What's Upstream From Cancel Culture?

Cancel culture is bad. So how do we fix it?

I write for a lot of sites about specific bad things happening in our culture (ex. cancel culture, racism, the rise of left-wing and right-wing authoritarianism, toxic polarization, etc). But then on Heal the West I talk about things like confronting our fears and finding our true identities.

I imagine this dichotomy can leave some readers who find Heal the West through my other writing confused. Are these two themes (problems in our culture, and personal improvement) related in any way shape or form?

My answer is yes. In external outlets I (generally) focus on identifying the problems. At Heal the West I focus on my ideas for solving them.

There's an old story that's resonated with me since I first heard it. A village is situated by a river. One day, a dead body comes floating down the river. The villagers dutifully fish it out and give it a proper burial. The next day, another dead body comes floating down the river. So the villagers fish that one out too (and give it a proper burial). But the day after, two bodies come floating down. Then it's four bodies, then eight. Pretty soon it's a flood of bodies, day after day, and it's all the villagers can do to pull the bodies out and bury them. Crops lie abandoned as every spare hand is used to haul bodies out of the water and give them each a good burial.

In the midst of this chaos, one man leaves his post hauling dead bodies out of the river and starts walking upstream.

"Where are you going?" the other villagers ask. "We need you here."

The man responds: "I'm going to figure out who keeps dumping bodies in this river. Maybe I can make them stop."

Identifying problems in the culture war (here's why cancel culture is bad, here's the problems with DEI, here's why Trump and toxic polarization are both problems we should worry about, etc) is like pulling bodies out of the river. I think it's absolutely necessary. I have friends and people I admire who spend their careers pulling back the curtain and laying bare the problems with XYZ. Many of them, in addition to teaching me everything I know about these problems, have done far more than I have to combat them. 

But Heal the West also gives me the freedom to do something different: to travel upstream and start searching for the roots of our problems.

Or to put it another way:

On many external sites, I focus on "What is XYX and why is it a problem?"

On Heal the West, I shift my focus to "How do we solve XYZ?"

I think a lot of our problems stem from broken psychology and/or broken spirituality (by which I don't mean that we have too few Christians; I mean that we have too many people, of any and all walks of faith, who spend too much of their lives living out of fear, guilt, and shame (myself included)). As one example, I write a lot about fear and how we can overcome it. One reason is that I think the rise of cancel culture is downstream from a lot of us living from a place of fear.

How does fear contribute to cancel culture? I'm sure there are more reasons, but I see three big ones.

First, one goal of many cancel campaigns is to make us afraid. In The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch tells the story of how activists went after Steven Pinker for very benign tweets (including using the phrase "urban crime/violence" and praising a David Brooks column). Was the goal to get Pinker fired? That seems unlikely, given Pinker's status as a tenured professor and his immense star power. Instead, Rauch argues that the real target was academics without Pinker's protections, who had made similarly benign-but-not-sufficiently-far-left statements, and who might be cowed into silence. As Rauch puts it:

"Pinker was a tenured professor with a national following, too big to take down—but that, too, was part of the point. In an important respect, the ostensible target—Steven Pinker—was not the campaign’s real target, or at least not its main target. The real target was the onlooking audience of much less powerful people who understood that they might be next, and that if Pinker could be targeted, certainly they could be. 'This letter wasn’t really about Pinker at all,' wrote a graduate student named Shaun Cammack. 'In fact, it has a very specific function—to dissuade lesser-known academics and students from questioning the ideological consensus.… There are 575 people opposing Pinker for his views, and in the small world of academia that signals an extraordinarily high cost to dissent.' Pinker would be fine, but the smaller fry would get the intended message, which was to steer a wide berth around disapproved ideas or thinkers."

These kinds of intimidation tactics can, frustratingly, work. But in a world where none of us was scared of the online mob, they would be far less successful. We would simply roll our collective eyes, and the cancelers would be forced to move on.

(To be clear, I know there are people who don't have the luxury of standing up to the canceling mob. In academia especially, I have friends who are trying to provide for their families, and their job security in a brutal job market is contingent on them not saying things that arouse the ire of their far-left professors and administrators. When I say that we should reduce the grip of fear on our lives, I don't mean that we should act stupidly or do things that endanger our ability to provide for our families. But I also suspect that cancel culture has been given rocket fuel because a lot of people give in to the bullying more than they strictly need to if their goal is just to provide for their families.)

The second way that I suspect fear contributes to cancel culture is this: I think many cancelers are themselves scared. They see the messages of the people they're trying to cancel as dangerous, akin to bullets flying towards them. These messages are "words that wound." Rauch quotes a law professor who said “To me, racial epithets are not speech. They are bullets.” In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf quotes a civil rights lawyer who justifies students' attempts to deplatform a conservative speaker with this message: "It doesn't make sense for you to be pursuing a degree somewhere and for someone to put a bullet in your head." Our culture is selling (especially young) activists a fear-leaden message that words are violence, and these activists are buying it. 

Of course, some cancelers are white-knighting on behalf of others (ex. white students who say that a person should be canceled for saying things that might offend a black student). But even here, I suspect that fear is at play. The white person can tell themselves, "I'm scared of XYZ (ex. a professor saying the n-word as part of a reading of James Baldwin), so a black student would also be scared." If the white student weren't scared at all, then the script in their head would run more along the lines of, "I know that words aren't violence, but a black person might not know that and therefore might feel scared or in danger." That's a harder script for the white student to maintain (let alone act on) because it paints black people as children and sounds pretty racist. Fear and projection make this kind of white-knighting possible.

In a culture with far less fear, far fewer people would be motivated to join or start cancelation campaigns.

The third tie between fear and cancel culture is that many organizations are also scared. In 2023, for instance, a new employee at software company Outreach posted a video making fun of himself for not knowing what a bodega was. The twitter mob descended, and Outreach started taking heat for the video. They caved to the mob and fired the employee. Outreach probably didn't cave because they thought that the video was beyond the pale. Instead, I suspect that they jettisoned their principles and common sense in order to kowtow to the mob.

This seems to happen a lot. An online mob forms, often over trivial things, and demands the head of so-and-so employee. Instead of standing up to the mob, the company caves, and so-and-so ends up without a job. If the decision-makers at these companies weren't so scared, I suspect we would see a lot fewer cancelations of employees over minor offenses.

Of course, there are other causes of cancel culture as well. There's an element of viciousness to some campaigns. Internalized or projected guilt might also play a role, and some people have a different sense of what's beyond the pale than I do (and, sometimes cancel culture really does go after people whose conduct is beyond the pale). Some people also enjoy the outrage: in our lonely culture, the shared outrage of coming together to burn a witch can make some people feel like they're a part of something.

But even so, I think fear is a primary motivating factor of cancel culture. In a culture with far less fear, I think cancel culture would barely exist. Firstly, most of us would respond to cancel mobs with a yawn, which would make the mobs far less effective and therefore less likely to form. Second, very few people would actually feel motivated to try to cancel someone (and the targets they did go after would be the 1-in-100 who actually deserve it).

No action item this week for our community of practice. I just wanted to explain the through-thread and why I see this project as so important.

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