Cancel Culture and Canceling versus consequences for actions

Great Debates
1

In another thread I made a glib definition of canceling as “when liberals do to conservatives what conservatives have always done to everyone”.

This drew a retort that I must think what those conservatives were doing was okay.

So I thought I would start a new thread to discuss what “cancel culture” means, what “canceling” is, and how canceling differs from censorship or from just having social consequences for one’s opinions and actions.

Link

Perhaps I’m a little confused, but I think the term “cancel culture” arose from the right wing pundits in response to liberals starting boycotts against individual and groups that support agendas they don’t agree with. Things like anti-gay and anti-trans activities.

The right coined this term as an attempt at a derisive label for the actions. But my previous definition was coined as a reference to things like movie ratings system, the Hollywood Hayes Code, trying to ban particular music and then forcing warning labels on cds.

So I would like a more coherent definition of those terms so we can make sure we are taking about the same phenomena.

To me, censorship is restrictions on speech by some authority source, typically a government entity.

What, then, is it if a private entity does not allow voicing of some opinions? Is it “censorship” of I don’t let a white power group hold a meeting or a rally on my front lawn? Is it censorship if I own a billboard but won’t let businesses use religious symbols and messages in advertising displayed on it? (For clarity I mean any symbols that I am aware of as religious symbols or are being used to encourage religious participation.) 1

What about of a publically held corporation limits topics on its platforms?

What if a 501c.3 organization does so? A 501c.4?

I don’t think it’s censorship when a collective group say they disprove of certain policies or behaviors, and it doesn’t become censorship if they collectively protest or boycott to change an organization’s policies or actions.

I will post more as part of the discussion as I frame my thoughts.

1 I suppose this is going to lead to a long protracted side debate over what actually counts as religious symbols, and what happens if someone drops in a symbol for a dead religion, or a symbol that has more than one cultural meaning where only one is religious, etc. ad nauseum. Let’s try to limit this hijack to what’s necessary to understand censorship and canceling.

2

I thought cancel culture was borne from the idea of right wing celebrities getting blacklisted from Hollywood for whatever un-PC infringement(s) the establishment took issue with. In some cases that meant literally canceling their shows. See Roseanne, Tim Allen, Gina Carano, etc.

It is, of course, not censorship. Hollywood money can do what it wants.

It’s probably not a good thing that Hollywood acts like an effective monopoly (owing to strong unions, wierdly) and can end someone’s career over thought crimes. At the same time, it seems really easy not to get canceled in Hollywood and everyone whining about it generally comes off like a bunch of unlikeable losers. Difference between theory and practice.

3

They were left wingers . . . oh, you’re not talking about the First Red Scare and the Palmer Raids or Second Red Scare and McCarthyism and HUAC and the Black lists…
Never mind.

4

I meant the term. Obviously the concept is nothing new.

5

IMHO, cancel culture can’t mean consequences for something that is obviously wrong or bad. It has to mean an unreasonable over-the-top reaction to someone doing something that’s reasonably moderate or justifiable.

6

By that logic people who approve of the Allies fighting back against the Nazis must also approve of what the Nazis were doing.

There is no symmetry between the Right and the Left; the Left can be good or bad, right or wrong; but the Right has always been malignant, dishonest and delusional since the concept was invented. The Right is what you get when you try to systematize “evil” into an actual ideology. The Right is the Creed of Sauron; “cruelty, malice, and the will to dominate all life”.

When has the Right ever had the facts on its side, or done something good?

7

Looks like the term started in 2018 after the Harvey Weinstein and Louie C.K. cases in 2017. They were “cancelled” because people finally stood up and complained about their disgusting and abusive behaviors. Obviously these behaviors were ancient, especially in male-dominated cultures, which were basically all modern cultures, and while there was occasional pushback most of the perpetrators got away with it and stayed important, powerful, and abusive.

I think social media was the difference. Besides the ability to call attention to an issue nationally, tech had a reputation after the Arab Spring for creating movements. Cancel culture became such a movement. Soon everybody could cancel anybody for any reason. What started as a backlash spawned a backlash of its own. Cancel culture ate its own. Now everybody hates everybody and punishing the bad guys is a lost cause. Yea, social media.

8

Lol. I bought a cake from a bakery recently, and asked for a few words and a completely innocuous symbol (representing square dancing). The clerk was happy to bring it to the kitchen and write stuff on it, but she wasn’t allowed to draw any symbols at all. I assured her that i understood why the bakery might have that rule.

But i think “cancel culture” usually refers to “cancelling” people. (Like the red scares.) Not to refusing to publish politically charged symbols.

9

Sort of, but maybe not that last part about it being moderate/justifiable. I think it breaks down into two pieces:

  1. The ‘Justice’ delivered by an excited mob is not guaranteed to be fair or proportionate to the transgression - indeed it’s very likely that the excited state of a hastily self-assembled posse of vigilantes will cause them to overstep reasonable bounds, or that the excitement may magnify and embellish their perception of the transgression.

  2. An obvious outcome does not necessarily equate to a deserved outcome. For example if you serially insult people in public, it won’t be long before you get punched in the face or maybe get thoroughly beaten up. A beating is an outcome that most bystanders could have predicted or could see coming a mile off, but that doesn’t automatically mean it’s a fair or right outcome. Ending up in hospital with broken bones is a worse punishment/outcome than someone probably deserves for verbal abuse.

Thus a person can do a thing that is not at all reasonable or justifiable, and the over-the-top reaction may still be disproportionate to the action.

10

Like many other terms (Karen and woke being others), the use of the word “cancel” in this context originates with Black culture originally, and then was appropriated by the wider discourse - and then misappropriated by RW discourse, just like woke.

11

I think ‘cancelling’ mostly refers to attempts to get someone fired or blacklisted because of their beliefs. If the aim of a boycott is to get an organisation to fire or end their association with an individual because of something they said, or their membership in some kind of association, then it’s trying to cancel them. Parts of the ‘red scare’ would count, AFAIK.

It becomes censorship if it is difficult or impossible to express certain views at all, eg because they are banned on all major social media platforms, publishers refuse to publish them, and/or major booksellers won’t stock anything expressing them. It doesn’t really matter whether this is done by government or private corporations (in some ways the latter is worse, since a few unelected billionaires get to decide what we are allowed to see, whereas at least people can vote for a government that won’t censor so much).

It’s like the difference between government enforced discrimination (eg Jim Crow) and private discrimination (eg employers who refuse to hire, or owners who refuse to rent property to minorities). The former is worse, but the latter is still bad, and can have the same result in practice, if it is widespread enough.

Sure, all you have to do is not join the Communist Party of America or be too friendly with anyone who has.

AFAIK blacklisting due to the Red Scare has traditionally been seen as a bad thing, at least on the left. But communism is genuinely awful: it killed 100 million people, it sent millions to gulags, it kept hundreds of millions more living in poverty and fear for decades. And some American communism supporters genuinely were spying for the USSR. I don’t think you can justifiably say the sorts of speech crimes people are getting cancelled for by Hollywood today are worse. It’s not a principled position to disapprove of the former while supporting the latter.

I’m not sure how much the modern left disapproves of the Red Scare, though. Seems to me that portions of it have embraced support for censorship and enforcing conformity in general.

Also, it’s hard to have sympathy for ‘unlikeable losers’, but that doesn’t mean they deserve to lose their jobs and never work in the area again. It’s common in these cancellation stories that the person targeted did do something foolish or dubious, but the punishment is totally disproportionate to the ‘crime’.

12

This is a good post and a great point. Mob justice is very rarely just.

13

Boycotts, blacklists, or similar actions and reactions, also called canceling, are tools, and like any tools they can be used for good or for ill.

It’s good to boycott (cancel) a local business person if they are using their profits to abuse women and children or spread genocidal rhetoric.

It’s bad to boycott a local business person if they are using their profits to protect and nurture abused women and children or fight against genocidal rhetoric.

And there is a vast gulf of behavior in between which must be evaluated case by case.

Individual cases might be complicated, but the issue of “canceling” should not be. Very roughly speaking, it’s good to cancel bad people who do bad things, and it’s bad to cancel good people who do good things. Who gets to decide? Society, as it always does (and this occurs whether we like it or not). Sometimes society will get it wrong, and individual people should try to help society get it right.

And every single person I’ve ever seen complain about this still has a line (child molestation, perhaps) for which they agree that boycotts/blacklists are appropriate. The only disagreement is for when these tools are appropriate to use. Again, every single person agrees they’re at least sometimes appropriate.

14

Cancel culture is a form of censorship. And to make sure we’re on the same page, censorship is any attempt to silence someone or something because the content is perceived to be objectional.

My first foray into the realm of cancel culture was back when PragerU was being maligned on social media for their YouTube videos. These videos had obviously been written for children (with fun cartoon graphics) that has been assigned some kind of “adult supervision required” tag. My friend’s mom was going on and on about how PragerU was being cancelled, so I went to go check out one of the videos.

I found a fun, cartoony video that was attacking foreign cultures in a way that could only be construed as “racist”. I mentioned this in the comments of the video, and I was attacked by PragerU fanboys trying to convince me that attacking other cultures wasn’t racist because they were attacking the culture and not the race.

Kind of like the arguments I had last summer with people who were trying to tell me that one of the oldest racist tropes in existence, that foreigners were eating pets, wasn’t racist.

At any rate, my attempts to convince these folks that any attempt to invoke superiority over someone else because of that person’s culture was vile regardless of what label was attached to it, I was blocked from posting on PragerU content on both Facebook and YouTube.

Cancel culture, indeed.

As others have noted, everyone supports censorship in some fashion just as everyone supports cancel culture in some fashion.

15

So I think about this scene in Mad Men, I can’t remember the context exactly but Don is firing someone for cause and gets real for a moment when the person breaks down, saying “You’ll find another job.”

I feel like this happens all the time. If I made a boneheaded mistake at work I might get fired, but then go find a job doing the exact same thing because the new company doesn’t have that same context. But let’s say I get fired for an HR issue, like I make a pass at the intern in a way that makes her uncomfortable. What usually would happen, I gather, is that my company would have no choice but to let me go, but then I would turn around and apply for jobs doing the exact same thing.

Let’s say I get a job offer from a new company, but they catch wind that I made a pass at the intern and got fired for it. Would it not be a rational decision for them to rescind their offer? After all, I’ve exhibited behavior incompatible with employment, it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t their intern. If company A had a problem with it, company B should have a problem with it as well.

Extend this to company C, or company D, or company E… every single HR department could make the same, rational decision given the available evidence. None of them are colluding to blacklist me. But the net effect is the same – due to a single “mistake,” I’m effectively unemployable.

What do we do about this? Historically this hasn’t been a problem because there’s lots of companies out there, and one of them is gonna hire me without digging too deep into my previous employment. But if it’s as simple as “Google steronz and you can see this HR issue in a million articles,” then I’m screwed. And that’s the case that celebrities find themselves in.

Is it fair? Probably not. Does it require some organized “cancel culture” brigade? Nope. Just individual studios all making the same, rational decision.

16

Sure, it happens organically without a brigade, but some people have used this as a basis to deny that there ever is a mob of people deliberately stirring the pot and fuelling the process.

(not suggesting you were making such a denial obvs)

17

Based on my recollection, the first failed attempt at cancellation was Morgan Wallen.

Since then, it seems further attempts have been ineffective.

18

Because abhorrent behavior has become increasingly acceptable.

19

I think it started there, but through social media it has spread to anybody doing something mean and getting recorded and shared. The collective internet applies its “that person needs to be punished” filter and someone had the interest to search out and dox the person.

Fair enough, but who decides?

What? I suppose it could be looked at as responding in kind, but I think the assertion was meant as “those mean people doing this bad thing, so we’ll do that bad thing back.”

I would rather point out the disparity of the legal system enforcing a boycott or canceling versus a group choosing not to interact with/do business with someone that is opposed to them.

Like putting a gay wedding topper on a wedding cake?

Yes, thank you for pointing that out. I looked at the wikipedia page and it talks about the rise of that term in Black culture before it began to be applied in a political context, which is then how the RW co-opted it as a sneer term.

20

While technically true, it’s also wrong because of how much it leaves out. No defense of communism or spying is needed to say that thought crime is un-American. Ironically, it’s common in totalitarian regimes including communist ones. America is supposed to be the haven from punishing people for thoughts rather than deeds. Just as in the earlier 1918-20 Red Scare, America abandoned its principles. The hypocrisy of punishing people for supporting the USSR while it was our ally in WWII is exceptionally rank.

One aspect of this abandonment was the punishment of people for guilt by association. Again, this is a particularly heinous form of un-American activities, a deliberate pun based on the name of the Congressional committee which witch-hunted relatives of communists, signers of petitions, and writers whose works didn’t hue to a line. McCarthy never revealed his list of communists in the State Department because he never had one; he merely opened every person there to potential cancellation based on nothing at all.

Real spies were caught and punished. Punished loyal Americans far outnumbered them. Blacklisting was a bad thing at the time and looks even worse in retrospect. One can always disinter one side of an issue and present it in an isolation that makes it look heroic or despicable, but two sides (sometimes more) are needed for understanding.