It’s responding to this:
You know that cancelling is basically hundreds, thousands or millions of people piling on and calling the victim a horrible person, right? I want to know why you don’t consider this to have harmed them. Do you believe “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me”?
Easier said than done, I’m afraid. Especially in light of the fact that Trump has blurred the line between himself and David Duke’s ideology. Knowing this it is hard to give Trump supporters the benefit of the doubt four years on. So while I agree that the stark divisions between the two sides are not healthy for society in general, there remains a concept of right and wrong, and Trump and his supporters are on the wrong side of history.
I think such harm is trivial for wealthy and influential people with tens of millions of fans.
This is easy to say for comfortable white people who aren’t being directly harmed and even killed by Trump’s incompetence, corruption, and bigoted policies.
There’s an important distinction that must be drawn, and that’s what the response looks like.
If the response to someone saying something is to criticize them, I’m okay with that. The criticism must be misplaced, but criticism is okay. It’s a pretty anti-free-speech impulse to try to shut down criticism, and that’s how a lot of the “O noes cancel culture!!!” rhetoric comes across. It looks like people want to silence the voices of others, especially of groups who traditionally have been locked out of public discourse.
Being criticized is hard, and I understand why folks find the experience unpleasant. But trying to shut down criticism is a bad impulse, and people should fight against it.
But then there’s the other stuff: rape threats, death threats, doxxing, SWATting, and the like. We can all agree that that’s horrible. To the extent that folks are referring to that when they talk about cancel culture, of course that shit’s unacceptable.
In the middle, there are things like contacting employers about employee behavior. There, I judge it based on the reason for the contact. If someone is marching at a Unite the Right rally and chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” I’m pretty okay with contacting the employer to get the person out of there. If someone is contacting the employer because an employee spoke in Spanish to another employee behind the counter at a restaurant, the contacter sucks.
Reasons matter.
But again, so much of what’s called “cancel culture” is really just people engaging in criticism of other people. Shutting that down is a shitty thing to do, and it’s a tactic overwhelmingly used by the traditionally powerful against the traditionally powerless.
People who publicly make bigoted statements are fair game for ridicule for those bigoted statements. That is indeed one of the most important ways to fight bigotry: to make it socially unacceptable to say bigoted things.
Whether those people are “otherwise decent” is irrelevant and questionable anyway, because by making bigoted statements, one is actively working to maintain a societal system based on bigotry.
Are you similarly worried about “otherwise decent” people who happen to engage in occasional financial fraud or say the occasional murder? Or maybe just one robbery?
I agree with much of what you said but it bears reminding that nobody is suggesting that criticism isn’t a form of free speech or needs to be restricted. What’s being discussed is the manner in which criticism is being used to sometimes suppress free speech. Jon Ronson wrote a book and did a Ted talk about it in 2015. That is what I’m talking about when I talk about the issues with cancel culture in society.
So if people post racist jokes about a wealthy and influential celebrity on twitter, is that also a trivial harm?
I thought they were? What with coronavirus and all?
I know comfortable white people who are Trump supporters, one of whom was killed because of Trump’s incompetence of handling the pandemic. They aren’t wrong because they are white. They are wrong because they are ignorant.
I’m concerned that people who commit crimes receive appropriate and proportionate punishments, yes. That’s what I keep saying, I think in many cases mentioned the ‘punishment’ was completely disproportionate to the ‘crime’.
How much truth do you think there is in this?
To the celebrity, perhaps, but it’s real harm to broader society.
That’s a good point – though there are lots of us privileged, comfortable white people who have yet to be personally harmed by Trump’s policies, and thus it’s probably easy for such folks to say things like that.
Their privilege and whiteness makes it much easier to be ignorant, and makes the consequences of ignorance much less negative.
But you don’t agree that trying to sanction Pinker for his controversial-but-not-actually-bigoted views is harmful to less influential people’s free speech?
Maybe you might consider using a term other than “cancel culture,” because (1) I don’t recall Jon Ronson’s book using that term, and (2) “cancel culture” is being used in many ways that amount to public figures complaining about being criticized by people.
That Harry and Meghan example used above is particularly baffling. I can’t tell who is supposed to have been “cancelled” in that situation.
I think Pinker said some incredibly dumb things and deserves most of the criticism he’s gotten. And I have no problem with most of the social consequences he’s suffered. He said some shitty things and then some people didn’t want to associate with him. Good!
Very little of it. Shitty thread from a shitty tweeter who pretty consistently defends Trump and his enablers on the right and consistently (and mostly inaccurately) attacks progressives.
That’s disingenuous. Six hundred people signed an open letter to the LSA trying to get them to remove him from their list of distinguished academic fellows. That’s not like avoiding someone at a party!
Do you agree with this part?