Yes, There Is Such a Thing as Cancel Culture

By Noah Carl. Excerpt:

"Regarding the first of the four criticisms above, the fact that some prominent figures with large platforms have opted to speak out against cancel culture, and have lived to tell the tale, is largely irrelevant. The Harper’s letter itself bent over backwards to mollify prospective critics, so it’s hardly surprising that the vast majority of signatories felt comfortable adding their names. What’s more, as others have pointed out, some prominent individuals who signed the letter may have done so precisely because they were invulnerable to being cancelled. After all, cancel culture is designed not merely to punish the target for his or her alleged transgressions, but also to “encourager les autres.” And many of those “autres” may not have the clout or the resources to risk speaking out.

On a related note, it is sometimes argued that cancel culture doesn’t exist, or is greatly exaggerated, because people who get cancelled can still express themselves afterward in interviews or on social media. “Oh, you lost your job and your livelihood. Then how come I can still read your tweets?” The fallacy here is to assume that an individual’s speech has only been infringed when there is literally someone holding a gun to their head telling them what they can and can’t say.

Regarding the second criticism, it is not exactly clear who the counter-petitioners had in mind when they stated that “marginalized voices have been silenced for generations in journalism, academia, and publishing.” If they were referring to the underrepresentation of individuals from certain groups in the relevant domains, then that is a separate issue from whether cancel culture exists. If they were referring to specific individuals from those groups who were subjected to cancellations of their own, then we can agree that such cases are highly regrettable. But the fact that individuals from certain groups may have been targeted in the past does not mean we shouldn’t be concerned about individuals from other groups being targeted in the present.

Regarding the third criticism, the authors of the Harper’s letter presumably chose to mention only a handful of cases because they were constrained by the need to reach consensus, and by the space available in the magazine’s Letter section. However, there are many more examples they could have mentioned. The number of speaker disinvitation attempts at US universities has been trending upwards since the late 1990s. Reddit recently banned around 2,000 “subs,” comprising both left- and right-wing content, following renewed protests against the site’s “lax policies.” And Toby Young, who set up the Free Speech Union earlier this year, stated in an article on July 4th, “At the FSU, we used to get half a dozen requests for help a week. Now we get half a dozen a day.”

Regarding the fourth criticism, it strikes one as slightly disingenuous to claim that cancel culture is just people being held “accountable” for their views. (Readers may recall a scene in Chernobyl where the deputy chairman of the KGB euphemistically describes his organisation as “a circle of accountability.”) To begin with, there have been some truly egregious instances of cancel culture, which puts the lie to the suggestion that everyone who gets cancelled needed to be held “accountable” for something. For example, Boeing’s communications chief recently resigned following a complaint about an article he wrote… 33 years ago.

Moreover, this understanding of “accountability” lacks any notion of proportionality, and views people with opposing views as enemies to be punished, rather than as fellow citizens to be persuaded (or, at worst, provocateurs to be ignored). As Steven Pinker has argued, “in terms of the psychology and social dynamics that arise from the psychology,” cancel culture has parallels with the Chinese cultural revolution and the European witch hunts.

To sum up, there is such a thing as cancel culture, and the arguments put forward by the anti-anti-cancel culture petitioners are not very convincing. In his famous essay On Liberty, the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill warned against “the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them”. His words remain as true today as they were in 1859."