between age groups. In a recent YouGov survey, in the 18-29 age group, 80% believe cancel culture is real and a problem (18% say it’s a very big problem, 31% says it’s a somewhat big problem, and 30% say its a small problem), while only 20% believe it’s not a problem. (Presumably that 20% includes both people who think its not real, such as yourself, and people like the aforementioned Vice author who believe it’s real, but good.) In the 45-64 age group, 90% believe it’s a problem to some degree (34% say it’s a very big problem, 24% say it’s a somewhat big problem, 33% says it’s a small problem) and 10% believe it’s not a problem. An 80/20 split vs a 90/10 split is something of a difference, and there are some differences between how big the problem is perceived to be, but your description just doesn’t resemble the reality. A large majority of the “yoof” believe cancel culture is real, and is a problem.
Asking myself that, my answer is unequivocally yes. Indeed, I would make a statement stronger than merely asking if examples seem similar to me in retrospect. If someone posts a news story to my Twitter feed with a caption like “Cancel culture at work,” I will be able to predict, in advance and before opening the story, what the broad themes of the story will entail and how the story will unfold. I can say this with confidence, because this is an experience I have on a daily basis. If what you were saying was true, I shouldn’t know what to expect each time I open a story like that. But I do, without fail.
Jon Murphy
Mar 11 2021 at 10:16am
Which is it? Does cancel culture not exist or is it incoherent? These are mutually exclusive options. It needs to exist before you can label it incoherent.
KevinDC
Mar 11 2021 at 11:57am
I’m not sure I agree with this. It seems perfectly reasonable to me for someone to say something doesn’t exist because it is incoherent. Maximum lazy – a round square. The idea of a square that is round is incoherent, and because it is incoherent, I therefore claim round squares do not exist. Similarly, an object that is both red all over and green all over at the same time is incoherent, and therefore doesn’t exist*.
This is not to say I think the idea of “cancel culture” is incoherent, obviously. For something to be incoherent, it needs to entail some kind of internal contradiction such that it can’t be mapped onto any description of reality. Despite Phil’s claim, the term “cancel culture” has a meaningful, widely understood, self consistent definition for which matching real world examples are trivially easy to find. This is also clear from how readily you can find cases of people (usually, though not always, on the left) who say things like “People are calling incident like X ‘cancel culture’ when really incidents like X are just cases of accountability.” They’re not disputing the existence of the phenomenon under question, just the label used to describe it. Although some others, like the Vice author I cited in my other comment, embrace the label as well.
*One could dispute this if they were talking in terms of Meinong’s ontology and considered qualities of absisting, subsisting, and existing, and say that although something is incoherent it could at least absist. But I don’t think that’s the angle being taken here.
J Mann
Mar 11 2021 at 3:33pm
I don’t agree with Phil’s point, but I’d go a little further and say that a concept might be incoherent enough not to be useful. In that case it’s kind of semantic discussion to say whether it exists.
As an example, let’s say I think there’s an emerging overcriminalization crisis, and I start pointing to anecdotes a bunch of people who were convicted for crimes. A few of them are obvious wrongful convictions of the innocent, a few are convictions for actual violations of laws that are stupid and unjust, and a lot of them seem to be apparently fair convictions for violating reasonable laws.
Under those circumstances, Phil might argue that there’s no real overcriminalization crisis – I have cobbled it together by conflating relevantly unlike things, which have different causes and require different solutions, and some of which don’t require any solution at all.
Phil could do us all a favor by spelling out his argument in more depth, but as stated, I don’t think it’s incoherent, just not correct. 🙂
Jon Murphy
Mar 11 2021 at 9:23pm
KevinDC-
You make a good point. I see “incoherent” as different from “incorrect by definition,” but I can see your point
Phil H
Mar 11 2021 at 3:53pm
That’s a whole bunch of replies! Thank you. In particular, thank you Kevin, because that was a spectacularly good reply.
So… yeah. Kevin’s points were very good, and yet I’m still not convinced. Here’s why.
He points out that “cancel culture” can’t be just a critical term, because there are people who actually talk explicitly and positively about doing cancellation. This is clearly right.
And yet… there seems to be a difference in the way those two groups use the term. Most obviously, Kevin says, “I disagree with her case.” I’ve yet to be convinced that there is much overlap in meaning. Those who are positive about cancellation say, “cancellation [is] a way for marginalized communities to publicly assert their value systems through pop culture.” J Mann above says, “individuals will try to get others disciplined, fired, deplatformed, etc. for expressing opinions that offend them.” Those two definitions really don’t share any elements at all. Perhaps that’s just two different perspectives on the “same thing”… or perhaps not.
My second worry about the nature of this phenomenon is that it’s not obvious to me that it’s any different to things that used to happen before. In the past, if you offended someone important in your town, and they decided they didn’t want to be friends with you, was that cancellation? Everything is sped up and magnified by social media, no doubt, but I can’t see what it is about “cancellation” that is different to not liking someone, or losing the support of a particular community. In the article that Kevin linked to, a person who makes her living from saying things in public that people like (a comedian) said something in public that people didn’t like, and as a result became less popular. I… don’t really understand why we need a special word for that. It isn’t new. Scott says, “I personally know people who have been damaged by cancel culture…” Sure, but did no one ever get damaged in the past? Did no one get criticised publicly, or complained about? If you want to claim, “today, when people make public criticisms, they often attach the word ‘cancel’ to them,” then I’d accept it. But if your claim is that the term “cancel culture” means something a little more distinctive, I’m still not convinced.
My third worry about the notion of cancel culture, particularly as it’s used by its critics, is that the criticism seems to assume that it’s “wrong” to “take away” someone’s audience. If a bunch of students protest, and so a speaker is disinvited to a campus, bloggers will declaim this terrible “cancel culture”. But why was that speaker entitled to that speaking slot? All I see happening is a making public of the conversations that used to go on behind closed doors. Who got to speak at universities was decided in smoky back rooms. Now it’s sometimes not decided in smoky back rooms. And it feels to me like the smoky back room speakers are very upset about that.
And finally, here’s a comment that I got on the one tiny bit of social media that I actually use (a WeChat chat group) – in response to an article about how common the use of English group nouns like “murder of ravens” is, a friend of mine wrote, “This woke nonsense…” If you look around, there’s plenty of that. “Woke” (like cancel culture) has become just a word that people throw at things they don’t like.
KevinDC
Mar 11 2021 at 5:29pm
Hey Phil –
A couple comments in response.
When I said I disagree with her case, I meant that I’m disagreeing with her arguments for why cancel culture is a generally good and appropriate response to the issues she cites. I don’t disagree with her definition of what cancel culture is, or her examples of cancellations.
I wouldn’t say those are different perspectives on the same thing. Rather, they are descriptions of different aspects of the same thing. The former is a description about the point and purpose cancellation is meant to serve (asserting values of marginalized communities), the latter is a description about the methods by which cancellations are meant to achieve that purpose (disciplining, firing, deplatforming). And the author of the Vice article doesn’t dispute that those are the methods being used – she just argues that those methods are good to use in order to achieve her desired ends.
People have always been mugged, but if over the course of a few years the number of muggings increases by a huge degree across society, we call it a “crime wave” or something else to signify that a particular phenomenon has become widespread and is taking place on a larger scale than before. Similarly, people have always been shunned, but when shunning increases in intensity and frequency and becomes vastly more widespread, it makes sense for the same reason to describe the change in scope of this phenomenon as “cancel culture” or some other term. If you don’t want to call it that, I’m perfectly happy to taboo the word and call it whatever other term you might like – I’d still oppose it under that new label. But given that this label is already the one in common usage – including by the supporters of the phenomenon – my first inclination is to just go with the common usage rather than use substitute definitions.
J Mann
Mar 12 2021 at 9:37am
First, as I said upthread, I think one aspect of modern cancel culture that is somewhat new is that a number of people are being cancelled for expressing widely held opinions, even majority opinions. When you get fired for expressing a majority opinion, I guess you could frame that as “losing the support of a particular community,” but what’s important about the story is that the community got you fired. (If the Illuminati picked a person each day to get fired for their amusement, you could also frame it as that person “losing the support of a particularly community,” but you’d be missing some important parts of the story.)
Second, a parable: When I was a kid, I thought it was a fairly common opinion that the blacklist was wrong – that even if communism was a dangerous ideology that caused the suffering of hundreds of millions, it was wrong for Hollywood studios to refuse to hire communist writers under public pressure. I also thought this was a generalizable principle – that while people sometimes were fired for expressing their political opinions outside of work, it was wrong.
At the time, I never heard someone argue that what happened to the people on the blacklist was just the equivalent of people not liking them, and I still don’t think it.
I would call the blacklist one of the early examples of cancel culture, and I think the reaction against it was healthy.
Phil H
Mar 13 2021 at 4:02am
Thanks, both.
At this point, you both seem to be saying that cancellation is kinda the same as something that happened before, but there’s been an increase in how often it happens, and the targets of it. I’m pretty much willing to go along with that. I now think we don’t disagree about the facts of what is happening – that’s a useful step forward!
Looking at where we are, I’m troubled by the fact that you seem to think this “cancellation” is a bad thing. It looks to me like a classic example of non-government action. The cancellers aren’t making use of any state authority. The cancelled suffer no violence or legal consequences. Obviously, you can agree or disagree with whoever you like, but it’s odd to see this as a policy issue.
And if you don’t like what happens on Twitter, there’s always the easy, obvious, market-driven solution! I have never downloaded the app, and my life is blissfully free of worry about cancellation.
J Mann
Mar 13 2021 at 12:22pm
Thanks Phil!
I think it goes without saying that something can be both non-governmental and legal and still be wrong, of course. (Racism, for example, or even just coordinated unkindness and petty cruelty.)
Given that, even if cancel culture is non-governmental and not illegal, we can still disagree about whether it’s wrong. Going back to the blacklist, I think that was wrong, but if you think the benefits outweigh the costs, I guess that’s where we disagree.
Mark Z
Mar 10 2021 at 8:34pm
I don’t buy that modern ‘cancel culture’ reflects a movement toward utilitarianism relative to McCarthyism. The utilitarian case for banishing communism iseems much stronger than the utilitarian case for banishing Dr. Seuss. I think you misstate the thinking of ‘cancelers.’ They aren’t ‘cancelling’ because they believe subjective harm is bad and should be reduced; obviously they don’t care about offending white people or males, and offending such groups is seen as somewhat desirable even (‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable’). Rather, I think they believe in the epistemic privilege of the oppressed, and thus when such people view something as offensive, it’s a good indication that there’s actually something objectively wrong with it.
Perhaps somewhat related your hedonic treadmill explanation, ‘new leftists’ tend to grow up in a more homogeneously progressive environment, and one’s Overton window is largely shaped by the margins of one’s own experience. Literally old leftist grew up in a setting where many were constantly interacting more conservative people, so maybe they have a broader residual Overton window. I suspect that as a society becomes more predominately Christian, other religions become less socially acceptable; as it becomes more Protestant, Catholicism become less acceptable; as it becomes more Lutheran, Calvinism becomes less acceptable, etc. America hasn’t homogenized in general, but many cities and institutions in America have homogenized rapidly over recent decades (I recall reading that even in the early 80s self-identified liberals only modestly outnumber self-identified conservatives in academia, but I forget where).
MarkW
Mar 11 2021 at 8:18am
I do realize that members of marginalized groups can be severely harmed by certain types of speech.
‘Severely harmed’? Really? At this point the (rare) racist who actually calls a black person the n-word is far more likely to be severely harmed (loss of reputation, employment, friends) for being known to have said such a thing than the hearer is to be harmed by hearing it (from a person they have no reason to respect).
I don’t doubt that behavior toward marginalized groups is better today than a few decades ago
I don’t doubt it either if we’re going back 50 years and more, but compared to ten years ago, I disagree. Things are getting decidedly worse. Race-relations are degrading (and polls reflect that). Even the most innocuous interactions threaten to become fraught. Compared to 10 years ago, white people may now be even more self-conscious and more careful of saying anything that could be misconstrued as racist when interacting with black acquaintances and colleagues. But having only careful, guarded, innocuous conversations across racial boundaries is not an improvement.
Scott Sumner
Mar 11 2021 at 1:37pm
You said: “‘Severely harmed’? Really? ”
Consider yourself lucky if you don’t understand this fact.
MarkW
Mar 11 2021 at 9:32pm
I understand it, I just don’t believe it. Not in 2021. The racists around at this point who would yell out racial slurs are a very small minority — they’re pathetic, not powerful. It is ridiculous to pretend that they possess the power to cause ‘great harm’ with a word. Any word. Even THE word.
Or, I suppose you could argue that, unfortunately, that is one of the ways things have gotten worse — hypersensitization is making some people nuts. My wife had a new person join her department recently who spoke up during an MLK zoom event and described how she could ‘feel the hate’ behind people’s eyes as she walked through the grocery store. And this is in a thoroughly lefty college town, mind you, where BLM yard signs outnumbered Trump yard signs last fall by 100:1 (probably, more like 100:0 — not sure I saw a single Trump sign in the city). Actual racial hate behind the eyes of local grocery shoppers? Or a woman primed to see hate that isn’t there due to antiracism mania? I’m going with B. Now maybe she actually was psychologically harmed by ‘seeing’ all the ‘hate’, but I’d place the blame on the activists for that, not the people walking through the store and filling their carts.
Lizard Man
Mar 11 2021 at 9:44pm
I think anyone with a lick of sense would treat someone who refers to them with a racial slur (or a homophobic or misogynistic one) as dangerous. And I don’t mean hurt your feelings dangerous, but rather bash your head in, stab you, etc., type dangerous. It seems to me that someone who goes around insulting people by calling them such things is not only looking for a fight, but testing to see how much bullying they can get away with. And again, I don’t mean just calling people names bullying, but assaulting them, destroying their property, explicitly threatening them and anyone associated with them with violence.
MarkW
Mar 12 2021 at 7:10am
Well, yes, but then the potential harm is from the actual violence, not the speech. But I think what we’re talking about here is speech alone. And I can imagine scenarios where being referred to by an ethnic slur would be traumatic — if done, say, by a potential romantic interest, or somebody considered a friend, or by a boss or authority figure. But that kind of thing is what I think is incredibly rare at this point. And what I don’t accept is that a word that is unobjectionable when heard on a hip-hop radio station or a Dave Chappelle skit can become traumatic and highly-damaging when heard in a classroom discussion of first-amendment law. That kind of hypersensitivity is not inborn — it has to be actively cultivated and encouraged.
Lizard Man
Mar 12 2021 at 10:45am
I think in many instances, the use of such words isn’t merely an insult, but rather a threat, or the implicit condoning of threats. Not in all circumstances; but it seems to me right that there should be some kinds of negative consequences for using that kind of language in a careless way.
The firing of the NYT reporter is ridiculous and outrageous.
MarkW
Mar 12 2021 at 11:46am
I think in many instances, the use of such words isn’t merely an insult, but rather a threat, or the implicit condoning of threats.
How about concrete examples of uses that would constitute “a threat or implicit condoning of threats”? Drunk sorority girls on video singing along to their favorite hip-hop song containing the n-word? Listening to an audio book of Huck Finn? How about the Dave Chapelle bit about Jusse Smollet (where not only is the n-word used but used in its original derogatory sense albeit by a black man insulting another black man). Ok or not? Implied threat or not? Maybe you have some examples to show what you mean.
drobviousso
Mar 11 2021 at 11:59am
Free speech norms are always and forever a virtue to whatever group is losing out in the culture wars. In the 50’s and early 60’s when conservatism was dominant, lots of young people on the left grew up knowing what it was like to have soft and hard power pointed against them. That created a bunch of great pro-freedom sentiment on the left among the young, including the Berkley example the OP references. Well, the wheel turns as it always does, and now its the right facing police action and self-help violence when trying to hold a speech on Berkley’s campus. Find a politically plugged in right-leaning person under the age of 25 in 2021, and they’ll sound a lot like an under 25 left-leaning person in 1961. For exactly the same reasons.
People on the left, arguing for free speech, are making an ‘argument against interest’ in some ways. In some cases, I think its tactical (like FIRE, who you can tell from listening to their podcast is made up of folks sympathetic to the left, culturally). In some cases I think its inertia. And in some cases its due to historical literacy. And in some cases its just because freedom is good and they are wise enough to recognize that and good enough to do what’s right, and they deserve lots of praise.
Jesse Connell
Mar 11 2021 at 6:39pm
Dear moderator,
I suggest deleting any comments that deny the existence of “cancel culture”.
robc
Mar 12 2021 at 6:55am
I thought this was the dumbest post ever…and then I started laughing.
Well done, I am just slow on the uptake.
Michael Rulle
Mar 14 2021 at 12:24pm
My perception of unacceptable cancel culture is when people lose jobs for expressing opinions that seem normal, even if against the mainstream within their institution. These are the stories that get the most attention. I have never seen a count, but my sense is there are probably not that many. However, the multiplier effect is very large——if one or two get fired——1000 more will keep silent. So firing people for statements made 10 years ago, or that are merely differences of opinion is “fascistic” in style.
It is easy to find points of view that people from different political perspectives would all find “cancel worthy”—-which is why your idea on boards structure is very good (it need not be exactly that—but the point is very good).
Not sure “cancel culture” that does not punish people unfairly, versus merely criticizing them, even if unfairly exaggerated, is a term which makes sense—-as nothing is “canceled”.
I think I am missing your main point.
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