The Origins of Cancel Culture

 

You might be wondering what’s behind “cancel culture.” How did we so quickly descend into apparent mass psychosis?

The answer, I believe, is postmodernism. Specifically, it is the idea that there is no objective truth. If this is so, everyone invents their own narrative, making the world whatever they want it to be.

The current battleground is transgenderism because it establishes the basic principle: I can be whatever I want to be; I can choose my reality.

The naïve postmodernist imagines this leads to a world of “live and let live,” in which everyone gets to be and do whatever they like. But the necessary consequence is the opposite. Without any objective standard to appeal to, there is no possibility of compromise of or coming to any accommodation. Instead, when my “reality” inevitably conflicts with your “reality,” the only course is to silence you, and ultimately a battle to the death.

That is what we are seeing now. A quite similar movement, operating from the same premises, led to Nazi Germany.  It is the triumph of the will.

The Cat in the Hat Bites Back

 

My friend Xerxes always gives me something to talk about. He is my window into the leftist soul. Without him, I would find it utterly unpredictable, because it seems mad.

I think it is significant that, in his latest column, he has come out, if obliquely, against the banning of Dr. Seuss books. He even expresses some qualified regret at the passing of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben. Sure, they “reek of southern slavery,” but he quotes a descendant of the original Aunt Jemima saying “"I wish we would take a breath and not just get rid of everything.” He is careful to put the sentiment in the mouth of a minority member, but still…

I am hopeful that, with Dr. Seuss, if not with Aunt Jemima, the book banners and the blacklisters may at last have gone too far. This is an attack on too many comfortable leftist people’s childhoods. 

For comparison, “conspiracy theory” was not always an automatic pejorative. It used to be fashionable to suggest conspiracies. I think the turning point came with Oliver Stone’s film “JFK.” It was so over-the-top with a particularly weak conspiracy theory that it discredited the entire genre for a generation or more. Now “conspiracy theory” is actually accepted as something immoral, and automatically worthy of banning. 

Something of the like may be happening with the attack on Dr. Seuss. Not a wise choice of target. It looks like overreach.

Xerxes terms this general movement to topple statues and ban books “revisionism.”

Revisionism, however, implies some reinterpretation of history. That is not happening here. Nobody before this wave of mass hysteria thought the South were in the right in the US Civil War, or that slavery or colonialism was fine. No vision has revisioned. I think it is safe to assert that nobody bought Aunt Jemima syrup or Uncle Ben’s rice thinking this was endorsing slavery. A more accurate term than “revisionism” would be “iconoclasm”; or, better yet, “memory holing.” This is a matter of erasing history, not changing our interpretation of it.

Erasing history is much more sinister than revisionism. It makes it easier to justify slavery or colonialism or Nazism in the present or future: the comparison, and the counter arguments, have been removed. Those who do not learn from history …

But I do not believe this is the actual motivation among the iconoclasts. That, after all, would be a conspiracy theory. It is just a fearful unintended consequence.

Xerxes points out that even great Biblical heroes did things wrong; even they could not withstand being judged by modern standards. He notes that King David was a murderer, a rebel, a terrorist.

This too is not the real explanation, however. It is not that morals have progressed, and we are judging our ancestors unfairly because “times have changed.” King David would have been as wrong to commit murder and adultery in his own time as in ours: check the Ten Commandments.

Nobody seems any longer to notice, but all the Old Testament patriarchs, and all the New Testament apostles, were sinners. Moses too was a murderer. Noah, as soon as he was rescued from the flood, got flaming drunk, then cursed his son. Lot got flaming drunk and had sex with his daughters. Abraham abandoned one son in the wilderness, and fully intended to slaughter a second. Having married his sister. . Isaac shamelessly favoured one son over another. Jacob cheated his brother Esau out of his inheritance. Solomon took a thousand concubines and sacrificed to Baal.

The Bible makes clear it is not condoning these sins. David may not build the temple; Moses may not enter the Promised Land. 

The point is that we are all sinners, even the most righteous among us. So long as we keep faith with God, our sins are not fatal—although they will not pass without punishment. 

The same error is often made by non-Catholics with respect to Catholic saints. Protestants object to Thomas More being canonized, because as Lord Chancellor he presided over the execution of Protestants for heresy. Is the Catholic Church supporting such practices? 

No. No Catholic saint is believed to be without sin; that would be the worst possible blasphemy. Canonization recognizes not the absence of sin, but positive acts of “heroic virtue.”

The same standard should obviously be applied to any figure from our past; no other standard is possible among humans. Robert E. Lee was a great general, and deserves recognition for that alone. Moreover, he sacrificed his own interests in refusing command of the Union Army rather than abandon his homeland, Virginia. He again behaved nobly in refusing to continue the fight as a guerilla war, and urging Southerners to lay down their arms and seek reintegration. Washington owned slaves; but he deserves eternal respect if only for declining absolute power when he might have seized it. This was heroism. Jefferson owned slaves too, but deserves eternal respect for having drafted the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.

I do not care so much for fictional characters with no story, like Aunt Jemima or Uncle Ben. But their disappearance is disrespect to the countless honest working people they represent, the many good-hearted nannies and waiters and cooks. And all for no fault of their own, but only because they remind others of sins against them.

And perhaps that is the key. It is not enough that the people we choose to remember must never have sinned. They must not remind us of any sins. 

It is not, then, that those doing the statue-toppling, banning, boycotting, and deplatforming, imagine that they themselves are without sin. This seems too improbable to be believed, or too monstrous. We all have a conscience, and know we have violated it. Unless, perhaps, these leftist mobs are all psychopaths. 

More probably, they hate to be reminded of sin, of the very existence of sin, because they are too aware of having sinned. And the sin our generation is conscious of is not slavery, and not colonialism--those were generations long ago. And so those are safe sins to condemn.

Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and Dr. Seuss are being scapegoated. The sins of the community are being cast on them, and then they are driven out. It is the eternal way with scapegoating.

Dr. Seuss is being crucified for our sins.

And to Think That I Saw It in 2021

 

The current hysteria of blacklisting and censorship has now reached Dr. Seuss. A year ago, this sounded absurd. What still sounds absurd today is likely to be law tomorrow.

I managed to dig up online some of the offending images that have prompted this.

These are simply comic stereotypes. All figures in any cartoon format are comic stereotypes.

Imagine, for comparison, if you are Canadian like me, a Seuss illustration of a Canadian as a lumberjack wearing a red plaid shirt, suspenders, hobnail boots, and a cap with ear flaps? Or a Mountie uniform? We might roll our eyes at the supposedly ignorant Yank. But would we feel offended? Why?

Reality check: my Filipina wife and my half-Filipina children have no problem talking about slanted eyes. Are they supposed to be ashamed of them?

The Right Wing Virus

The left-wing drive for censorship and deplatforming is in effect an admission that, if anyone gets to hear the right wing’s arguments, they will be convinced by them.

But even more telling is how the left has taken to declaring people, like Joe Rogan or Lindsay Shepherd, “right wing” simply for talking or listening to someone who is, or was previously declared, right wing. This is a plain admission that you cannot hear the right wing’s arguments without agreeing with them.

Get My Brain Out of that Vat!

Plato is no doubt rolling over in his cave.

I have never seen The Matrix. But the basic idea behind the movie seems to have resonated at least on the right: that what we take to be reality is a vast simulation. Everyone talks now of “red pills.”

How do we know we are not living in a vast simulation?

Elon Musk argues that this is probably the case. Here’s his argument, as I recall it:

We can predict that soon our own computer-generated simulations, our virtual reality, will be impossible to distinguish from the physical world. Not to mention our robots and NPCs passing the Turing test.

Now, assume there are alien civilizations, and that technological progress is inevitable over time. Some will surely have advanced beyond ourselves, and will therefore be beyond this point. It seems unlikely we would turn out to be the most advanced in the universe. So they will have already made such virtual realities. So we may be characters in them.

As a matter of fact, absent the aliens, most of the world has always believed this—that the physical world is a simulation. All Buddhists and Hindus believe this. They call it “maya”: “illusion.” Taoists agree. This is what Neoplatonists believed in the West—this world is Plato’s Cave. This is what North American Indians believed before they became Christian—making the idea that they were especially concerned with “nature” and “the environment” the opposite of the truth.

One Hindu concept of the cosmos is Shiva as "Lord of the Dance." What we take for the physical, substantial, world is his deceptive movements to draw our attention first here, then there.

Why don’t Christians and Jews believe it?

One word: God.

As Descartes, for one, explained, if God created this universe, being all-good, he is not going to play any tricks. A clear perception will be a warrant for truth. Hence we end up with things like empirical science.

If you do not believe in a personal God, it all falls apart. You do not know.

But there is a second, lesser sort of Matrix in which we Christians are aware that live. The gospel warns us that the Devil is the lord of “this world.” Earthly power is in his gift, as in the third temptation of Christ. And the Devil is the “father of lies.”

In other words, there is a real matrix when it comes to social opinions—the realm of earthly social power. The realm controlled by the scribes and the Pharisees.

We have already referred to one example: the common belief that the North American Indians had a special concern for nature and the ecology. Utter bollocks, and everyone believes it.

There are many social myths—Francis Bacon called them “idols of the tribe”—which we take as certain truth, which are perfectly false, but serve somebody’s purposes. Such myths can be the glue that holds society together.

No, not that Francis Bacon.

These social truths, matters of “common knowledge,” do not come from God, unless, perhaps, they are from the Bible, and the Bible is his revelation, but are invented by men and women. As it happens, men and women do often have selfish interests and ulterior motives.

I find this is a reliable general rule, a rule for life: when referring to some social or psychological as opposed to purely physical affair, if “everyone” thinks something is so, it is not so.

You might think that this is a matter of general ignorance, and improves with education. Some things, after all, are not obvious, but must be learned. I find the opposite: the better educated someone is, at least in our society, the more likely they are to believe things that are obviously false. “Urban legends” seem to thrive in the academy as though this is their natural medium of transmission.

Freudian and Marxist ideas, for example, which were long ago debunked as science, not only survive but are absolutely unquestioned in the universities, at least outside the psychology or the economics deparments; scientism, the naïve faith that science can explain everything; the dogmatic faith in a series of increasingly dubious assumptions that is global warming; feminism, which became beyond question without having ever been properly debated on its merits; the dogma that homosexuality is innate; and now the doctrine that one’s sex is not, and can be changed at will. The list is very long. It is likely I too still hold some such beliefs, which I have not yet discovered to be either wrong or entirely unsubstantiated. I have spent a lot of years in the academy.

To be educated currently seems to mean to be either vetted for or indoctrinated into the matrix. Perhaps it was always so, but it seems to be coming to a head. There is, as many have noted, an alarming conformity in academic thinking now.

There is also a powerful force now operating in the opposite direction: the Internet. The matrix works on information being restricted and controlled, managed and crafted. The internet makes information unbridled and free.

The two trends may be related. This may be exactly why there is such a growing demand for conformity, and a rapid expansion of the number of points on which one must conform. It all smacks of desperation. It may be because the fabric is visibly fraying, and the gears and pulleys are beginning to show through.

What really happened to Jeffrey Epstein? What really happened in Benghazi? What is the real story of Hillary Clinton’s emails? Why is everyone coalescing so suddenly behind Joe Biden? Why the apparent coordinated suppression of the candidacy of Tulsi Gabbard?

It is easy to see that as lot is going on behind the scenes, even if we cannot know what.

All this only in the sphere of politics. That’s just the tip of an iceberg bigger than the one that took out the Titanic. There are far stranger things happening in the professions.

“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

An obvious and trivial example of an apparent reaction to the threat of the Internet is the inevitable insistence by teachers and librarians that you must not use Wikipedia as a reference. Actual studies have shown that Wikipedia is more trustworthy than Britannica or other “expert” sources. But it is beyond professional control.

More blatant is the growing tsunami of “deplatforming.” A commentator begins to draw an audience, starts to say something interesting, and suddenly he is gone. Especially on the right, of course, but even, now, Chris Matthews. It seems he was too inclined to speak for himself. He was not sufficiently under someone’s control. He had become an unacceptable risk.

A yet more striking current example is the sudden cancellation of Woody Allen’s new autobiography by Hachette; only a few days after publication was announced.

Perhaps the reader does not know that the charges of pedophilia against Allen have been aired in court, twice, and twice dismissed. That information, it almost seems, has been systematically suppressed.

Yet he is now not to be allowed the right to speak in his own defense. The public must not know his side of it. For some reason, he is a risk.

I had my own experience, with a Canadian online magazine, Convivium. They just loved a piece I had written about the Irish churches of Ontario, and had it slated for publication.

Then they realized I had written Playing the Indian Card. I have good reason to believe that they had never read it. Nevertheless, simply the idea that I had written something saying “everything you think you know about Canada’s ‘First Nations’ is wrong,” was enough to make them drop the piece. They made no bones about this being why. Any serious examination of the history of Canada’s relationship with its “indigenous people” was enough to mark me as too dangerous to be associated with. Even though the piece I had submitted to them was on an entirely unrelated subject.

The atmosphere of suppression, the actual blacklisting, is now far worse than anything in the McCarthy era.

Perhaps, if you are interested, you should buy the book now, while it is still available.

I suspect our descendants will not recall us fondly. I suspect that we will one day appear in the history books in more or less the same light as the Spanish Inquisition, or the witchburnings, or even the Fascists and Nazis.

The good news is that it seems certain the whole current matrix has become so fragile it is unlikely to last must longer.

Pity Poor Mark Zuckerberg. Really

Many on the right are upset, as am I, by the rising tide of blacklisting and censorship. Most recently, just yesterday, Facebook has banned Paul Joseph Watson and Laura Loomer, among others. This blacklisting has gotten so obviously out of hand that even Donald Trump has weighed in with a protest.

But I think those who are blaming Mark Zuckerberg, and Twitter, and Google, and Patreon, and so on, for these bans are missing the forest for the trees. I think perhaps these businesses deserve some sympathy. They are probably not guilty as often charged with seeking to impose their own opinions on the world-- but of moral cowardice. A far more common moral failing.

It seems most likely to me that people like Zuckerberg, who have spent their lives accumulating extreme wealth, are really, in the first place, far more interested in making money than in politics. This is, moreover, their fiduciary duty as employees and proprietors. On that basis, they would surely really much prefer to continue hosting wildly popular content contributors like Watson, or Yiannopolis. Each makes them a lot of money.

But what if other people are threatening to boycott for hosting them? That sounds like a money-losing proposition. Bad PR. Angry customers.

The natural knee-jerk of a businessman is to keep the customers satisfied. He or she hears a complaint, and they figure they need to respond.

People on the left are of course going to be enraged at and want to shut down precisely the voices that are most effective, to which they cannot adequately respond. And so the process quickly gets draconian.

What Facebook and Twitter and the rest are doing now is still short-sighted and foolish. But it is understandable. They are businessmen. Politics is not their game. They just want to steer clear of it, they are not interested in it, and so they are blind to the dangers they are walking into here. Poor fools.

All he wanted was peace in our time.

So long as they stayed neutral and just let anyone post, they could plausibly deny any responsibility for what is posted. They would have had to stand tough and be principled, though, and they were not, in fact, principled. They just wanted to make money. But the instant they started policing things, as they have emphatically now, they actually and foolishly accepted legal and political responsibility for anything that appears on their platform. By anyone. Including posted comments by every lunatic capable of breathing through his mouth. That is going to become political and legal suicide going forward. There can be no end to it. Everyone is going to be furious at everything, and expect them to do something about it. And as soon as they do anything, another group is going to be at least as furious at the censorship.

Worse, as more and more legitimate opinions, and content people want to see, gets thrown off their platforms, they are almost forcing some competition to emerge and take over their market niche. And be able to compete by featuring established big names like MacInnis, Milo, Watson, Loomer; bigger names and more interesting content than are available on YouTube or Twitter. Because by the logic of the outrage boycotts, it will be the most compelling content and the biggest names that are targeted for boycott. Witness what happened with Fox News in the television marketplace. Witness the newspapers dying. Witness even how much less interesting Rebel Media has become since they bent to pressure by dumping Faith Goldy, Lauren Southern, Gavin MacInnis—all their stars. For an easier ride at the next shareholder’s meeting, these social media companies are signing their own death warrant.

Government intervention in the market is generally a bad idea. This is the classic situation in which it is a good idea. Government intervention can sometimes help everyone. The classic example is drugs in sports. Probably few athletes want to risk their health by resorting to performance-enhancing injections. But if a few do, everyone else must, or be left out of the playoffs. Their career is ruined. So it helps everyone if they are banned, and a regimen of testing imposed.

This situation is not the same, but similar. As a business proposition, probably no business wants to start censoring. But they feel forced to by the current market pressure. If, on the other hand, government passed a law positively requiring them to host all comers without politics being a factor—the rule could be that nobody could be denied a platform for any speech that is legal—then Facebook or Twitter could proceed with their business, the making of money hand over fist, without needing to soil themselves with politics. Everybody wins.

Except, of course, the scoundrels who want to silence opinions they cannot refute. But they will lose in any case.

Remember that famous quote, commonly misattributed to Mahatma Gandhi, but nevertheless eternally true: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

I never said it. I just lived it.

What we are seeing currently, nasty as it has gotten, is stage three. The left is no longer able to ignore opinions they disagree with. They are no longer able to ridicule them. Now they are fighting them openly and aggressively. In doing so, as Gandhi realized, they visibly surrender the moral high ground in the eyes of the general public.

Very soon after this, they become pariahs. They become as respected as, say, European imperialism is now, as a result of Gandhi’s campaigns, or discrimination against blacks is now, as a result of Martin Luther King’s. This is the road down which the modern left is frogmarching. People are starting to pop red pills literally left and right.

Tucker Carlson the Witch

Tucker Carlson

Fox host Tucker Carlson is under attack for comments he made on the “Bubba the Love Sponge” radio show some years ago. Advertisers are reportedly pulling out, despite his show’s high ratings.

I’ve spoken about this sort of thing before, with reference to the (Virginia governor Ralph) Northam yearbook controversy. Such witch hunts must stop. Doesn’t anyone see that this is McCarthyism? Worse, in fact, than McCarthyism was. We used to all agree that this was wrong.

Whether or not what Carlson said was somehow erroneous, or upset somebody, he has the right to say it. Not that his comments were themselves egregious, but that does not matter. And in this case it was not even anything said on his show. To try to hound him off the air because of it, therefore, is extreme sharkvaulting blacklisting. Logically, the intent is to prevent him from ever again practicing his profession, anywhere, from making a living--because you disagree with something he said. This is not honourable or decent behavior now any more than it would have been in Hollywood in the 1950s. But it is beyond anything seen in Hollywood in the 1950s. 

Although literally about the Salem witch hunts, Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible" was also a thinly-veiled criticism of McCarthyism,

Whatever he said is properly irrelevant, unless it involved slander or calls for violence. But the accusations against him are ludicrously trivial in comparison to any McCarthy or the House Committee on Un-American Activities ever levelled. The charge in those days was belonging to or supporting a political organization, the Communist Party, that sought in principle the violent overthrow of the US government; at a time when Communism was a clear and present geopolitical danger. All Carlson is accused of is opinions that are unfashionable in some circles, although demonstrably acceptable in others--as witness the gratifying ratings enjoyed by Mr. Love Sponge.

If the harpies and inquisitors keep getting away with this, nobody is safe. What is permissible to say in these same witchfinder circles changes so quickly and unpredictably year to year and even month by month that anyone could be professionally destroyed at any time for something they said several years ago. Who could have predicted just a few years ago, for example, that it would soon become a “hate crime” to oppose gay marriage? Yet people have lost their jobs over that one. 

Senator Joseph McCarthy

Freedom of speech is an inalienable right. It is also essential for a democracy to function; because it is essential to make it possible to discuss the issues. Which is precisely what Carlson was doing, and precisely what the blacklist bullies seek to prevent. It must never matter what Carlson said, or whether either you or I agree with it. It should not matter even had he said it on his own show yesterday. If you don’t want to hear it, you don’t watch.

But the attack on Carlson does matter, and must concern us all. Our basic freedoms are under assault, as is the very fabric of our society.

Some will insist this is not a free speech issue, because government is not involved. That is so in terms of the US Constitution. But in terms of the Lockean theory on which it is founded, the very purpose of having a government is to protect our rights and freedoms from each other. Granted that here it is not government that is infringing on freedom of speech, but a mostly faceless mob. Government exists to protect us from such things, just as, and for the same reason, we expect it to protect us from lynch mobs. 

Families and friends of victims of the 1950s Hollywood blacklist protesting.

The puzzle is how to do this here. Sponsors have their own freedom of speech, and therefore a perfect right not to sponsor some program with which they disagree. Consumers have the perfect right not to buy a product, and so to boycott. Networks have the right to cancel a program if it is no longer profitable. And on the whole, government in a democracy is not a reliable protection against mob rule; essentially, the same mob elects them. Relying on government to help here may be asking the fox to mind the henhouse.

Voluntary action may do the trick: organize to boycott in turn any business that pulls their ads. Make a point of buying from those who do not. 

Matthew Hopkins, intrepid witchfinder general; the Media Matters of his day.

Sadly, in the meantime, however, even if this works, a good many lives may be destroyed.

Another possibility, it seems to me, would be a law making it illegal to advocate either “deplatforming,” discrimination in employment, or boycotting on grounds of speech, given that the speech itself is legal. Unfortunately, this too would be an infringement on freedom of speech; but one that can perhaps be justified by genuine public need. In the words of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, this restriction, like those against slander or fraud, could be “demonstrably justified.”