Cancel Culture and Virtue Signaling -- What’s the case against them?

Great Debates
1

Far as I can tell, I’m all for them both.

I don’t even understand what someone is telling me when they find anything wrong with either, but maybe I’m not seeing what I’m doing wrong.

For example, I don’t watch much sports anymore, and specifically I don’t watch the NFL. I haven’t seen an NFL play in five years now, out of sympathy for Colin Kaepernik. I decided that the NFL was being racist when this guy couldn’t get a job in the NFL because he protested racial inequities by kneeling before a game, so I decided to see if I could go a whole season without watching a game. So far, I’ve gone five, and I don’t miss it.

And I used to be a fan. Not the nuttiest fan in the world, but I used to spend a few hours every Sunday in front of my TV, and talk about the games with friends, etc. Now I don’t.

I don’t think I’m accomplishing much by my personal boycott. Maybe if the subject comes up, someone will find my reasoning persuasive, but I don’t really put much effort into explaining my position. I just feel better for not supporting the NFL in any way.

Best as I understand this, I am practicing cancel culture and virtue signaling by boycotting the NFL, and being open about it. My argument is, Why should I support something I think is fundamentally flawed? It’s like that with baseball, too, or almost: I USED to be a nutty MLB fan—I even made part of living writing about baseball for five years. I might know more about the game than anyone on this site, and if I don’t it would take a very long contest to decide the winner, but I detest the DH rule, and I’m thinking that if MLB adopts it universally this season, as they say they will, that’s it for me. No more baseball.

Why would anyone care what I choose to watch, or not watch? I’m aware that I’m being symbolic in boycotting these things. I just don’t want to be a part of things I disapprove of.

Isn’t this how capitalism is supposed to work? If I patronize a restaurant but I find out the owner is a Nazi, or a religious nut, or a sex offender, and there’s another restaurant almost as good at scrambling eggs, doesn’t it simply make sense for me to switch restaurants? Aren’t I entitled to feel good, or at least not to feel bad, about putting my money in the hands of someone I disapprove of? If I learn that the owners of Home Depot and Lowe’s hold political views I disapprove of, why not drive an extra mile to pick up a box of screws at an independent hardware store?

Sometimes there’s not even any animus involved. I subscribe to a website where the proprietor is practically a saint—donates all the proceeds to good causes, is very knowledgeable about the subject of the website, and seems like a kind and humble man personally. But he features a Q-and-A section on his website that is very poorly run. I post a question and I find that my question is “awaiting moderation” for days, sometimes weeks, while other people’s questions (they’re all dated) are answered immediately, so I complain “What’s going on here?” and the answer I get is “Oh, your question was fine, that one slipped through the cracks, sorry, my bad” but this keeps happening over and over and over, so I decided not to continue my subscription and to tell him politely that this was the reason.

Did I ‘cancel’ him? Am I virtue signaling? Or just using my small power, the subscription fee, to emphasize my message that I really wish he’d improve that part of the site?

I don’t understand what people are saying when they speak pejoratively of cancel culture and virtue signaling. To me, they’re positive ways of emphasizing my positions.

2

With regard to virtue signaling, I think the problem some people have is that they perceive those doing the signaling are perceived to be hypocritical. Maybe they wear a Black unity band in their Apple Watch but act racist in their personal lives.

Cancel culture is a different story. Boycotts can be effective, but they aren’t always the best tool to use, especially when we’re talking about a large organization rather than an individual. Where would we be, for example, if Jackie Robinson had decided he didn’t want to have anything to do with MLB? There’s other ways to encourage changes in behavior. Take the current situation with Brian Flores, the NFL, and the Rooney rule. Clearly the collective hiring practices of the league for head coaching positions is racist. He didn’t just decide to take his ball and go home, however, and neither did many of the Black people involved with the NFL.

3

They’re not the only options, and not always the best ones, true. But I don’t see the flaw in either one.

As to hypocrisy–sure. We’re all born hypocrites. I try to let that one flow down my back.

With Robinson, the better example might be “a black baseball fan, pre-1947, deciding not to give his money to the Yankees when he could attend a Negro League game instead.” Nothing wrong with that.

4

If you avoid a business because they’re just not performing their job very well, that’s one thing. The owner probably doesn’t like it very much, but I don’t think anyone would disagree with your decision to spend your money elsewhere.

It’s different if you decide not to patronize a business because you disagree with the personal/political/religious actions of the people who run it. People fight back against that by calling it “cancel culture”; giving it a short, catchy name lets them rail against it without having to understand what’s going on. It translates to “waah, they’re not only doing the right thing, they expect me to do the right thing, too!”

5

Cancel culture and boycotting are very different.

Boycotting = “I don’t like Thing XYZ, so I won’t partake of it, but if others want to, that’s their thing.”

Cancel culture = “I don’t like Thing XYZ, and I want to get it destroyed, so others can’t watch/participate in it either.”

6

That’s how I perceived it too, with a large dose of “convicted in the court of public opinion” thrown in, and that’s why I’m all for boycotts, but pretty much opposed to cancel culture.

I mean, someone’s life/livelihood shouldn’t be destroyed because of someone else’s misperception, or worse, differing opinion. I mean if someone holds an opinion you disagree with, that’s NOT grounds to actively seek to “cancel” them. Especially if it’s a question of orthodoxy or ideological purity.

7

Though “cancel culture” has also been claimed in cases where it was not opinion but behavior that was the issue-Louie C.K. springs to mind. His career was of course not destroyed, but it suffered a setback, temporary as it was.

8

I was actually thinking more about academia than public figures like entertainers.

Academics Are Really Worried About Cancel Culture - The Atlantic

9

They’re tools, like any other. Like most tools, they can be used for good or ill. Sometimes people deserve to be “canceled”, and canceling them would be good for society as a whole as well (i.e. David Duke, Donald Trump, etc., at least IMO). Sometimes the wrong people are canceled, and that’s a shame.

Same goes for virtue signaling. Virtue signaling for Civil Rights, for example – being welcoming to minority customers, being sure to hire minority workers, etc. – is a very good thing for society, even if someone is doing it just to appear “virtuous” rather than out of genuine decency. Masking, sharing that one has been vaccinated, etc., is similarly good for society if it helps encourage others to take such protective health measures. Even if one is doing it just to appear “virtuous”. It can also be pointless or even negative, depending on the circumstances.

10

Actually, an organized boycott, like the Montgomery Bus Boycott, is saying “We want as few people as possible to partake, so that Company ABC will feel economic pressure and change Thing XYZ.”

11

Possibly, but the difference is that with boycotting, you usually are OK with the thing still existing, you just want its policy to change.

Whereas with cancel culture, it goes a step further: The idea is to kill the thing itself rather than just mere reform (i.e., not just get a professor to stop saying controversial things, but to actually have him fired so he won’t be a prof anymore.)

12

It’s only cancel culture and virtue signaling when libs do it. That’s the long and the short of it.

13

It wasn’t clear to me whether your “Thing XYZ” referred to something like a policy or practice, or to the person, company, or organization that was engaging in that policy or practice.

In fact, I’d say “cancel culture” is often about punishing someone for a one-time thing they once said or did, as opposed to an attempt to get them to change.

14

We should differentiate between the clowns who shout “cancel culture” and “virtue signaling” because they’re good attacks to use against the perceived Enemy, and people who are actually disturbed by a behavior that they have observed, and do not ally themselves with one side or the other in the mudfight, or, if they do, are more sympathetic to the ones they’re critiquing.

With attention focused on the latter, in both cases the underlying concern is nearly identical to the concern about “political correctness” and “litmus testing” and what it amounts to is a dislike for quick-call judgments instead of being willing to listen to the entirety of what is being assessed. That one phrase, even if not taken out of context, should not discredit someone’s entire body of thought. That not everyone who dissents with a viewpoint as expressed in a specific popular terminology is necessary a bigot or an evil person. That we do ourselves no favors by boiling things down to the oversimplification of “four legs good, two legs bad” and should instead consider all the nuances and suspend our own judgments and reconsider everything in light of whatever someone new might have to say about it, so as to come out of it all that much more confident that we’ve arrived at our viewpoints without being closeminded.

The counter-argument is that “we’ve heard this a few million times, how many goddam times do we have to reargue the same basic point? it’s a tactic to keep us snarled up in the same discussion, and we want to move on!”. There’s a certain legitimacy to that too. Do you really want to pause and give serious consideration to yet another intellectual-sounding explanation for why the nonwhite races really are actually inferior? Do we have to? Doesn’t that lend fuel to the notion that they’re pushing, that an egalitarian attitude about race actually isn’t established in our species as a truthful and accurately-founded perspective?

15

They’re the same thing. IMO Trump’s businesses deserve to be boycotted because most of the Trumps are criminals and traitors (morally so and maybe legally so as well). I hope they’re boycotted into non-existence, or at least into becoming shells of their former selves, if they don’t end up being sued/prosecuted into non-existence. The only new thing is that social media has made such activities a lot easier and more likely to succeed.

16

Virtue signaling is an idiom that does not just mean “signaling virtue”. It always has the negative connotation of ostentation and insincerity. It means ostentation for the primary purpose of impressing others with your apparent virtue, with the implication that you might be less willing to actually do anything substantial involving any self-sacrifice.

So I would not use the term in the manner you describe in a scenario where there might be bona fide reasons to do something prominently and publicly. I recall a recent news story from Macedonia where an 11-year-old girl with Down Syndrome was being bullied, and the president personally came and walked her to school. In describing what he did, you might say: “He was not just virtue signaling, but seeking to raise public awareness.”

17

Perhaps. But in my experience seeing the term used, it’s usually bullshit in its implication of ostentation and insincerity. For example, I’ve seen lots of dumb assholes call masking and publicly disclosing vaccinations virtue signaling. That’s still the “good” kind of virtue signaling, and ostentation or even insincerity are irrelevant (and usually inaccurate anyway).

18

I agree. It’s most often used by nasty people who have no desire to do good to falsely impugn those who do.

19

The “useful tool” I see in use most often is the accusation of “cancel culture” and/or “virtue signaling” to stifle opposing opinions.

20

Just like PC and woke, virtue signaling is now another right-wing snarl word.

If I’m doing something virtuous and I want to set an example, there’s nothing wrong with me signaling that. However, as it is currently used, it’s just a snarl word, and those who use it can probably be ignored.