The gay men's discussion group I attend (virtually nowadays) took up the subject of "cancel culture" this month. I considered passing on this one, but it turned out not to be as bad as I'd feared. It was pretty bad, but I learned something from it.
The organizer/moderator began by sketching out the media flurry over "cancel culture," referring to Dr. Seuss, J. K. Rowling, Potato Head, and some other high-profile examples. He immediately disavowed any knowledge about any of them, declaring that he was just going by the headlines he'd seen. Well, great: that discredited him totally - which upset me, since we're personal friends.
The rest of the group accepted his account, which could be called the official account as framed by the corporate media. It quickly emerged that all they knew was what they'd picked up on the fly from headlines. That was significant, but it's notoriously Donald Trump's approach to the news; and ironic, because some of them lamented that other people never read past the headlines of news stories. These men ranged from about 40 to 70 in age, all are articulate and educated, some are professionals (The two non-whites in the group were Asian.) But though all of them agreed that "cancel culture" (or CC) was a big problem, none of them knew much about it -- and I'm being generous there. They agreed that CC is an existential threat to American society, to democracy, to freedom of speech.
I waded in recklessly, arguing that none of the victims they were concerned about had actually been cancelled, if that means losing their jobs because the Twitter mob had jumped on them. J. K. Rowling is still rich, still has her social media accounts (in fact she's part of a Twitter mob, labeled TERFs, trying to cancel transgender people), her books are still in print without let or hindrance. Dr. Seuss is dead, but not because of cancel culture; his estate decided not to keep six of his forty-odd books in print, but they are still in libraries and private collections, no one is breaking down doors to keep these men from reading If I Ran the Zoo to their nephews and nieces. In fact, the most prominent victim of cancel culture is Donald Trump, who lost his job and his social media accounts as a result of it. Several of the other men protested at this, but they made no arguments against it.
Some men bravely acknowledged that CC is not a totally new phenomenon; some were aware of "political correctness," though they accepted the prevailing media account of PC as well. I was increasingly baffled that these intelligent guys knew virtually nothing about the society they live in, including its history, that they didn't get from scanning headlines and listening half-attentively to the TV. Maybe "baffled" is the wrong word, though. "Frustrated" is more like it; it was like trying to reason with Trump supporters.
I mentioned the House American Activities Committee, which had cost people their jobs and fostered -- or benefited from -- a social hysteria about Communists and other dread perils. Some of the others nodded, because everybody knows McCarthyism is bad and cancel culture, like political correctness, is the New McCarthyism. One man protested that it wasn't the same, because HUAC was about politics and principles, about anti-Communism not cultural stuff. I pointed out that among HUAC's targets were homosexuals and Soviet Jews who'd taken over Hollywood and were subverting the minds of the young. I'd wanted to bring up how major newspapers used to print the names, addresses, and often the employers of gay men caught up in bar raids, but couldn't fit it in. I should have mentioned the contemporaneous attacks on comic books and Negro music, both depicted as Communist plots to break down Christian morality and foster race-mixing and juvenile delinquency.
The moderator agreed, but declared that what was new was that this time the intolerance was coming from the left, instead of the right. That is how it's being depicted, I agreed, but that was also true of Red Scares and Political Correctness: the Jewish Communists had taken over Hollywood and the media and wouldn't let Real Americans have a voice, they silenced everyone who tried to be patriotic. The same went for Political Correctness, which was denounced by liberals and the right alike as left-wing intolerance of normal American culture.
Another proposed difference, of course, is social media, and some of the participants were aware that it's been argued that CC represents a democratization of public pressure on certain people and institutions. I agree with this take up to a point: certainly numerous Establishment media figures have been outraged that the rabble dare to disagree with them directly, in larger numbers than they're accustomed to. But I think it's at most a difference of degree rather than kind. Hate mail, including organized campaigns, has been around for a long time. Think of the millions of postcards the FCC received, imploring them not to ban religious broadcasting as the notorious atheist Madelyn Murry O'Hair had petitioned them to do (except that she hadn't). As I was mulling over this post, I also remembered the South African novelist Alan Paton's last novel, Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful, which included a subplot about a South African anti-apartheid writer receiving a long series of racist hate mail.
It could be argued that the difference social media makes is that the mob can see each other at work, whereas the individual writers of hate mail couldn't see what their peers were writing. (Except that often, as with the FCC matter, they were writing together, copying prescribed messages.) That could be relevant, but it can be managed by blocking and reporting. Discussion isn't really being suppressed in these cases; the targets usually are no more interested in real discussion than their critics are.
The real problem, and possibly the real difference, I argued, is not the Twitter mob but institutions: corporations and others that choose to deal with criticism and bad publicity by throwing those who excited the controversy under the bus. I reminded the group of Shirley Sherrod and Van Jones, whom Barack Obama had ditched when right-wing media attacked them, even though the accusations were false. As some in the group pointed out, it doesn't always work that way: the corporate media loved Donald Trump and gave him huge quantities of free airtime. The CEO of CBS said that Trump had made the network millions of dollars. Whatever else is going on, the power lies not with the Twitter mob but with the institutions, the elite few who decide who gets the lucrative platforms. They're the ones who cancel, and they're the real threat to freedom of expression, because they are largely unaccountable. I mentioned Noam Chomsky's famous remarks about concision in corporate media, and someone asked me to post a link to the video.
The discussion quieted down after the first half hour (the meetings last about an hour and a half). Someone brought up Amy Cooper, the woman who lost her job after calling the police on a birdwatcher who'd asked her to put her dog on its leash in Central Park. He was quietly irate that she'd been punished simply for being afraid. I challenged this: I'd watched the video numerous times, including once in the past week when I happened on it again. It's not possible to be absolutely sure, but I pointed out that she didn't retreat or cower, she stalked right up in his face, despite his request not to approach him; and she lied during the call, claiming that he was threatening her, though he was not. Fear can make people behave oddly, but I don't believe she was afraid; she was the aggressor.
Should Cooper have been fired? I don't have the answer, and that's exactly the trouble. We don't have any consistent criteria for people losing their jobs for racism or other bigotry, and corporations (she worked for an "investment firm") can fire employees for bad reasons or no reason at all.
We didn't get around to discussing Dr. Seuss. I'd looked forward to pointing out that children's books have always been heavily censored, with input not only from parents but from librarians and teachers. Theodore Seuss Geisel worked with his publishers and with educational consultants as his books were in production: he was not a free-spirited artist following his Muse hither and yon. You might think that the system of children's book production and publishing is a bad one, but you need to have some idea how it works. It was not the Twitter mob but Geisel's estate, which manages his work, that decided to stop publishing six of his books, which are not only problematic in content but no longer sell very well. The estate had consulted with numerous academics, psychologists, and child development experts before they concluded that racist caricatures of African tribesmen should be retired.
There's a postscript to this discussion. My friend the group moderator is Korean-American, and he posted on Facebook today about J. Mark Ramseyer, Harvard's Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies, who has come under fire for publishing his claims that Korean "comfort women" were not brutalized victims but prostitutes who had voluntarily contracted to supply sexual services to Japanese troops in the service of the Emperor. My friend indignantly demanded accountability for Ramseyer. I pointed out, only partly tongue-in-cheek, that the attacks on Ramseyer were a clear example of cancel culture: a left-wing Twitter mob dogpiling a conservative academic because he expressed Politically Incorrect opinions. My friend retorted that it was not, because the accusations against Ramseyer were backed with evidence. I replied that the same is true of Dr. Seuss: the images in those books are racist, and were declared to be so by academic professionals after long study. It's also true of Rowling, who is an anti-transgender bigot comparable in hatefulness to antigay bigots, whose bogus arguments she recycles for use against transpeople.
Personally, I'm wary of the professionals who vetted Seuss's work. The New York Post article I just linked reports of their study of the books:
“Of the 45 characters of color, 43 are identified as having characteristics aligning with the definition of Orientalism,” the study stated, including 29 wearing turbans.
“Only two of the forty-five characters are identified in the text as ‘African’ and both align with the theme of anti-Blackness,” they wrote, adding that every character of color is also male.
And so on. It's typical bad academic prose, with a dubious theoretical framework. "The theme of anti-Blackness"? I think we have to bear in mind that such professionals in past decades often blocked the publication of children's books that are now regarded as classics (E. B. White's Charlotte's Web is a famous case, but there are plenty of others), and today's academics are just as culture-bound as their predecessors. Much of the academic work on "race" and "ethnicity" today is just as bad, just as distorted in its assumptions, as ordinary discourse on those subjects. None of this means that I disagree with the decision to withdraw those six Seuss books, only that I might disagree with some of the reasoning behind it.
I certainly agree that much public discourse is terrible: not only uninformed but hostile to factual accuracy, driven by emotion and personality cults rather than critical reason. And I agree that freedom of expression is always under threat, often from those who claim to be its champions. That certainly describes my friend, alas, and most of the men in Sunday night's discussion: on the current controversy they haven't bothered to inform themselves beyond skimming headlines, and on the history of the problem they know very little except cliches. (Democracy good, McCarthyism bad!) In these respects they're typical of commercial media and the people who consume them without looking at alternative sources of information. It's not necessarily dishonesty, it's more ordinary human laziness. But once again I'm startled to learn that though I feel inadequately informed because I'm too lazy to read widely and deeply enough, I'm still much better informed than most people.
But as I said at the beginning, the discussion helped clarify my own position. Though many people on the left are as sloppy and (worse) impatient with, even hostile, to rational thought as the right or the center, I'm now sure that "cancel culture" isn't a phenomenon of the left. The danger to freedom of thought and expression comes from centralized power in corporations, government, and other big institutions, who are hostile to the left but are perfectly happy to use us as an excuse to stifle freedom of thought. "Cancel culture," like "political correctness," is a term used not to defend free discourse but to stifle it: once you say "cancel culture," no further argument is needed. Ellen Willis explained it three decades ago, discussing CBS pundit Andy Rooney's dismissal for bigoted commentary:
Yet the real reason Rooney got into trouble was that he violated the media establishment's bland, centrist criteria for acceptable speech. In demanding Rooney's removal, lesbian and gay activists appealed to precisely those standards of "civility" -- that is, niceness -- regularly used to marginalize their own speech ... Rather than pressuring CBS to throw Andy Rooney off the air, GLAAD should have demanded time on 60 Minutes to rebut him. In choosing instead to define his speech as an intolerable threat, they merely reinforced the basic assumption of the dominant culture that we can't afford freedom, that all hell will break loose if we relax controls.And as more recent commentators have argued, the Dr. Seuss fuss has enabled right-wing media to pretend that they care about freedom of expression while distracting attention from issues like Republican attempts to block important legislation in Congress, preserve the filibuster, and suppress voting rights at the state level. It looks to me, happily, as their tactics aren't working as well as they used to, but it still bothers me that so many liberals and centrists find their siren song pretty effective.
