Yes Cancel Culture Exists: It's Called "Living in a Society"
How Dr. Seuss's "The Sneetches" explains everything
I realize that the title of this one might seem intentionally provocative or even click-baity. I guess I’m asking you to trust me that the piece is not meant to be.
This week the creator of the Dilbert comic strip (which I was shocked to learn still exists), went on a racist rant and got the iconic relic of cubicle-culture targeted by “cancel culture.” The whole thing got me thinking about something I’m noticing in class lately.
Increasingly, I find myself in conversations about life and current events and someone wants to use the term “cancel culture” or one of its variants. This often happens with my students and I started noticing a distinct self-censorship reflex when it does. Whenever someone wants to talk about someone’s career going up in flames for some terrible thing they’ve said or done, they describe it as being “canceled.”
Then I notice it. Their eyes shift around to see how that term just went over in the group. This is often followed by a quick, belated use of scare quotes.
And that’s the big clue isn’t it? We often use scare quotes to say something that we really mean but that we think we shouldn’t say in polite society. It’s a convenient shorthand; it efficiently says:
“here’s what I mean and I know you know what I’m talking about, but now you know I know I’m not supposed to say it. Let’s understand one another and just move on with my larger point.”
The whole thing has just become silly. We would be much better off not worrying about the term and just discuss the criteria that makes someone “the main character of Twitter” for a day. Sometimes it’s good to cancel people, sometimes, it’s an over-reaction.
But, like virtually everything else in our stupid, identity-mired culture war, the use of the term “cancel culture” (scare-quoted for my own protection) has become something to fight over and to distinguish the virtuous and enlightened from the barbarian hoards.
Everything about our collective social and political life resembles nothing so much as Dr. Seuss’s “The Sneetches,” with the star-bellied sneetches going to great lengths to distinguish themselves from those sneetches that “have no stars on thars.” I highly recommend this animated film version of the story as it basically describes to the letter how all this ridiculous culture war serves only the corporations getting rich off of it.
I would say that it’s ironic that Seuss himself has recently been involved in “cancel culture” debates, but our world is beyond irony, sadly.
Let’s discuss it like it’s a sportsball game: wearing red, it’s Team Righty facing off those kids in blue, direct from the coasts, Team Lefty.
Railing on and on against “cancel culture” has become a lazy right-coded political stance in the culture war, something like the how the star-bellied sneetches insist on their higher virtue in the great Dr. Seuss story. This despite the fact that for most of my life, it was right-leaning people wanting to cancel everything from The Simpsons to Colin Kaepernick. Since it plays well for ratings on Fox News, it’s become politically convenient for these people to paint left-coded political stances as hyperactive and un-serious for waging online cancellation campaigns like “Cancel Colbert.” The political right’s hysteria about “cancel culture” is boring and hypocritical.
But remember, dear reader, that there are two kinds of sneetches on the beaches! So because it’s become a thing associated with said boring and hypocritical righties, the people who identify as their opposite, on the left of the spectrum, have made it a knee-jerk reflex to simply say “they’re so stupid. Cancel Culture doesn’t even exist.” This too is a boring and hypocritical stance, and it requires that I ignore reality so I’m not mistaken for a conservative. As I said before, there was literally an online campaign to “Cancel” Colbert and it literally used the term “Cancel.” And in every celebrity news cycle, if you click on the corresponding trending topic on Twitter, one of the first responses will invariably be that it’s “time to cancel celebrity x now.”
This absurd political reality is why the whole thing is silly to me.
But since I’m here, I may as well predict three of the main pre-fabricated social media responses to my extremely reality-based and logical assertion that “cancel culture” does in fact exist. (I’ll say more at the end).
Argument 1: It’s Just Markets
A good liberal will probably first say something like, “it’s not cancel culture, it’s just markets at work. There’s nothing to this!”
To which I first say, “yes yes, those markets that left-leaning people just love so much in other contexts, right?” Corporations dumping toxic waste into rivers can be defended by that same argument, mind you.
But my main response to that is, of course! Yes, markets are one of the mechanisms by which collective action gets taken in our society. This is a reality of literally everything that takes place under capitalism. That reality doesn’t necessarily justify the movement. Sometimes markets can be manipulated in less than fair ways and Twitter mobs are terrifyingly good at exploiting that potential cruelty. McCarthyism employed market forces too, remember.
Argument 2: If Cancel Culture is Real, then Why is X Still Working?
This is always tweeted out as if it’s some sort of case closed, mic drop that needs no further discussion. Freddie deBoer recently covered one under-analyzed aspect of this argument (suggesting that it really means you WANT cancel culture to exist, even as you claim it doesn’t). There’s another aspect to this argument, one that is related to the whole “just markets” thing.
Because Louis C.K. is still touring despite have been outed as an abusive perv, that supposedly means that “cancel culture” is a fairy tale. What I would argue is that sometimes, in any war, you just lose some battles. Just because Louis C.K. has found another act to his career, that doesn’t mean that people didn’t actively try to use market forces (see above) to keep that from happening. This case is, for now, a culture war battle that one interested side happened to lose. The situation does not preclude the existence of targeted marketing. Also, you can’t celebrate markets (see Argument 1) only when they benefit you. If the market giveth, the market can taketh away too. And in fact, that is exactly how markets work.
Argument 3: It’s Consequence Culture
This is the most convincing of these three argument. Yes. Most of the time, someone finds themselves in the harsh spotlight of “cancel culture” because they did something that results in well-earned consequences being levied by markets or whatever. I don’t really argue against this point, except perhaps to say that the legal system does accept the concept that a guilty person can pay their debt to society at some point. All consequences don’t have to be life-sentences.
I do think, however, that the term “consequence culture” has a eye-rolling, parental quality to it and it sounds too much like being sent to the principal’s office by a substitute teacher to be truly effective or, frankly, taken seriously. If liberals don’t like being caricatured as humorless scolds, I would recommend steering away from this term as a wartime tactic.
Resident Alien
I hope that my alienated position in this debate is clear enough: I have no patience with the conservative hysteria about crazy liberals cancelling everything that offends them (they are, as I’ve said, the masters at this — I give you Governor DeSantis’s insane political passions). I also have no patience with the liberal position of denying reality. Of course cancel culture exists and sometimes it does become an asinine, virtue-signaling witch hunt. Not always or even often, but sometimes.
In case you’re interested, there is a book forthcoming that apparently makes a progressive case for just accepting that “cancel culture” is real and apparently a good thing. I find the honest straightforwardness of this premise frankly refreshing.
I suppose that I’ll keep using the scare quotes when I talk about it, because I will invariably keep talking about it.
Here’s my position: “cancel culture” or whatever you want to call it is a necessary condition of literally any society or culture that ever exists. As long as we are not part of a Borg-like hive-mind, as long as there is a diversity of opinion about anything, society will — in fact it must — struggle over what is deemed appropriate in any given time and place. Our cancel culture debates have been sucked into the vortex of our forever culture war and calcified into a pointless semantic debate.
The real point is that there will never be and there has never been a moment in any human society where people did not try — for reasons good and bad — to silence ideas, speech, or art, using whatever means appropriate to that society. Markets are useful to us today, as are legal proceedings, and public shaming on social media. Just know that other societies have used other means, many much more brutal than we would tolerate. It is worth considering the brutality we’re willing to stoop to in enforcing acceptable public conduct norms.
It’s all a big beach, and we are all sneetches.
Yes Cancel Culture Exists: It's Called "Living in a Society"
Good summation of the nuances among we Sneeches. I sometimes wonder what’s being cancelled for the cancelled? To live in the rarified air of celebrity, which is mostly invented, and brief. Eh, I’m missing the tragedy.
With Adams, his entire art was lampooning a brief moment in work life and the trends around it. Only now to rightly fall victim to a lampooned modern trend of work life. Yes, we have transcended irony.
Consequence Culture may get an eye roll, but "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes" and FAFO (Fool Around, Find Out), gets a hearty Schadenfreude-laced guffaw. Very little difference as far as I can tell..