Cancel 'Cancel Culture'
An excellent, well thought out criticism of 'cancel culture' from a left point of view. It's quite long but very, very good. Should be read by millions. Especially point 7 and 15 have been applied recently to hold back my own books, in an annoying and counterproductive way: '7) A threat to ideological comfort is a threat to safety.' and '15) The open exchange of ideas is not to be trusted'.
This is the concluding part:
" ‘Cancel culture’ teaches its adherents to focus on weaknesses of people in order to tear down their strengths, rather than uniting with people’s strengths to overcome those weaknesses, in light of the common threats we all face. It trains people in suspicion, fear, hyper-sensitivity, and overreaction, and thrives on decontextualization and sensationalism. It teaches people to weaponize vulnerabilities and to instrumentalize others as means to an end, rather than treating them as human ends in themselves. It traffics in moral posturing more than political strategy, expressing a burning impatience with wrongdoing in the world—this is its positive aspect—but too-often directing that impatience against regular people, against comrades, and often against intellectual discussion or due process itself: all things we need if we are to change the world for the better. Unable to strike meaningfully at the heights of the system, CC tends towards ‘horizontal violence,’ with callous disregard for those it harms or the work it wrecks.
To be sure, cancel culture did not come out of nowhere. It is inseparable from the habits encouraged and enabled by corporate social media: Hasty generalization, reduction of complexity, public virtue signaling, echo chambers discouraging dissent, the fear of false ‘friends,’ and the rapid dissemination of unreliable information are all key features of its function. It takes advantage of the impunity of the online troll and the connectivity of social networks to pursue all-spectrum bullying. At the same time, CC reflects the sad sobering reality that in the contemporary USA, the ‘muck of the ages,’ the impurities and damage of capitalism, empire, male-domination, racism, narrow individualism, etc. have indeed marked us all, in one way or another. But rather than finding in this common state of imperfection a basis for humility, compassion, and mutual improvement, CC seizes upon the faults of others as if those who have strayed thereby become irredeemable monsters—infiltrators to be purged, punished, or eliminated from pristine existing spaces. Faced with a complex world of developing human beings, always operating in conditions not entirely of their own choosing, cancel culture insists on Angels and Demons. It thereby discourages genuine openness, intimacy, trust, friendship and understanding, while silencing those who don’t abide its wild swings of judgment.
As we’ve seen above, cancel culture traffics in guilt by association, expresses cynicism about people & their potential to change, and embodies an anti-intellectualism mired in narrow identitarianism, as well as deeply problematic notions of evidence & epistemology. It also evinces a profound lack of strategy, for which it substitutes performative moral panic and self-righteousness. At times, to be sure, cancel culture is instrumentalized deliberately to forward individual careers, or to deliberately destroy movement-organizations, whether by those with personal vendettas or in the employ of the enemy state (see COINTELPRO). Such deliberately destructive actors, however, could not succeed without the help of many well-intentioned people, who, nonetheless, tacitly enable cancel culture’s destructive practices. Even as, on some level, they may know better.
By helping to surface left cancel culture’s fallacious methods here, we hope to contribute to an increasingly conscious and collective process of thinking through and beyond the present impasse. Together we can and must develop the theory, the practice, and the sustaining infrastructure that can move beyond cancel culture, re-ground left movements and organizations, and thereby give us a fighting chance to build the culture of respect, debate, and comradeship we will surely need for the struggles to come. We need movements that can build effective resistance to the current unjust and unsustainable world system, that can shepherd broad popular forces capable of defeating the ruling-class agenda, that can help people to grasp the world’s problems in their genuine complexity, and that can nurture into existence a new world that will be more reasonable, just, and free than the one we have now. "