1. Free expression is probably at an all-time high right now, at least in the West. There is a huge variety of different venues for your writing, there’s a whole new world podcasts for speeches, and an ever-increasing supply of video outlets. The availability of these platforms and publishers doesn’t guarantee you an audience, but that’s not what free expression means.
2. Related to that, some of the technologies that have enabled easy speech have made counter-speech extraordinarily easy as well.
3. There are a lot more people who are not you than there are people who are you, and so easy counter-speech means that it’s entirely possible to get inundated with unpleasantness.
4. Because of (2 and 3), people are often careful about what they say, and may feel burdened by this.
5. It is hard to get (1) without (2). The ability to broadcast to others means that they can broadcast back.
6. (4) may hit socially well-positioned people, but it hits vulnerable people far more.--Ryan Muldoon "Free Expression and Evolving Standards" @Radical Classical Liberals
By 'cancel culture' I mean the organized efforts to silence others (e.g., their invitations rescinded, and their honorary doctorates denied, moved to assignments with other duties, etc.) without recourse to violence and state authority (that would be censorship).* I have defined it like this to be permissive to efforts that would also be classified as civil disobedience. In this sense cancel culture just is the marketplace of ideas at work. The currency in this market is approval/disapproval (or credit/discredit in the old sense). There is, thus, nothing especially new in cancel culture, although thanks to social media the mechanisms by which it operates are more virtual than ever before. Obviously, for some this is a reason to reject markets; these are the very people that still pine for Betamax.
That is, cancel culture is a disorderly market. It is very much at odds with a picture of democracy that emphasizes reasoned (and civil) debate. And so on a certain (deliberative) conception of democracy cancel culture is problematic as a mechanism of public opinion formation and preparing of collective action. This is why (they treat it as a virtue not a bug) deliberative democrats spend so much time on the pre-conditions of deliberative spaces.
But cancel culture is one of the ways in which otherwise dispersed and often disorganized individuals can make the more powerful take notice of their views. Sometimes it is very intimidating. I have been on the receiving end of such efforts, and it is no fun (especially when you realize the folk filling your inbox are affiliated with neonazis). And there is no doubt that cancel culture can shade into threats of violence or misfire at targets who are in no sense worthy of public opprobrium (just unlucky).
The previous two paragraphs elide a distinction; marxists (see William Clare Roberts) view cancel culture as crowds in action whereas the critics (e.g., Dan Crenshaw, who is one of the more thoughtful Republicans in the House) use 'mob'. I prefer to see cancel culture (and here I am indebted to Tyler Cowen) as a thin association--sometimes there is coordination, mostly -- in the headline grabbing cases -- it seems to be individuals who come together to express their indignation. If the association is durable, we start (recall) calling it a faction or a party.+ (I return to this below.)
So far I have given a broadly Millian interpretation of cancel culture. He thought (recall here and here) that public opinion was needed to check the abuses of the powerful. But the price for that is, as he worried, the danger of conformism (policed by "vituperative" speech). And, there is no doubt that the cumulative effects of cancel culture, like all widely used preference aggregation mechanisms, may be conformism (yes, VHS displaced Betamax). So, while cancel culture is a possibly effective means in breaking up a cozy cartel, it may lead to a homogeneous landscape.
Now, one may think that indignation is the problem here. Indignation seems inimical to liberal political life. Yet, as Adam Smith reminds us, such sense of "sympathetic indignation" is at the root of justice. In its institutions this sense is sublimated and through the rules of evidence and reason redirected to proper ends. (Recall this post on Srinivasan and the aptness of anger.) But this pushes the problem back because such sympathetic indignation may well be corrupted, and is often corrupted, by other commitments and interests. So, perhaps, on balance, and this is my own inclination, liberals should be weary of anything that encourages the crowd?
This is too easy because such indignation may well be at the root of political life. As Spinoza puts it in his Political Treatise: "men are led...more by passion than reason, it follows, that a multitude comes together, and wishes to be guided, as it were, by one mind, not at the suggestion of reason, but of some common passion...or the desire of avenging some common hurt." (6.1) Somewhat surprisingly, as Chantal Jaquet has noted, this very desire is at the root of political authority "the right of the commonwealth is determined by the common power of the multitude" and it is ground in the "desire to avenge some common hurt." (3.9) Political life is a kind of sublimation and domestication of this subsisting indignation. The effect of righteousness is social peace.
What is noticeable in nearly all the critics of cancel culture is that they refuse to engage with the grounds of indignation. Tactically, one understands this move because it helps ferment polarization (and so opportunities for profit) and cement group identity. Morally it is a mistake because one fails to heed the call of justice. Strategically, it is a worse mistake because one, thereby, misses the causal forces that shape the changing directions of the tectonic plates, which are the sediments of and constraints on the marketplace of ideas, of political life.
In December 2015 (look at that date!) I noted that Trump's rise to power within the Republican party was clearly an effect of the sense of indignation in that tribe and a loss of faith in its elites. I tend to view cancel culture in American public life as doing something similar to the intellectual opinion leaders of our time. Since our for profit public culture and media feed on indignation, we should expect a turbulent time ahead.** The market giveth and taketh away, and it dances to the tune of fortune.**
*I recognize that the meaning of 'violence' is shifting; but I can't cover all bases here.
+At that point the comparison with a market may break down, and cancel culture becomes more like a union.
**I thank Nick Cowen for discussion, who should be mobbed for my mistakes.
This really breaks my heart, but it doesn't surprise me. There will be a reckoning for the Philosophy Academic Community, especially online. They are saying that Cancel Culture doesn't exist, b/c they don't want to be held accountable for destroying my innocent life & career.
Posted by: Sarah Braasch | 07/15/2020 at 11:38 PM
The conference organizers for the International Social Ontology Conference confirmed that at least one of my online stalkers had sent them disparaging messages about me, accusing me of being a racist & white supremacist. In case anyone was still wondering if cancel culture exists. For this reason, I have decided against participating in the Live Q and A session tomorrow morning. I am feeling very traumatized after having been repeatedly mobbed, including on Twitter, in recent weeks, in the wake of George Floyd's killing, including by persons who claim to be prison abolitionists and anti-mass incarceration.
Posted by: Sarah Braasch | 07/16/2020 at 12:42 AM
The market-place analogy is apt, and so is the following observation by Adam Smith:
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." (Wealth of Nations I.X)
Those of the same trade here are the universities, the media, social and otherwise, and now in supreme irony the large corporations, all of whom are either true believers in the new intolerant religion of Woke, or are intimidated by them.
It took some seventy-years from Smith's publishing of the great work for the British Parliament to, at least partially, enact its spirit.
As for your 'grounds of indigation' reference in the penultimate paragraph, you are wrong and I am happy to debate them.
Posted by: David Cockayne | 07/17/2020 at 11:05 AM
I think the idea of cancel culture being the marketplace of ideas in action is a little too rationalistic to describe what's going on - it's not about which products win on the market. It's more about the ethics of how transactions are conducted in the marketplace. E.g., suppose you want to go to your greengrocer and buy some cucumbers ... do you walk into the shop, say hello, ask how the greengrocer's kids are doing, and then calmly buy your cucumbers? (Civility.) Or, do you fly into a furious rage because the shop only sells non-organic cucumbers? Do you start bullying and verbally abusing your friends who still shop there, who prefer the conventionally-grown cucumbers, in an effort to influence their buying decisions? Do you only shop at greengrocers that have a sign saying "Workers of the World Unite!" in the window? (Cf. Vaclav Havel and Andrew Sullivan's recent essay on dissent.) Do you sneakily bring a dead cockroach into the shop and then call a health inspector to do an inspection, so you can get the shop shut down? Etc. It's those kinds of moral reasoning with regard to the "how" of transactions that's at issue, as I see it ...
Posted by: Therese Doucet | 07/18/2020 at 10:15 PM
Hi Therese, What you describe seems like a very orderly/normative conception of markets with fair play. I love such markets, but i don't think they do justice to what happens inside and among corporations.
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 07/18/2020 at 10:34 PM
Hi Eric! "What you describe seems like a very orderly/normative conception of markets with fair play." I actually meant to say the opposite! That is, the debate over cancel culture is all about market distortions ... which could be at the small-scale level, as in the case of buying cucumbers like my example (the analogy there might be with individuals arguing on Twitter ...), or, as the proponents of cancel culture suggest, and I think you're suggesting, a corporate cartel .... (a bunch of elites gather together to try to have a monopoly in the marketplace of ideas). I guess I confused the issue by saying transactions more specifically, when I'm talking about a wide range of ethical decisions that can influence how the market happens. What I disagree with is the idea that cancel culture is about the substantive question of which commodities (ideas) are being bought and sold ... from my perspective, the opponents of cancel culture are not objecting to ideas losing out on the marketplace. They're objecting to certain ethical (or unethical) manners of the marketplace. And if I understand it, you see it instead as them objecting to a marketplace in which they can't have a monopoly. Not sure how we would resolve that difference of perspective, as I think it comes down to each of us attributing different motives to people ... so we might have to just agree to disagree ... :)
Posted by: Therese Doucet | 07/18/2020 at 10:52 PM
No, i agree with you that norms in the market place are also being contested and shifted. (Can you really freely sell poisenous babymilk, etc.?) I am not objecting to people who think cancel culture represents dangerous norms.
But yes you also seem unwilling to acknowledge the grounds of indignation and of that tendency i am critical of.
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 07/18/2020 at 11:04 PM
Thinking more about, this analogy is helpful for me to see the possible pros of cancel culture besides the possible abuses ... we don’t want poisonous baby milk, and if e.g. one big company that sells baby milk is also using its market power to suppress data on poisonousness, that’s bad and consumers banding together to lobby for accountability is a needed corrective! That makes sense. Similarly with poisonous ideas taking cover under bad data spread controlled by powerful media outlets, tolerated as freedom of speech. Twitter mobs then could play a positive role. But with social policing it’s then a question once again of who polices the policers, given the risk of abuses of crowd power ...
Posted by: Therese Doucet | 07/19/2020 at 10:26 PM