No One Likes This, Actually

Good Riddance to Cancel Culture

Long before social media, before the existence of the internet as we know it, way back in 1990, I was canceled. It happened in a grad-school class that was cross-listed in the English and History departments. On one of the first days of class, we were discussing the problem of bias in historical sources, and I said, “Finding out the historical truth is a challenge, because there is no Urtext¹ that tells us exactly what happened, but there really are events that have occurred in the real world, and it’s important to try to discover the truth about them.”

The entire class erupted in outrage. You see, this was back when we were acolytes of Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, and their ilk, and when it was thought to be true that there was no such thing as truth. I had committed the sin of admitting in public that I believed that actual events had actually happened, a belief that was taken to be uncool, ignorant, and problematic.² The students mocked and berated me, and the professor did nothing to stop them. A fellow English grad student, with whom I had been friendly in the past, was especially harsh.

For several classes after that, no one would speak to me, and when we had to choose groups for a project, no one was willing to work with me. (My professor eventually assigned a student who was absent that day to be my partner.) And yet I got off comparatively easy, because none of my friends heard about the incident, and so it eventually blew over.

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Shame Culture and Cancel Culture

“Shame culture” is a technical term from anthropology. The distinction between shame culture and guilt culture was first described by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict. In guilt culture, we are defined and judged by what we do. If we commit a wrong, we can make restitution and be forgiven. The US is mostly a guilt culture, which we see in our judicial system, in the rites of confession and absolution in many religions, and in the way we apologize and make amends to loved ones in our daily lives.

By contrast, in shame culture, we are defined and judged by what we are. People are considered to be polluted, untouchable, or outcast for a range of involuntary statuses—for example being a menstruating woman or a rape victim,³ or belonging to a caste that traditionally cleans toilets or handles meat, leather, or corpses. In some cases there is no remedy and the person is permanently outcast, while in others (for example with menstruating women), the person is reintegrated after performing purification rituals.

Shame culture and cancel culture share a few similarities:

The intention of the person doesn’t matter. Online mobs have invoked “intent doesn’t matter” to harass people and even cause them to lose their jobs over benign acts to which cancelers have ascribed evil motives. For example, an electrician lost his job because he was caught on camera cracking his knuckles in a way that some people online interpreted as a white power sign, even though the man said that he had never heard of this sign before. Just a few months ago, a nine-year-old boy of Native American ancestry and his family were exposed on camera and publicly shamed as racists, because the boy wore an Indian headdress and facepaint to a Kansas City Chiefs game. The boy said that the media attention was “scary,” and his mother added that “We didn’t know what blackface even was.”

The pollution spreads like cooties, so that people are reluctant to support the outcast, lest they become outcasts themselves. I suspect this aspect of cancel culture was behind how my acquaintance treated me all those years ago—she didn’t want to be perceived by the other students as endorsing me and my reprehensible belief in historical truth.

Cartoon by Edward Steed for The New Yorker, March 25, 2024.

A notorious example of this contagion effect happened in 2020, when the New York Times published an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton, which called for the National Guard to be sent to quell riots at some of the George Floyd protests. Journalists at the Times claimed that this op-ed made them unsafe, and they successfully demanded the resignation of the editorial-page editor, James Bennet. Bennet didn’t agree with Cotton, but he did think that the op-ed expressed views held by many Americans. Nonetheless, his association with an objectionable idea⁴ was seen as sufficient reason for him to lose his job.

The people being excommunicated are often not the ones in power. The fired electrician was a working-class Mexican American. The boy at the Chiefs game came from an ordinary middle-class family. He had a lot on his plate already—he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at age seven—and the hostile media attention made his life worse. Those New York Times staffers didn’t level their outrage at Senator Cotton or make the effort to build support for Democrats in Arkansas. Instead of going after someone with political power, they ousted Bennet.

Dream Scenario and Cancel Culture

We are starting to see heartening signs of a vibe shift on cancel culture. Of course, heterodox and right-leaning people have been inveighing against cancel culture for years now, but my side of the political aisle has been (sometimes rightly) suspicious of their motives. Recently, though, the left has begun to question cancel culture too, for example in Kristoffer Borgli’s critically-acclaimed film Dream Scenario (2023). (Note: If you want to avoid spoilers, skip to the next section.)

Nicholas Cage plays Paul, a nebbishy schlemiel. His students ignore him, his daughters disrespect him, and a former colleague has stolen his research and is enjoying the money and status that he should share.

Source.

Paul starts showing up in people’s dreams. At first this enhances his status, and his students treat him like a minor celebrity. But then the dreams become nightmares, and everyone feels creeped out by and frightened of Paul. The language the characters use to describe their feelings comes straight from cancel culture: A therapist tells the students, “These dreams suggest that Paul Matthews is a harmful person” (1:02:29), and the school principal bars Paul from attending his daughter’s show because other parents are “worried their kids will feel unsafe” (1:17:55). Even his daughter protests, “You must have done something. Have you SEEN Twitter?” (1:06). Paul loses his job and an endorsement deal, his wife kicks him out, friends shun him, and a raging mob of students vandalizes his car and chases him off campus. He is left lonely, baffled, and bereft.

As with cancel culture, in the film intention doesn’t matter, only people’s feelings. Everyone reviles Paul even though he never meant to upset anyone, nor has he actually hurt anyone in any way. Mystified, he says, “It’s their dreams. I have nothing to do with it” (1:08:46). His plight reminds us of people who have lost their jobs and been the targets of overwhelming, disproportionate rage and hatred for such acts as posing for a joke photo that was in bad taste; “initially opposing a union [they] subsequently supported”; kneeling during the National Anthem, after having been reassured by a member of the military that kneeling was a respectful way to protest; or objecting to the Iraq War.

Paul’s cancellation is contagious; everyone in his life rejects him because they don’t want to be tainted by association. Paul’s wife is pulled off a work project “until this whole thing blows over,” and she blames Paul: “It’s embarrassing to be married to you right now” (1:20). The film also dramatizes the students’ sanctimonious glee when they take down a vulnerable outsider who is unable to defend himself. The film ridicules the characters for their irrational cruelty and cowardice and makes the case that cancellations are immoral.

Pluralistic Ignorance and Cancel Culture

“Pluralistic ignorance” is a clunky term for a simple concept: We often think we are the only ones who feel a certain way about an issue, when in fact we are in the majority.⁵ Dream Scenario is popular and celebrated in spite (or because) of its theme, which suggests that people across the political spectrum dislike cancel culture. Once we are aware that so many others think as we do, it becomes easier for us to resist the temptation to join a cancellation and to speak out against online outrage.

Are we ready give it a try? Here are some ideas for how to extricate ourselves from cancel culture and live happier and more forgiving lives:

Read Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. Ronson has the perfect response to people who think that those being canceled get what they deserve and that it’s not cancel culture, it’s accountability culture. He concedes that in most cases it is true that the person has done something bad—made an inappropriate joke, say—which is why it can feel so righteous and pleasurable to join a pile-on. But internet shaming from millions of strangers is always wildly disproportionate to the original offense. Some people have died by suicide after being canceled. Most of the time someone else’s misdeed is not our business, and our punitive rage at strangers diminishes us. Our country would be a fairer, more humane place if more people read this book.

Be the second person. Few of us are self-sacrificing heroes. Most of us are go-with-the-flow types who are reluctant to stand up, lest we be cut down. I know I am this way, anyway. It can be very difficult to be the first person to speak up. But once someone else does it, we can be the second person. This essay is me being the second person. After I saw Dream Scenario, I decided to join in the vibe shift against cancel culture. Once a second person speaks up, it is easier for others to follow. As the video below argues, “Everyone needs to see followers, because followers emulate followers, not the leader.”

Have some compassion. It can help to remember that there are systemic issues that encourage cancel culture. As my story from 1990 shows, cancel culture is not confined to our own time. It arises whenever people have to compete for scarce resources but lack objective measures of achievement and status, and it is especially prevalent in winner-take-all professions, where a few people enjoy outsized wealth and fame and the majority toil in poverty and obscurity—for example in academic departments in the humanities and social sciences, the media, religious organizations, and nonprofits. In the absence of obvious evidence of success—sports victories, financial profits, solved problems, scientific breakthroughs, and the like—it is all too tempting to demonstrate in-group status by consigning others to the out-group.

When I got over my bewilderment in that classroom, I felt sorry for the other students. The English and History departments used to admit about twice as many MA students as there were places in the PhD programs. The MA students knew they had to distinguish themselves in front of their professors to improve their chances of being admitted to the PhD program. Those students turned on me to show the professor and each other that they were worthier of esteem than I was. Cancel culture is a maladaptive response to zero-sum systems; even the cancelers deserve a bit of sympathy for being stuck believing they need to claw their way up at others’ expense.

Gently push back. There is a difference between feeling angry and upset about someone else’s opinion and being harmed by it. I think those Times staffers knew on some level that they wouldn’t be able to stop the Cotton op-ed simply because they disagreed with it. They needed to claim that it was dangerous. It would have been appropriate for senior workers to ask the younger staffers, “Why do you think Cotton’s op-ed will hurt you? Are you planning to riot?” Well, ok, that’s kind of snarky, but the editors could have offered facts to defuse fears, for example that the National Guard actually protected peaceful protestors from police at some protests. Too often, “unsafe” and “cause harm” are wielded as conversation-stoppers. When we’re talking with a friend, colleague, or loved one, we can try opening the conversation back up by asking, “Why do you think that?”

That being said, never argue with strangers online. If an argument with an outraged and irrational opponent begins to brew, we can protect ourselves with the block button. We can remember our moms’ wisdom about bullies—that if we ignore them, it stops being fun for them—and refuse to react to fools and trolls. On this point I highly recommend this post, from the Technopoptimism blog, which reminds us that

in the entire history of the internet, no one has ever won an argument. I don’t care if Facebook, or YouTube comments sections, or especially X and Reddit are designed to facilitate arguments. You will lose. Because everyone loses.

But when we are offline and out in the real world enjoying life with people we care about, we win. Let’s begin!

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How about you, readers? Have you ever had an experience like mine? What helped? How can we work together to consign cancel culture to well-deserved oblivion? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The Tidbit

So many of our arguments online remind me of this cartoon:

H/t my friend David.

So here’s a final way we can extricate ourselves from cancel culture: Laugh. Both laughter and outrage are contagious. We can choose which one we spread. Therefore choose laughter.

1. Sigh. This is how I used to talk back then. I was trying to show off that I knew what an Urtext was (an original source that predates and informs what we normally understand to be primary sources). I was struck down for my hubris.

2. It may seem improbable that everyone was outraged by such an anodyne and banal comment. But remember that this was the time of the Alan Sokol hoax: Sokol published an article in Social Text, a prestigious academic critical-theory journal, which claimed, among other absurdities, that gravity was socially constructed.

3. While the linked article is about Muslims in India, it has been a pervasive belief throughout history and around the world that a raped virgin is irrevocably defiled. This view appears in literature and the arts too, for example in Clarissa, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Titus Andronicus, Don Giovanni, and The Rape of Lucretia.

4. For the record, I believe that sending in the National Guard would have been a mistake. In my opinion it would have been better for the Times to have run a reported story about the riots and people’s reactions to them, including quotes from Cotton, rather than giving Cotton a whole op-ed to make his case.

However, I don’t think that the op-ed was outside the bounds of civil discourse, nor was publishing the op-ed a fireable offense. The Overton window has shifted so much since 2020 that New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, recently sent in the National Guard to help deter violent crime in the New York subways, a move that was mostly uncontroversial.

5. I highly recommend this episode on pluralistic ignorance from the You Are Not So Smart podcast. Pluralistic ignorance can be deadly. As the podcast discusses, it is one reason that cult members at Jonestown didn’t stop the mass suicide, even though Jim Jones’s hundreds of followers could easily have overpowered him, and even though it is likely that no one wanted to kill themselves. But no one knew how the others felt.