HJCarden wrote: ↑January 1st, 2021, 1:32 am
As I'm sure that any of you that frequent the internet know, cancel culture is one of the hottest issues in the political social sphere in the US, and im sure it is present in many other nations. I would be willing to bet that most of us easily can see what the issues with "cancelling" someone and calling in a virtual mob to destroy their reputation. Theres a laundry list of reasons to believe that cancel culture has negative effects, and I am convinced that the cons far outweigh what is gained by cancel culture.
Because of this, I would be very interested in anyone's ideas who
1) genuinely believes that cancel culture does more good than harm
2) Can give a good defense of the positive aspects of cancel culture
3) feels as if they have an interesting take on why cancel culture is bad for our society
Personally I feel as if I create an echo chamber for myself in regards to this issue particularly, as I have been unable to convince myself of any manner in which the benefits can outweigh the negatives. Interested to hear anyones ideas or general discourse and observations.
I can't find much positive aspects of cancel culture, although one might suppose there might be instances where it could be considered appropriate, given the context, as a way of introducing social accountability in our actions. For me, these context-oriented scenarios would have to do with concrete, direct, harmful actions against specific subjects, not dependent of the victim's subjective feelings. Let's say one is subject of a criminal act, then one might expect the perpetrator is somehow outcast as a way of social punishment. There are no blurred lines here.
But if one reverses the coin, many acts that are not deemed as criminal per se, actually harm people's lives, and that is the case of cancel culture, which is nurtured by the objective of carrying out the social assassination of other people for their apparent cultural transgressions. Then one wonders if such people are not to be cancelled themselves, since ironically, those who actively engage in cancelling other people are the ones actually harming others. But this is precisely the toxic cycle in which cancel culture reproduces itself, where emotions take control and one is ready to punish the transgressors. Anger gives us the justification, but where's the difference? Blurred lines now divide what is morally justified from what is not. I think the difference in social accountability lies in both the type of punishment and the type of offense being punished. Let's use as an example the latest case of cancel culture in the news, the cancelling of Mimi Groves:
A Vindictive Teen Destroys a Classmate
As we can see here, the vindictive teen is the one actually harming a person's life on purpose, "to teach someone a lesson". Let's add to the culprits the administrators of the University of Tennessee. Mimi Groves is clearly the victim here, so why wouldn't be justified in pointing our cultural guns against Galligan or the university administrators "to teach them a lesson"? And wouldn't we be guilty of engaging in cancel culture practices against other people? My best guess is "an eye for an eye": the punishment should be proportional to the damage inflicted, and in this case, Galligan and the university administrators deserve to be publicly shamed, even if the social consequences go beyond their damaged reputation, because it was OK for them to publicly shame and to achieve administrative punishment against their target. Both actively and passively, they sought to harm someone for one thing that at most could be considered a minor transgression (I personally don't think it even reaches that level, she didn't actually harm anyone, didn't commit a crime, and didn't have any intention to do it), so the punishment was way out of proportion. I also think they should be allowed to find social redemption if they sincerely regret and apologize for their actions.
About cancel culture in general, I may add: there's a misguiding trend that portrays it as something new and as a particular feature of the "regressive left". The truth is cancel cultural has been around for quite a while and has been used widely in both ends of the political spectrum. McCarthyism was a classic case of cancel culture from the right. And there are some particularly interesting cases of cancel culture documented by Norman Finkelstein in his work about Israel lobbyists seeking economic reparations for the holocaust of WWII.
That cancel culture has become a trend in our days seems to go along with the process of becoming a "global village" and the return to social practices that were typical of the mode of living in agrarian societies. In small villages and towns where every one knew each other, gossip and public shaming were common social tools for managing power relations. With the rise of urban life and increased anonymity in social relations, these tools were not very effective, but with the technological advances in communications, they have found new effectiveness again.
- By Bethel Saint Bright
- By Sy Borg