One of the major difficulties with the terms “cancel culture” is that it means so many different things in the popular imagination.
Is it about cancelling powerful men who abused their power and did horrible things to women, relying on their authority and society’s complicity to keep it silent? Then yeah, I’m totally for that. I think so are most people.
Or does it mean silencing political voices, however unpleasant, when they say unpopular, even awful things? Then I’m a lot squishier, especially when it means ginning up the Outrage Machine to get revenge against some virtual nobody for using the improper nomenclature.
For me, the problem is really one of empathy. I don’t like online outrage mobs, particularly when focused against private citizens, not because of what it does to them (though public humiliation can be awful and genuinely ruin lives), but what it does to me. I don’t want to carry around that sort of anger with me, and I feel, even if our intentions are good, it makes us all worse human beings.
I also have little sympathy for when a politician or public figure attempts to argue they are being cancelled. People hating your ideas or voting you out of office is not cancel culture, that’s just how politics and public debate works. Claiming cancellation is now just another grift.
It’s a grift liberals benefit from, too. They are more than happy to see weekslong coverage of the Dr. Seuss “controversy,” because it makes it easier to deny the existence of cancel culture. Look at how silly and trivial this is, obviously this example shows that this larger thing is not a problem.
And while I do think the Dr. Seuss thing was a tempest in a teapot, it is interesting to see how people made arguments that they clearly don’t believe in order to benefit their team. We had conservatives lining up to say businesses couldn’t run their business however they wanted, even threatening government intervention. Which supposedly is a big no-no for conservatives.
On the flip side, we had liberals loudly arguing that suppression of speech is totally cool, so long as it comes from private corporations. Yes, we all know that doesn’t implicate the First Amendment, but there’s no way a majority of liberals believe that censorship of speech from private corporations is totally kosher.
That’s like arguing the Hollywood blacklist was totally cool, until the Senate got involved. If every Hollywood studio, today, fired every person who was even suspected of any socialist political leanings, I doubt the response would be “Well, I guess that’s just a private business exercising free speech and their freedom of association.”
It’s like no one ever thinks the reverse of the argument will ever be used against them.
At Boise St., fifty-two diversity-related classes were cancelled due to a threat from the Idaho state legislature to withhold funds. The legislature now demands the right to review class materials and enforce that the public university is teaching what the public government wants.
This is gross censorship, conducted by the government. The Lawyers Guns & Money blog made fun of it and pointed out that right-wing free speech warriors are suspiciously silent on this one.
And yes, they are correct on that one. Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald are completely full of shit. Cancel culture for them is simply a way to work the refs or scoreboard political opponents.
But, to be honest, I don’t care about them. I care about a race to the bottom to censor or worse, have professors self-censor. I want the free-flowing exchange of ideas, especially at the formative college age. You should encounter ideas that make you uncomfortable. If you don’t, your education isn’t very good.
It’s like the old maxim, “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” People in charge want us discussing people. And who cares about them? The more we focus these arguments on grifters and hucksters, the more power we grant them. They absolutely do not matter.
But the ideas do. We should be committed to free speech as a concept. We should oppose censorship, whether it comes from the government or from big business. Because let’s face it, Amazon would have a much easier time censoring every book than Uncle Sam would.
So yeah, it doesn’t really faze me that Dr. Seuss’ heirs let some of his lesser selling and more questionable works drift into the abyss. It was a business decision, and one that worked out probably far better than they possibly could have imagined. And books go out of print all of the time, usually due to business decisions.
But the concept that we should not be concerned that a publisher can control the public sphere should at least give us pause, even if this case isn’t that huge of a deal. What if a religious fundamentalist bought up a publisher and stopped the publication of every book with LGBT themes? How is that different?
OK, maybe you can argue that’s discriminatory. OK, what if a publisher instead pulled every book with explicit sexual content? Hey, we just don’t want to be in the smut business. But in doing so, it would pull a lot of great books. Say goodbye to Henry Miller and DH Lawrence.
In this hypothetical case, I’m not okay with private companies pulling books from publication. That is censorship, and it’s happening without government intervention. But what makes it different? How do we defend against this possibility while still giving publishers the leeway to take books out of print that they justifiably don’t want to be connected to anymore?
Once we let the foundational principle of free speech erode, it becomes harder to build the wall back up to defend it. So, it’s okay we let some things fade into oblivion, but we should be mindful of the language we use and arguments we employ in its defense. Because we don’t want enable the Idaho legislature to censor academics in the name of community standards nor do we want to punt censorship to private companies, but that’s okay because there’s no government actor.
Core principles matter. And you can’t only care about free speech for your side. Then you don’t actually believe in free speech.
