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Cancel culture is the mirco level of what is happening in many parts of our online culture. The macro: group dynamics, power dynamics, and class are what drive the process. As critical thinkers and active citizens we need to be aware of both levels and how they interact and form the popular social currents in our society.
The most often suggested tonic to cancel culture is free speech. I tend to agree with that proviso, but I would add that free speech is not enough to guarantee a social dynamic that is immune from the ravages of cancel culture. Free speech must be coupled with a citizenry that has the wherewithal to think deeply about issues and be capable of frank analysis of the positions and arguments that they make, otherwise the utility of free speech becomes decidedly limited.
People have to be able to agree to listen to each other for free speech to work as we imagine it should. Yelling at each other from ideological fortresses accomplishes nothing.
I would suggest that the ability to compromise is one of the key ingredients that is required to make a society that values liberty and freedom work. There is a great deal of work to do in this regard as the barriers in place, as described by the JSTOR article, enumerates. Overcoming cancel culture will involve not only improving our own critical faculties, but also helping others make that very same transition.
“Perhaps more than anything else, cancel culture will be seen as an intrinsic part of life lived publicly in this decade, with the downfall of powerful Hollywood producers, racist and sexist comedians, white supremacists, and clueless corporations left in its wake. Cancel culture, not unlike cyberbullying, has also had its more “innocent” victims, ordinary citizens who said the unacceptable thing in a public forum. Is the destructive power of cancel culture too much?
Many perceive this phenomenon of cancelling as a very new and scary thing that young people do, so much so that they’re ready to cancel the whole thing. Even Barack Obama weighed in on it recently, cautioning young people not to be overly critical and judgmental, as though the very idea of “cancelling” must always wrong and unreasonable, regardless of what is being criticized or how problematic it may be. Obama’s negative reactions to this kind of power being wielded by a groups that are relatively powerless, as an establishment figure (no matter how benevolently he presents himself), are perhaps not unusual.
The social psychologist John Drury shows that the discourse around crowds, collectives, and people power have historically been problematic and negative, revealing the class biases and political ideologies of those commentators who describe them. Communities and crowds out of step with societal norms are often presented as something to be feared, and this is something many of us internalize. Crowds are scary. Even as we speak, there’s civil unrest, protests, demonstrations, and strikes happening all around the world, for a myriad of different reasons, in a decade that began with the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street protests. These movements have not often been described in flattering terms.
The kind of language that’s used to talk about groups of people assembled together—or their collective actions seeking to change the status quo—often maligns communities as irrational, “mobs” or “rioters” with uncontrolled, invalid emotions, a kind of faceless contagion that presents a threat to civilized, law-abiding society and the ruling establishment. As Drury points out, this language systematically delegitimizes the aims of these collectives as being trivial, if not dangerous:
If the crowd is pathologized and criminalized, then its behaviour is not meaningful. There can therefore be no rational dialogue with it. Since the crowd is not part of the democratic process, it is legitimate and even necessary to suppress it with the full force of the state.
No one could argue that it’s pleasant to be at the bottom of a pile on, virtual or not. It’s true that people can band together for the wrong reasons, but, funnily enough, they can also band together for very good reasons. Cancelling someone, in terms of public shaming, or shunning, or just being criticized, is, again, nothing new, though it is arguably different in how quickly and severely it can happen online. The English professor Jodie Nicotra points out that such a thing has always been a part of community life and, in fact, a part of building and maintaining a community’s values. Whenever people have deviated from the norm, there have been public acts of shaming, from the scarlet letters or village stocks of Puritan life to the ritual public head shavings of thousands of French women who were suspected of fraternizing with German soldiers in World War II.
Cancel culture is, on the one hand, less severe than these acts of public shaming, because it is mostly linguistic and communicative. On the other hand, it can seem more extreme, because unlike these historical events of past shaming, it’s unconstrained by geographical space and can involve large numbers of people in what can become an unrelenting personal attack. And that certainly can have unintended repercussions. Because social media, especially Twitter, is loosely joined together by a network of weak ties, it actually makes it easier for new, especially negative information, such as rumors or criticisms or even fake news, to spread quickly. It’s not constrained by closely linked social circles where information eventually stops spreading after repeatedly being shared by multiple people.”
How you are treated in society is dependent on your sex. Men never had to deal with bullshit like this.
“In the Victorian period, the lack of public facilities for women was intentional as a way of controlling their movements and keeping them out of public spaces, argues Dr Clara Greed, emerita professor of inclusive urban planning at the University of the West of England in Bristol.
There was a negative attitude towards building women’s toilets as it was considered improper for women to use public facilities, she adds. “This is why women simply would not come out of their homes for long periods.”
Public institutions, including educational buildings, workplaces and recreational spaces, were designed around the needs of men. Women tried to cope with the lack of toilets in a variety of ways, including drinking less water, holding in urine for hours, and spending less time in public spaces, says Meghan R Dufresne, architectural designer at the Institute for Human Centred Design in Boston in the US.
It wasn’t until the rise of the suffragette movement in the late 1800s – and the popularity of department stores and cafes, which encouraged women to stay and browse – that public toilet use for women became more acceptable, says Dr Greed. “
Just a small historical inkling of how deeply patriarchy is entwined with the fabric of our society.
Just as real a possibility when it comes to the zany stuff you can find in the various religions. :)
JSTOR always serves up interesting articles with a solidly researched background. How we think of human waste is dependent on the spatial location not only geographically, but historically as well. Compare and contrast human waste usage and disposal in18th century Japan versus England or France, the differences are remarkable.
Appreciating the different historical and cultural approaches to human waste management has lead to creative solutions in the developing world, see the rest of the article on JSTOR for details. :>
“When left untreated, fecal matter leaches into lakes and rivers, contaminating drinking water and causing disease outbreaks, including cholera, dysentery, and polio, along with intestinal worms and other parasites. The lack of proper sanitation facilities and treatment plants remains one of the biggest challenges of the developing world. According to a report from the American Society of Microbiology, researchers estimate the burden of gastrointestinal disease in developing countries at more than 26 billion cases per year.
Yet, in eighteenth century Japan, biosolids were an esteemed substance. Japanese citizens did not view human waste as unwanted muck, but rather as something of value. What fostered this view, so different from ours? The answer lies in the soil. Compared to many European and North American countries, blessed with an abundance of forests and fertile grounds, Japan had much less land that was suitable for agriculture. Large parts of Japan had soils that were sandy and low on nutrients. Without continuous fertilizing, they didn’t yield rich harvests. When the Japanese population began to grow, people needed more food—and farmers needed fertilizer to produce it. Ultimately, it was the citizens who produced the fertilizer that put the food on the table. Population dynamics, particularly in large cities like Osaka and Edo, which later became Tokyo, drove up the value of human excrement, which sometime is referred to as humanure.
The historian Susan B. Hanley writes that in the early years of the Tokugawa regime, a historical period that lasted more than 200 years, farmers sent boats to Osaka packed with vegetables and other produce—and in return they received the city’s night soil. But then the fertilizer prices climbed—and the night soil became a prized item. As its price went up, different organizations and guilds, which had the rights to collect night soil from specific areas of the city, began to form.
In Osaka, landlords had the rights to their tenants’ solid waste, but the renters retained the rights to their urine, which was considered to be of lesser value. By the early eighteenth century, night soil was highly coveted. The price of the fecal material from ten households per year was valued between two and three bu of silver or over one half a ryo of gold. Put in perspective, one ryo could buy enough grain to feed one person for one year.
The groups wanted to keep their monopolies on waste collection, so occasionally fights and disputes would break out. According to Japanese records, such tiffs happened more than once. Moreover, as prices surged, the less fortunate farmers, who couldn’t afford to buy the precious manure, sometimes would steal it. Stealing excrement was a crime punishable by law, carrying a penalty that included prison time.
The excremental bull market had a very positive effect on cities’ overall cleanliness. Because every drop of waste was gathered and used, Japanese cities did not have a problem with overflowing latrines, stinky street gutters, or other sanitation issues that plagued urban Europe at the time. In the eighteenth century, European cities were filthy. In Berlin, city waste was piled up in front of St. Peter’s Church until a law passed in 1671 obligated peasants who came to town to take a load home on every visit. London was infamous for its mucky streets and overflowing public latrines. In Denmark, the cleaning of the latrines was the job of the hangman. Paris, famous for its art and culture scene, was nonetheless infamous for its filth. The wealthier Parisians emptied their chamber pots out the window, and poorer ones relieved themselves wherever possible. Even the Louvre was a mess: its inhabitants used its stairs and balconies as toilets.”
Not quite as popular as the Holst version, but still very nice. This year, I get the tenor solo. :)
So, for safety sake, I’m going to delete some of my tweets from yesterday. Given the general hilarity that ensued, I thought I’d preserve some of the threads before I do… Prelude – ‘It’s Funny How This Feminism Is So Attractive to Men’ *BOOM* Scene 1 – ‘Trans Ideology Does Not Exist DUH’ Scene 2 […]
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