Friday, July 10, 2020

Just What is Cancel Culture Anyway?


I'm having trouble understanding the uproar over "cancel culture," whatever that is.

I do understand the scourge of intolerance. It's bad. I've read Huxley and Orwell so I have a working grasp of group think.

The letter published in Harper's warns of "a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.
...
The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.
Unfortunately Ms. Atwood et al don't offer specifics about how they and their fellow writers are being reined in. What are they forbidden to express? What dire fate awaits them for crossing lines? From whom?

History shows that we have freely and unrepentantly resorted to what seem to me as similar cancel culture measures in the past. One example that comes to my mind was de-nazification in postwar Germany. So odious was nazism that it was driven from the German culture, its adherents purged of office (if they weren't required for American aerospace and weapons programme purposes). Did it work? Not on its own, it didn't. There were a lot of carrots that went along with that stick and, nazism being an idea, is a stain that never will be completely erased.

Slavery and the post-emancipation repression of blacks in America was about as odious as nazism but it persisted not for a few decades but over a span of centuries.  Tearing down statues of Confederate leaders, traitors to the United States of America, that have been symbolically oppressing black Americans every day since they were installed, is not cancel culture.

No one is going to forget Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson. No one can erase the memory of butchers such as Nathan Bedford Forrest. Their names and their vile crimes are preserved for eternity in books in every library in the English-speaking world. No one is trying to cancel that miserable culture. Destroying symbols that venerate them, however, is not cancel culture.

I'm glad that Margaret and Salman and Noam were able to get their concerns off their collective chests even if they fell far short of making a persuasive case for the peril they suggest looms above us all. It is good to be reminded of the need for free speech and tolerance and we should embrace those freedoms daily.  That said I think there are many bigger fish to fry.


9 comments:

  1. Unfortunately Ms. Atwood et al don't offer specifics about how they and their fellow writers are being reined in. What are they forbidden to express? What dire fate awaits them for crossing lines? From whom?

    Such people have no problem publishing their ideas.
    Most others do.
    The North American media is so consolidated as to give little difference of opinion ( particularly Canada).
    There is no mass media in NA that offers any views contrary to the Neo liberal outlook.
    Two days ago a reporter from the UK was arrested whilst reporting on demonstrations in Seattle.
    Perhaps that is what concerns them?

    TB


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  2. I think our current usage is far from what Huxley and Orwell had in mind. But, as I explained here, Natalie Wynn (ContraPoints) does a great job of describing how a group of individuals, acting in concert, to a certain extent unwittingly, provoked a collective hatred of her that included death threats and a significant loss of income for a period of time. It's not always effective, so people of Atwood's status don't typically lose out on anything themselves, so it can seem ridiculous when they complain about it, but, with a most charitable read of it all, they are signing that doc in order to provoke second thoughts when it comes to firing or otherwise causing profound harm to, for example, a 'pre-woke' employee who let an offensive comment (or tweet) slip. It has a very disingenuous feel coming from anyone who has lots of power and likes to say some really offensive things. And some people argue that it's not even a real thing, but it is the case that some people have lost their livelihoods for taking a discriminatory or erasing position. BUT, the counter to the claims, that mass audience rebuttal, could also be seen as a positive socializing force that has had enough of trying to be understanding with racists, etc. We have the freedom to say horrible things and others have the freedom to tell us off for it, en masse. I think it's something that has to be looked at on a case by case basis. Sometimes people need another chance and have lost too much from the crowd reaction to them, and sometimes people need to be told to put a lid on it. Something like that. But should it be up to the masses to decide who gets to keep their job and go on social media without being threatened and who doesn't??

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  3. The writers you mentioned in your piece have not experienced sensorship with their own writing nor publication so your suggestion is relevant. Anyong

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  4. TB, I'm also unclear about the timing of this open letter to Harper's and its target audience. They convey the impression that the Trump/Orban/Modi/Bolsonaro/Erdogan gang with their rightwing extremists are not the real threat to their free speech but it's the other side, the left that is their peril. Would that I had seen Rushdie and Chomsky and Atwood handcuff themselves to the White House perimeter fence in protest to what the authoritarian class was doing to jeopardize free speech and tolerance but, no, they instead pen a letter to a magazine that is not high on the right's must-read list.

    I freely admit I find keeping abreast of this stuff tedious. Are they suggesting we now become more tolerant of lapses such as Trudeau's blackface costume? What about the mortal sin of cultural appropriation? Sexual innuendo, dirty jokes? Do they want the intellectual freedom to argue that Hitler got the trains running on time without mentioning whom he packed into those trains and their final destinations?

    Are we to cut them more slack because they're intellectuals and therefore more deserving of robust debate privileges than the great unwashed?

    Or do they just want us to lighten-the-hell-up? In the wake of #MeToo have we gotten a a bit too strident, too carried away with ourselves?

    Where do they want the lighthouses that will keep us clear of the shoals?

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  5. Marie, I tried to respond to your comments in the remarks immediately above this.

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  6. Anyong, you might recall that Salmon Rushdie did experience a measure of censorship in the form of a fatwa calling for his death for writing the "Satanic Verses." As for the others it's entirely possible in this hypercharged and virulent culture that they have likewise received death threats. Who knows?

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  7. What a lot of complete non-understanding of cancel culture from article to comments! Read this from Jonathan Cook, ex-Guardian journalist, and you'll have a clue. And learn why it matters, even if you find it tedious or you'll never understand the way news is slanted on the one hand, and how mob rule works on the other. I'd reference Cook's own website, but he delays posting his latest paid freelance work by some weeks. So you'll have to be content reading the article from a, gasp, alternative website:

    https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/07/writers-open-letter-against-cancel-culture-is-about-stifling-free-speech-not-protecting-it/

    BM

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  8. Interesting article, BM. Having another "bitter" moment? Nothing in the pantry so you're having to feed on your emotions? Calm your tits, BM.

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  9. Princess Diana said something to the effect if I remember correctly, the greatest problem in the world today is intolerance. To say I’ll sit next to a person even though I don’t like them, is living in good faith. So am I compromising my ethics by saying, sorry l cannot sit next to you because I don’t like you. I don’t think it would be difficult for Atwood. People have lost their job for voicing a dislike of a person who is on the opposite side of the fence when it comes to government. Should they lose their job?

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