Our Culture Has Always Been a "Cancel Culture"

Source: Image by Markus Winkler from Pixabay

In the midst of all the turbulence and tragedy that has marred 2020, an ongoing conversation is taking place surrounding social norms for discourse in public spheres of society, including but not limited to journalism, science, comedy, politics, and social media. This came to a head with the Harper’s magazine Letter on Justice and Open Debate published in July, followed by a swift backlash. The letter reaffirmed the need for “free exchange of information and ideas,” and called for the general public to refrain from “public shaming and ostracism” and “blinding moral certainty," while others viewed the letter as an expression of its own sort of hypocritical intolerance, dominance over acceptable speech, and bigotry.

But even critics and dissenters of the Harper’s letter, such as Glenn Greenwald, acknowledge that very real problems of creeping illiberalism and intolerance pose a threat to free speech, healthy debate, creativity, and the search for truth. Embedded in his video monologue and critique of what is commonly referred to as "cancel culture," Greenwald makes a statement that bears repeating: “We’re not talking about a new phenomenon. We’re talking about something that has always existed and will always exist.”

Exactly. This is nothing new. Our culture has always been a "cancel culture."

When I follow these ongoing discussions, I’m genuinely surprised at how short our collective memory really is. I hear over and over again how social norms about acceptable speech and debate are rapidly changing because of social media, a rise in victimhood culture attributable to Gen Z, and other recent shifts in society. But I remember what it was like to see professional consequences for taboo expressions before these more modern trends, and I don’t think that our social life today is fundamentally different than it was 15 or 20 years ago.

For example, consider Sandra Tsing Loh, who was fired from her radio show in 2004 for saying the word “f-ck” once during a story about her husband’s work. I learned about this through an interview with Bill Maher (with commentary from panelists George Carlin, John McWhorter, and Kim Campbell). There was speculation that this was part of a hysterical crackdown on indecency following the “wardrobe malfunction” with Janet Jackson during the recent Super Bowl halftime show.

Maher: This woman who fired you said you need to “seek help.” [audience groans] You need to “seek help” because you said the f-word?! How dumb is this f--king country?...[Toward Carlin] It’s gotta be stupider than when you started.

Carlin: The liberals are just as bad on this issue as the conservatives, because of ‘politically correct’ speech, campus codes…nothing but sheer denial of free speech, and their hands are not clean.

McWhorter: The people who complain are disproportionately people who are relatively advanced in years, but those people have a lot of votes, and so a small portion of the population ends up creating this kind of theatrical sense of what’s appropriate or not.

This was in 2004. Long before Twitter, before Donald Trump, and before the term "cancel culture" became a thing, we were canceling people for innocuous, mundane, and harmless yet ostensibly offensive behaviors. You could transplant this exact episode into the year 2020 and it wouldn’t be weird.

So why does this behavior persist? Why do people keep engaging in efforts to police others’ actions, even when those actions do not infringe on the law?

In a recently published study, researchers led by Ashwini Ashokkumar shed some light on this. They found that people often choose to censor others’ statements online simply because they express an opposing viewpoint, even if those comments are inoffensive. The researchers first surveyed participants’ attitudes on divisive issues, including abortion rights and gun control. Then one week later, participants were invited back to complete a seemingly unrelated content-moderation task, in which they looked at statements on a blog that were either consistent with or challenging their beliefs. Participants were told that if they flagged a comment, then it would be removed by the site moderators.

Overall, participants were more likely to censor opposing viewpoints compared to similar viewpoints, but the difference was small. The more striking finding was that participants who felt emotionally fused to their beliefs (i.e. a strong sense of moral conviction) were nearly twice as likely to censor statements with opposing viewpoints (about 30%) compared to similar viewpoints (about 15%). The researchers replicated this effect in a second study. They also found that participants sought to not only censor comments but also to ban the authors of those comments from the website completely.

But maybe participants wanted to censor comments and ban authors because they found the comments to be offensive? That explanation is less likely. The researchers gave the same statements to a second group of participants, who were asked to simply rate their offensiveness, and to indicate whether a reasonable person would find the statements abusive, harassing, or involving hate speech or ad hominem attacks. Overall these folks found the comments to be inoffensive, and I agree. What do you think? Do they look innocuous, even if you strongly disagree with the content?

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• “There is no way that one can be pro-woman and pro-life.”
• “Abortion is wrong. Mother Teresa added: “It is a deep poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.”
• “Personally, I don't think any civilian should be allowed to have a gun. To walk around in public with an assault rifle. That is just insanity.”
• “Gun owners are not criminals. Criminals inflict crime on people with whatever tools they choose to use, gun owners defend themselves and others from these people.”

Overall, the results of the study suggest that people aren't simply looking to censor offensive speech. They want to censor inoffensive speech if it conflicts with their beliefs about what’s right and wrong.

This is the real problem underlying "cancel culture," and it has been a problem for a very long time. We can’t go on thinking that it’s OK to stifle or punish others for expressing views we don’t like. It’s anti-democratic and inconsistent with the goals of the #Resistance.

So then how do we solve this? Is it an inevitable problem that we’re always going to cope with?

I am hopeful that as a society, we can become more interested in dissent and debate. Personally, I feel a strong craving for viewpoints different than my own. I want to read comments from people who disagree with me on core issues, and I know that plenty of others feel that way too.

I think that genuine curiosity is a key variable we need to exploit in order to foster open-minded debate and tolerance for diverse viewpoints. When people are healthy, they are interested and inquisitive, and when societies are healthy, they are filled with interested, inquisitive people. Stay tuned, and we’ll be talking about curiosity a whole lot more in future posts.