Cancel culture’s sword of Damocles
Cancel culture and restriction of debate; or, the letter from privileged people telling under-privileged people how to behave. In the current academic and social conversational environment it is incredibly easy to sign up to this letter: https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/ , yet what the authors have singularly failed to recognise is that they actually have the public platform, wealth, and prestige to sit there comfortably and argue from a position of relative privilege. I am a satellite facing into a solar wind, a very junior academic researcher, with 38 years lived experience, so please take my following comments as you will.
Having no public voice highlights, to me, the very reason I think this letter is misplaced. Quoting from the letter: “We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.” On the face of it this is reasonable, especially when they talk of the right to express opinions, yet I feel the authors miss the fundamental point of why cancel culture and certain topics are frowned upon. Society is an evolving process and concept, with ideas and conversations today that would have been banned and ridiculed 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago, and vice-versa. As a society we frame our conversations and ideas in the moment, understanding that we stand on all of human history, drawing thoughts, ethics, and morals from our lived and shared experiences. We also understand that minority voices must fight for their rights, forcing their way into those conversations, because mainstream publishers and studios are primarily focused on making money through catering to the wider audience.
20 years ago Jimmy Savill, Rolf Harris, and Kevin Spacey were lauded and lionised. Today, their voices are excluded. Does anyone question why? No, because we as a society understand that their voices are so tainted that they hold no cultural value. 60 years ago Muhammed Ali and the Black Panthers were ridiculed and excluded from society because their voices threatened the status quo — they were cancelled and ignored because the majority felt threatened. Darwin, Ghandi, Gallileo were all ridiculed and ‘cancelled’ by the majority because their ideas threatened the stability of the societies they lived in. It suited those in power to do so, to cancel, and then in time vindicate their ideas. Thus, the notion that cancel culture is a minority weapon of choice is flawed, as the majority and those in power are more than happy to cancel those voices they feel threatened society, both bad (in the case of paedophiles) and forward thinkers.
Free speech is not ‘free’, but comes with societal obligations on all parties. We as a collective whole must fight for our collective rights, to uplift those without a voice, and ensure there is no backsliding of those rights. Do you feel comfortable with a free-for-all in ideas? Great, but that opens the door to accepting that Nazi ideology, paedophile manifestos, and other verboten ideas have a place in the conversation. Before you complain that I am taking it to an extreme, yes, of course I am. I am certainly not advocating for either of those groups to be allowed the oxygen of publicity, but at the same time they serve as an example of the actual censorship we allow daily without any rancour. We, as the majority society, cancel people and ideas when they endanger the well-being of society, accepting that extremists, rapists, paedophiles etc have no voice worthy of listening to.
Of course, this is then complicated when minorities try to use the same mechanics to cancel voices that actively harm their rights. Every protected group fought and won the right to say their voice matters, that it is unacceptable to be vocally racist, disablist, homophobic and anti-pregnancy before the law. Society did not willingly grant those people those rights, they had to be fought for and the majority in turn accepted that in the mainstream homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism etc have no place and we will cancel those voices in the media and the mainstream.
The internet and social media atomised conversation, allowing any and every view to have a platform, large and small, yet when those platforms are used by high profile people to promote values at odds to acceptable behaviour, that voice is amplified and reaches further than any older form of media. Cancel culture within social media can be knee-jerk (there are prime examples where it has badly gone wrong), yet serves as one of the few tools through which minorities can effectively fight back against bigotry and hate because individually one small voice carries no weight, but collectively they can stop bigotry before it becomes a larger cancer.
The writers of this letter ask for good-faith discussion, yet nearly every person who is called out is acting in bad faith. If you can cancel those who seek to ill the majority, then you need to listen to those in the minority who are harmed by majority voices pressing down on them, and actually engage in meaningful conversation that flows both ways, not just from the majority to the minority. If the majority can exercise in cancel culture of those who it deems unfit for public conversation, why cannot minorities use the same tools to prevent oppression?
Yes, I am creating a false equivalence, because, of course, we do not want paedophiles and terrorists in our public discourse as they poison the conversation. Then again, are not racists, homophobes, and anyone who actively discriminates doing the same? Personally, I cannot defend cancel culture if it is used by the majority to silence minorities, it must work both ways to prevent harm and poison spreading. The same goes for reasoned debate and free speech — the majority cannot argue for either if it simply flows from the rich to the poor, white to non-white, straight to LGBTQI+, and not the other way around. Free speech comes with responsibilities to all our fellow humans, and as such comes at the cost of social responsibility. Open debate is always welcome, as is equitable justice, but that equity and openness is not at the expense of an unequal flow of voice and power.
