The other day, following Bari Weiss’s appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher, I posted a diary asking two questions about “cancel culture”: (1) Why is “cancel culture” a good reason to vote Republican? and (2) How is canceling “cancel culture” (by telling people what they can and can’t say or do in response to other people’s offensive words or behavior) any different from “cancel culture”?
The discussion of the second question essentially answered the first, at least in the sense that anti-”cancel culture” crusaders like Weiss, Maher, and Andrew F***ing Sullivan, seem to think that voting Republican or electing Republicans is the way to cancel “cancel culture,” by making its [anonymous] adherents re-think their tactics. Notwithstanding how insane that is (and how things have not, in fact, worked out that way), electing Republicans appears to be the only solution to “cancel culture” that those who think we should cancel “cancel culture” have been able to come up with. If there’s another, I haven’t heard or read it anywhere.
As the prior diary pointed out, “cancel culture” is not a person or even a group of people that can be identified by name or face; it’s an abstract, amorphous aggregation of social-media content that the Mahers, Weisses and Sullivans of the world talk about as if it were a golem from Jewish folklore. It’s a strawman, basically, against whom the “victims” of “cancel culture” can’t retaliate in reciprocal fashion because it doesn’t have a name, a face, a job that they can get it fired from, or a platform that they can get it kicked off of.
That’s why their only solution is, and has been, to hang “cancel culture” around the necks of the national Democratic Party, its candidates and officeholders, by implying that a vote for a Democrat is a vote for “cancel culture,” concern-trolling about Democrats losing votes (or voters being unable to support Democrats) because of it, and by extension, helping Republicans get elected — even though actual Democrats are in no way responsible for it and neither Party, in office, can actually do anything about it legislatively or administratively.
So, is there another solution? Is there another way to cancel “cancel culture,” assuming there is a reason, need or desire to do so (on which I do not herein mean to express an opinion)?
I think maybe there is. I’m reminded of when I was a high-school English teacher and had to deal with teenage students’ personal “opinions,” viz., kids who didn’t “like” whatever literary text they were assigned to read, or whatever work product they were assigned to produce, or my class in general, or me personally. For years I expended tremendous thought and effort trying to change, influence, and/or accommodate those adolescent opinions and feelings, with little success, until I realized that that was the wrong approach.
It might have been after I started law school (which was about 4½ years before I left teaching), but eventually I figured out the correct approach: make it irrelevant. Acknowledge their opinions and feelings, don’t invalidate them, but make it clear that those opinions and feelings do not alter or abrogate their obligation to do their schoolwork, produce work product as-assigned, and demonstrate learning therein, as well as my obligation to provide them with the instruction they need, make expectations clear, answer their questions, provide whatever help they seek, and grade their work fairly, objectively, and honestly.
I could go on and on about all that, and I will simply say that it worked so much better than the other approach in terms of producing learning outcomes, but the point here is that if there is a reason or need to cancel “cancel culture,” assuming it can be done, the way to do it is to make it irrelevant, whether that means, e.g., ignore it, don’t make a thing out of it if it isn’t a thing, don’t make it more of a thing than it really is, don’t attribute to it anything that’s not attributable to it, and don’t tie it to anyone who’s not responsible for it.
Maher, on his show, asked the question that if practically no one likes, agrees with or approves of “cancel culture” then “who has this power, and how can they exert it so fully?” A good question, to which neither Weiss nor the other guest, Thomas Chatterton Williams, attempted a substantive answer, because there really isn’t one. If anything, I think the answer is that no one, viz., no actual identifiable person or group of identifiable people, “has this power,” and that this abstract amorphous aggregation of social-media content “can exert it so fully” because we, collectively, respond to it by (a.) making a thing out of it, (b.) giving the thing what it wants, (c.) complaining about (b.) and martyring the “victims,” (d.) looking for (but not finding) ways to make the phenomenon go away or negate its influence, and (e.) making monumentally important decisions, like who to vote for (or not) and who to put in charge of our federal government, in a vain effort to accomplish (d.).
The marketplace of ideas includes the idea that there are things we shouldn’t tolerate in a polite, modern, civilized, enlightened, just society, and that some ideas, and people who harbor them, don’t deserve a public platform or to be paid for expressing them. We’ve all been admonished at one time or another for being intolerant of intolerance; now we’re discussing whether we should tolerate intolerance of intolerance. Which will inevitably lead to a discussion of whether we should tolerate intolerance of intolerance of intolerance, and so on ad infinitum. Clearly, “tolerance” is the wrong rubric to be using in this conversation; as I’ve written before, “tolerance” is not a virtue in itself.
Again, my point is not to express an opinion about “cancel culture” or as to whether it should be canceled, or is a pressing societal problem on par with, e.g., health care, inequality, or climate change. The only solution to this “problem” that I’ve been able to discern, from those who consider it a problem that needs to be solved, is to hang it around Democrats’ necks and elect Republicans. Of course, there’s a huge difference between a teacher not giving students the power to set their own curriculum and standards, and the larger world not giving an amorphous aggregation of social media content the power to “cancel” people who say the wrong things or express the wrong thoughts, but I think the basic concept is analogous and thus suggests a better solution: make it irrelevant.
Is there a third option?