Time to cancel ‘cancel culture’

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/04/2021 (2013 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

So-called “cancel culture” is nothing new — while the phrase is a relatively recent phenomenon, as are the media platforms that exacerbate it, its confrontational and dismissive dynamic is as old as the public shaming of those deemed moral transgressors, which has occurred for millennia.

Ironically, the hyperbolic misnomer “cancel” is an overstatement guilty of its own accusation.

Cancel culture is a current form of withdrawing support for public figures and entities after they have said or done something considered objectionable or offensive. It is a critical mass of people coming to consensual negative judgment, and in its extreme forms of shunning and ostracism, is driven by self-righteous zeal.

Such cancel culture is said to be sanctimonious sermonizing, stigmatizing and outright bullying, and the denial of fundamental human rights by “thought police.”

Politically, cancel culture has mostly been the denunciation of the left by the right, highlighted last summer by indignation over the statue of Sir John A. MacDonald in Montreal being toppled in protest of his racist policies, which simply reflected his era. This winter the conservative Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms produced a documentary on The Rise of Cancel Culture in Canada, featuring Don Cherry, Stockwell Day, Jordan Peterson, Rex Murphy and Ezra Levant as its victims. The film defended the purportedly absolute right of free speech to be offensive and blasphemous, and free from consequences, in the face of “totalitarian left-wing fascists.”

Nevertheless, historian C. J. Coventry stated that, “While I agree that the line between debate and suppression is one that occasionally gets crossed by the so-called left wing, it is almost invariably true that the real cancel culture is perpetrated by those who have embraced the term. If you look through (western) history, you will find countless examples of people speaking out against injustice and being persecuted in return.”

No doubt cancel-culture extremism can be a vindictive, collective attempt at ruining the reputation and livelihood of an individual or organization in response to perceived harmful opinions or actions. It can be a mob-mentality outrage machine that demonizes historical figures with blinding moral certainty, or purges someone from a position or career for one misstep decades ago for which they have already sincerely repented.

Journalist Ligaya Mishan described it as “the blood-sport thrill of humiliating a stranger as part of a gleeful, baying crowd.”

But all beliefs and movements have their extremists, and none should be characterized by its radical fringe. Anything taken to the extreme becomes grotesque. Extremism always damages its own cause.

Cancel culture joins other conservative slurs such as “libtards,” “bleeding hearts,” “snowflakes” and “social justice warriors.” Most recently, “woke” — active attention to social justice — has been co-opted by its detractors as a signifier of pretentiousness.

Two older, more prominent conservative smears reveal their frequent self-implication. “Virtue signalling” means disingenuous moral grandstanding, yet ironically, wielding the term functions as virtue signalling itself. By decrying virtue signalling, the speaker publicly claims the moral high ground.

Seeking to avoid offending or disadvantaging any particular group of people in society has long been castigated as “political correctness.” But there has always been one predominant political correctness or another. There was a time when racism, sexism, heterosexism, colonialism and paternalism were politically correct; now, not so much.

The charge of political correctness is a historically naïve and rhetorically tiresome accusation, because to condemn political correctness is to engage in the practice while debating the content.

More neutral, accurate and respectful descriptors for the very same social phenomenon are already in use. “Call-out culture” encourages constructive public criticism as speaking truth to power, and discourages disparaging such criticism in an attempt to delegitimize it. “Corporate boycotting” is what Major League Baseball did this month in response to Georgia’s new restrictive voting law, as Georgia-based corporations Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, and almost 200 others spoke out against it.

“Cultural boycotting” is the exercise of agency by people with little structural power who collectively withhold support for particular parties to urge them to better their perspectives or practices. “Call-in culture” addresses parties directly and often privately in a bridge-building manner, calling them to more sensitive, less harmful opinions or actions.

All four variants seek accountability to more than only centralized authority structures, that accountability to the broader community which has always existed in some form, though rarely to the degree it does in our hyper-mediated society. All four also seek a collective reduction of harm and an increase in egalitarian human flourishing.

By seeking social change, they are, by their definition, progressive in wanting to progress beyond the traditional status quo, in contrast to conservative in wanting to conserve the status quo. Conservatives, in turn, view such change as regressive.

If what it means to be Canadian is, as former Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker put it, to be “free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong,” then Canadians are also free to engage in critical speech and action. Redemptively, the variants of so-called cancel culture have merits in moderation, and it cannot be cancelled effectively.

What can and ought to be cancelled is labelling those with whom we disagree with self-incriminating derogatory buzzwords.

Dennis Hiebert is a professor of sociology at Providence University College.