Metastasizing further and further into our daily lives, cancel culture has become a governing force throughout entertainment, business, politics and journalism. Constantly guarding against a deviation from their accepted perspective, use of language or morality, the cancel mob selects new targets at 5G speed. Once selected, the target is publicly shamed, ruined and banished.
Often, targets of cancel culture are prominent figures, like former “The Mandalorian” actress Gina Carano. But more frequently, the victims are relatively obscure citizens.
Recently, cancel mobs have organized the boycott of a Skidmore professor who spent 20 minutes at a “Back the Blue” rally with his wife on their way to dinner; forced a Boeing executive to resign after digging up an article he wrote in the 1980s stating that fighter pilots should only be men (he has since apologized and unequivocally renounced his Cold War era perspective).
Now the mob is taking on an entrenched target, a cultural staple: classic literature—including some of Europe’s finest literary exports, Shakespeare and Homer.
Cancel culture, not to be confused with “accountability” or “outrage culture,” is a distinct entity. In fact, Merriam Webster’s Dictionary felt compelled to add the term last month. Defined as “the practice or tendency of engaging in mass canceling as a way of expressing disapproval and exerting social pressure,” cancel culture wields subjective, progressive morality as a weapon—seeking to destroy careers, reputations and any viewpoint not fully encompassed within the narrow scope of the progressive worldview.
As cancel culture gains traction, the cancel mob becomes emboldened. As the mob becomes emboldened, its cancel-target portfolio expands to include increasingly benign works and figures that have somehow, someway offended the sensibilities of the woke.
The process serves the collective mob—in promoting its worldview and obscuring dissent—and also serves the individual within the mob who builds his or her own social capital through virtue signaling in an online climate where the higher the outrage and indignation the higher the social media likes yielded.
Increasing the virulence of cancel culture are the tactics by which the mob discourages defense of the targeted. For when one raises their voice to defend the targeted, the mob amends its focus to encapsulate the defender as complicit in the target’s original offense. Said another way, if the cancel mob accuses X of racism, and Y says, “no, X is not racist,” then the mob accuses Y of being complicit in X’s racism. This tactic discourages Y from coming forward in defense of X. Accordingly, the cancel mob faces less and less pushback as it seeks out new Xs to shine their vindictive spotlight upon. And as the cancel mob enjoys increased impunity, it becomes further detached from the burden of objectivity.
In December, a Massachusetts ninth-grade English teacher proclaimed on Twitter that she was, “Very proud to say we got “The Odyssey” removed from the curriculum this year!” “The Odyssey”—a masterwork, written 28 centuries ago—was not fully aligned with the teacher’s contemporary moral compass. Rather, she felt that “The Odyssey” was “spreading sexism, racism, ableism and Western-centrism.” (Of course, ‘The Odyssey’ was written in the Bronze Age, a couple of millennia before the concept of “Westernism” even existed).
No work of art, no matter the context, significance or quality is safe should it not fall within the approved confines of modern progressive thought—a tall-order for works predating Christianity by nearly one thousand years. Seemingly, cancel culture holds nothing sacred.
Shakespeare, often called England’s national poet (and generally considered world history’s all-time greatest writer and dramatist), has become a recent target of cancel culture. Drawing the ire of #DisruptTexts, a movement that seeks to disrupt (see: cancel) the teaching of various texts, Shakespeare is suddenly on the defensive—four centuries after his death.
#DisruptTexts finds that Shakespeare’s plays “harbor problematic depictions and characterizations,” “persist in indoctrinating students into a false notion of the primacy (and superiority) of the English language,” include “violence, misogyny, racism,” and ultimately promote “white supremacy and colonization,” and therefore must be excluded from curriculums.
An excellent argument for replacing Shakespeare does exist: Shakespeare can be a slog, often failing to engage high school students; or, Shakespeare should be cut to make room for a more diverse set of authors. Perhaps a curriculum laced with “Crazy Rich Asians,” “The Color Purple,’ and “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” would do more for students than another round of “Macbeth.” But to advocate for an updated curriculum on the premise that Shakespeare promotes colonization? Absurd.
Homer and Shakespeare failed to anticipate and cater to the social code of 21st century American liberals, but that should not be a fatal flaw. Indeed, classic texts could be spared from the burn pile to serve progressive agendas; the texts could be calibrated as a reference point for outdated values, markers in the evolution of human thought over millennia and centuries.
Now, students and teachers should be able to read and assess a piece of literature from antiquity without making it singularly about modern social politics—but if that’s not possible, then simply clarify to students that the racial and gender views of sixteenth century England are no longer acceptable in twenty-first century America.
Yet in the moral absolutism of cancel culture, such shading is not permitted. In cancel culture, there is only right and wrong. The mob dictates what is right. And what was right in the past—but wrong now—is treated as to have never existed. Dissenters are smeared. Censorship proliferates. Intellectual discourse is strangled. Power concentrates.
Ironically, cancel culture has adopted tactics from seemingly antithetical schools of thought. In cancel culture’s quest for ideologically homogeneity, the mob employs tactics reminiscent of Stalin or Hitler. In their quest for moral purity, the woke left demands censorship in ways typically associated with the religious right.
Hopefully, cancel culture is too destructive, too casual in target selection, to sustain itself long-term. Perhaps it will auto-cannibalize. But hitting that self-destruct threshold would require continued expansion. Public discourse has already taken on a totalitarian hush. Stifled by a self-appointed Big Brother, always watching, always waiting—common citizens are afraid to express themselves, fearful that a haphazard utterance, a 10-year old tweet, or attending the “wrong” rally—regardless of intent or context—will destroy their careers.
External pressure must be applied to cancel culture; we can’t wait for cancel culture to implode, we must actively counter the mob.
Those with the power to counter cancel culture (entertainment executives, college administrators, newspaper editors etc.) need to find their collective backbone. Stop caving to the demands of the unaccountable. And those sympathetic toward, or fully aligned with, the cancel mob need to conduct an overdue introspection. Progressives are supposed to be upholding free speech, not shaming the masses into silence. Progressives are supposed to operate with compassion, to promote second chances—not permanently dim the prospects of people they don’t agree with.
Regardless of your political leanings, cancel culture should concern you. Consider doing your part to counter the cancellation trend: avoid groupthink; give people the benefit of the doubt; stick up for your friends and family; if someone doesn’t agree with you, don’t seek to cancel them–seek to convert them to your perspective through dialogue; and please, leave Homer alone.
Photo: Rembrandt’s painting of Aristotle with a bust of Homer. Credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle_with_a_Bust_of_Homer
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