February 13, 2021
Cancel culture
Most people have likely not heard of Gina Carano. She’s an actor who has risen to modest prominence after starring in The Mandalorian streaming on Disney+. Earlier this week, she was fired by Lucasfilm, the show producer, after she blitzed social media with a series of posts in which she likened the contemporary American political climate for Republicans to the plight of Jews during the Holocaust.
Per my reckoning, we are now at peak anti-woke-ism. If this were a book, we’d be in Chapter 5 or 6. Chapter 7 will be about the beginnings of an anti-anti-woke-ism phase of American culture wars. Is anti-anti-woke the same as woke? Stay tuned. I see ‘The Rise of a Twitter Thread,” a Hulu documentary in our future, premiering in 2022.
There is a lot of talk about cancel culture these days. It’s fair to start out by stating the ‘sincere conservative’ position, if there’s even such a thing anymore. It pivots around free speech as a cornerstone principle in democracies. It’s about how free speech is really an enlightened liberal value and how if liberals seek to win arguments by force, monopolizing of megaphones and tone policing, it will ultimately end in a society with very little free speech left in it. They describe cancel culture as liberal driven, which has conquered the arts, the corporate world and academia, and uses that power to cancel anyone who disagrees. I think I’ve done a good job of summing up their argument.
On the face of it, the sincere conservative position appears reasonable, even plausible. To tip my hand and reveal my bias, I find it hard to take classical positions seriously anymore. They may have worked in some ancient past in a narrow context, but more often than not they fail to grasp how facts and speech intersect in practice. My opinion is that the world has become a place where it is increasingly not important to agree about most things with other people. Consensus building has evolved into some form of weird role play, sought by some as a lifestyle choice. Those who seek debate are knights in a medieval era, who really seek jousts. At best, they offer entertainment. At worst, they create strife. When was the last time a sincere debate led to meaningful impact on the world, I wonder. Perhaps in the late 1940s when there were some persuasive arguments made for world peace, which led to the dismantling of the British empire, creation of NATO and the United Nations, etc? A skeptic might view even those dialogues as Russian and American machinations to replace the English as the new power brokers.
Also, classical arguments don’t consider the boundary conditions and the costs of their positions. They operate in theoretical vacuums. In a 100% White and Christian America, there are no costs to debating the merits of Caucasian exceptionalism or the place of Christianity in society. Introduce colored, non-Christians into the mix, and the costs to society escalate rapidly.
There’s a fairly wide divergence in the views of cancel culture. At one extreme, there are those who don’t even believe that it exists. Others look at it as a crude but necessary mechanism to rid the world of misogyny, racism, homophobia and privilege. Some regard it as working some of the time but prone to abuse. At the other extreme are folks like Carano who regard it as cancerous to society and civilization.
What is cancel culture? WIthout a proper definition, it’s near impossible to understand, let alone debate it. Unfortunately, there isn’t one. And I will offer my own. Cancel culture is when people whose power rests directly on public approval lose that power and associated benefits as a result of approval turning into disapproval. You have to be meaningfully rich or powerful to be cancel-able. It’s cancel as in a book or a TV show, not a dinner or a party. There has to be some sort of a rival mob led by rival elites. A relatively non-famous actor like Carano is not being canceled. She is simply being fired for creating a hostile work environment. A Mel Gibson can be canceled for anti-Semitism, but not the man who works on his set. An investor disinvited from speaking at a college commencement is not being canceled. He is simply being disliked. A small business owner boycotted for posting racist tweets is a corner case. A lot of what is being mislabeled as wokeism or cancel culture should really be analyzed for what it is - specific battles over power and institutions. Like board seats or committee control or business rivalry. These turf wars are not new. They have been around for a long, long time.
Protesting and demanding justice for an actual crime isn’t cancel culture. It is a natural progression of things. I think it’s best to not get too hung up on definitions. Think ‘a large, less powerful group policing a small, more privileged and powerful group outside of the legal system through social influence and inflicting material losses to restore a balance of power.’ Everyone is always trying to rule the world. The goal is not to rule, but to be left alone by whoever is in power.
Few of us are consciously selfish. None of us gets out of bed in the morning wishing to wilfully harm others. When in doubt, we try to weigh kindness over inflicting pain. We differ only in self awareness about how we weigh and rank the pain of all involved, and in how hard we work to see hidden pain. We must, of course, prioritize our own pains. It is a basic tenet of survival. Once the basic survival needs are met, the marginal value of putting ourselves first rapidly diminishes. Those who continue prioritizing themselves well past the survival basics tend to be broken in fundamental ways.
Let’s say you came of age in an all-male misogynistic world, like I did, where we were used to participating, at least passively, in a no-cost misogynistic humor. Locker room talk. All men know what this is. It was a world in which guys self-censored crude jokes about women when they were present. Why did they self-censor? It was put down to “respect for women present” but that is obviously BS. Honestly, I wonder if we men now feel muzzled or have discovered new found shame. The difference between then and now is the difference between noblesse oblige type favor granted by the powerful to spare feelings, “Hey watch it bro. There are women present” and the fear of consequences imposed by actual victims for suffering actual harm. People who worry about cancel culture should ask themselves how they would behave in its absence. Would you make a racist joke in every context? Some contexts? No context? We are all still free, as in speech, just not as in lunch. A lot of the complaints about cancel culture while they pose as free speech arguments are actually complaints about the latter, i.e. they are complaining that there are no more free lunches. No one likes to pay for what was once free. Men used to paying no costs for bad behavior resent that there is now a cost. It’s a new world, boys. Giddy up.
It’s disappointing though that we have lost all interest in the underlying issues. The internet of beefs has taken over. It doesn’t mean that the issues have disappeared. It just means that they are evolving in less obvious and ungoverned ways. I suspect that somewhere in this debate about cancel culture, we have obscured, even forgotten, the enormous progress we have made towards demanding and practicing basic decency and respect for others, especially those who have not been treated with decency and respect for thousands of years. It’s an important debate nonetheless and we must continue it. More on this in the next letter.
As of this week, 50 million Americans have received at least one dose of the vaccine. No, not this Vaccine, but the other deal that keeps Covid-19 away. That’s great.
A Singapore professor realized, after a two hour lecture, that he had been speaking on mute all the time. Some students tried to let him know but to no avail. But, all of them stayed till the very end. This begs the questions: Am I the professor? Am I on mute? Are you the student hanging on in hope that this will become interesting at some point? Don’t be shy. Write back.
Stay safe. The next 100 million doses of the Vaccine are around the corner.
One man’s meat is another man’s poison. While debate and free speech, in its true form is absolutely the essence of democracy, people shouldn’t get carried away when countering someone’s point of view and start abusing the person and their views. Celebrities, on the other hand, are supposed to be cautious about what they express in public forums, but in most instances, they reveal their ignorance, lack of maturity and thoughtfulness. ‘Cancel culture’ has been a boon in such cases where the so called ‘public figures’, for the sole intent of cheap publicity, put offensive and meaningless posts, and are justifiably censured or trolled and put in place.
"Cancel Culture", heard this term the first time. Very thought provoking subject. In my words, it is a close cousin of "free speech". The difference is how each term applies to the person that participates in the activity. But both have a serious flaw in that lies and falsehoods can be used in the name of cancel culture or free speech creating a false sense of "passion" among the believers of the perpetrator. This is like a movie director making the audience feel empathy for the protagonist or hatred for the villain because it is her creation of false sense of feelings. In either case (cancel culture or free speech), I believe that these days a modicum of honesty is missing. Let me pick on the Republican party, why don't they come clean and say, "we are a party of white supremacists". Many of us may not agree or like that, but I certainly respect the honesty.