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Cancel Culture is a term that is is now common parlance, but what exactly is it and what are the conditions that foster such a blight on our society and social systems?
Many of the actions of the activist-Left (or woke) when they attempt to cancel a person in society are enumerated on the list below. One of the most striking features is the precipitous drop in the notion of mutual respect and dialogue – your ideological opponents are the ‘oppressive enemy’ rather than co-constituents of the society you both share.
Cancel Culture is the epitome of binary thinking and the dehumanization of people you classify as your opponent(s) and it is cancerous blight on cultures that value freedom of speech and rigorous debate of contentious issues.
So in light of the quotation’s last line – Proper diagnosis precedes an effective cure – we must educate ourselves in order to fight against what ails our cultural landscape.
“Rather, cancel culture and totalitarian societies are variations of the communal motif of Nisbet’s “revolutionary community.”
First, the revolutionary community is premised on the myth of human goodness. Core to any society is a founding myth of how the world works. For cancel culture, all problems in society are the result of some oppression, which can only be removed through “the liberative action of revolutionary violence.”
Second, such liberating violence is necessary. Only through force will our society be freed from its oppressions. Peaceful change through persuasion is to bargain with the oppressors. This is manifest in the bloodshed of the French and Russian Revolutions. It manifests in cancel culture as the vicious attack upon the perpetrator. This is not traditional violence, but the intent is the same: destruction of a person’s life. A wayward tweet results in doxing, ruining one’s economic and social prospects for life. It may not be literally burning down one’s house, but it is intended to have the same effect. Jonathan Rauch has gone so far as to compare literal assassination attempts such as those targeting Salmon Rushdie with the character assassinations of cancelations. This tenet of the revolutionary community is the reason.
Third, the holiness of sin. Nearly all consider violence under certain circumstances necessary, if regrettable. Public denunciations may be appropriate in certain circumstances, likewise cutting off friendships, firings, and so on. They are a last resort when other measures to bring repentance and change have failed. Not so for the revolutionary community. “Acts such as murder, kidnapping, treason, torture, mutilation, vandalism, and arson” are holy when carried out in the name of revolution. So such social violence wrought by cancellations are holy, they are noble, the very essence of righteous rage. Hence, celebrations when the canceled attempt suicide.
Fourth, the revolutionary community values terror. Fear has long been used to achieve certain behavioral outcomes. The crucifixion, public floggings, stake burnings, and the like were effective because they instigated fear. For the revolutionary community, terror is an essential part of the community because for revolutionaries it is a species of justice. It is the means whereby both the targets of terror get their comeuppance and everyone else is shown what lies in store should they dissent. The message is clear: silence or your life. Evidence of self-censorship indicates that this tenet is effective.
Fifth, the totalism of the revolutionary ideology. The revolutionary community seeks to advance its vision to every nook and cranny of life. Cancel culture is aimed at any communication through any medium at any time. The efforts of “offense archaeologists” work only because of the totalism inherent in cancel culture. Nothing said or done at any time anywhere—public or private—is beyond the reach of its total account of good and evil. It is why years-old comments lead to firings and forgiveness is impossible. Apologies, no matter how groveling and demeaning, are only proof of unforgivable guilt.
Sixth, the principles and tactics of the revolutionary community are always derived from an elite. Relatively few scholars at elite universities dictated the terms of woke ideology and its antecedents undergirding cancel culture. While a single Twitter warrior, student, or disgruntled citizen may spark a canceling campaign, the ideological basis upon which they do so is derived from the elite.
Seventh, centralization. This is the element from which cancel culture diverges and it is cancel culture’s most salient distinction from a totalitarian society. Cancel culture lacks the centralization of a totalitarian state, although some think it is a precursor to such a society. For now, cancel culture remains decentralized. Those who carry on canceling campaigns have no discernable central command, but they do have a totalist vision of how their doctrines dominate all of society.
Proper diagnosis generally precedes an effective cure.”
“Academic freedom is not a self-justifying good. It must be oriented to some end that merits the support of those who finance it. One end of liberal education is the advancement of knowledge, which requires diverse opinions and the freedom to challenge orthodoxy. But another is to preserve and transmit a social and cultural inheritance. This is true if the transmission encourages challenges to the tradition as well.
The mere expansion of knowledge understood as information without an accompanying sense of philosophical wisdom and moral limitation is unable to justify itself or prevent its own abuse. Theodore Roosevelt, perhaps before the Progressive virus—one of whose symptoms is hyper-rationalism—fully infected him, explained: “There is not in all America a more dangerous trait than the deification of mere smartness unaccompanied by any sense of moral responsibility.”
This quotation speaks to the problem that seems to be endemic today in so much of higher education – a lack of a philosophical ‘North Star’ that guides and orientates the academic scholarship at universities and colleges. The transmission of our culture’s bedrock values, Classical Liberalism, seems to have been mostly replaced by a cadre of activist academics that seek not to preserve and strengthen our society, but rather ruthlessly criticize and pull apart that values that make higher education possible in the first place.
A better balance must be struck.
The very real threat of nuclear war hasn’t been on the radar since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Yet the capacity for self-annihilation remains. Consider the question raised by Daniel Ellsberg:
“When I say that there is a step that could reduce the risk of nuclear war significantly that has not been taken but could easily be taken, and that that is the elimination of American ICBMs, I’m referring to the fact that there is only one weapon in our arsenal that confronts a president with the urgent decision of whether to launch nuclear war and that is the decision to launch our ICBMs.”
He went on to stress that ICBMs are uniquely dangerous because they’re vulnerable to being destroyed in an attack (“use them or lose them”). In contrast, nuclear weapons on submarines and planes are not vulnerable and
“can be called back — in fact they don’t even have to be called back, they can… circle until they get a positive order to go ahead… That’s not true for ICBMs. They are fixed location, known to the Russians… Should we have mutual elimination of ICBMs? Of course. But we don’t need to wait for Russia to wake up to this reasoning… to do what we can to reduce the risk of nuclear war.”
And he concluded: “To remove ours is to eliminate not only the chance that we will use our ICBMs wrongly, but it also deprives the Russians of the fear that our ICBMs are on the way toward them.”
It would be a great step toward securing the world from a nuclear extinction level event, but the geopolitics of the situation make the move a contested one at best.
If the death of everyone can still be maintained with bombers and submarines do we really need the extra death (and extra threat) of ICBM’s? Is it even rational to consider the move as it might embolden the Russians and Chinese with even the perceived move away from MAD?
It is a calculus that makes sense in terms of lowering the threat to the entire world, but are the corresponding consequences (real or perceived) worth the risk, as it would have to be the US that would stand down first.
While reading Richer Morrison’s essay called Self-Defeating Environmental Activism this particular paragraph caught my eye ( I recommend reading the entire essay).
“I call this unconstrained in part as a reference to the distinction the economist Thomas Sowell advanced, of a constrained vs. unconstrained view of society and government. The constrained view—broadly consistent with the ideas of our Founding Fathers—suggests that human beings are by nature given to abusing and fighting over political power, and thus governing structures have to be limited and divided. The constrained view also acknowledges that our most important societal problems are not amenable to permanent solutions but are simply a matter of competing interests and values and thus can only be balanced toward a least bad resolution. The unconstrained vision—more amenable to Progressive theorists—holds that governments should be empowered to require good outcomes and eradicate bad outcomes, and obviously then assign behaviors to one of those categories.”
The constrained and unconstrained views of society are important theoretical and ideological origins for understanding how our views are shaped and reinforced. With the recent seismic changes to the body politic on the Left(the move toward a totalizing activist identitatarian ideology) I’ve had to reevaluate many of the positions I’ve taken in the past and come up with new ones, or at least different stances on the issues.
I’d like to say the process is finished, but much work remains in order to rationalize and reorder the priorities of one’s world view. Adopting a more constrained view of government’s role in society is part of the ideological framework that I am adapting toward.
I think the distinction Morrison mentions (quoting Sowell) is fertile ground for the recasting the theoretical lens of how society is viewed.
It is glorious. People actually discussing trans ideology and not being shut down or cancelled for daring to speak for female rights, boundaries, and safety.
2024 is off to a fine start.
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