Cancel culture is no joke, it’s civilisational self-harm

Cancel culture is a misnomer. The film Gone With the Wind will never be gone, even if outrage darkens the screen for a while. The list of cultural objects and people to be targeted keeps growing — indigenous movie Jedda, sitcom Fawlty Towers and satirist Chris Lilley all figured in Saturday’s article by Rosemary Neill and Max Maddison — but nothing and nobody is really cancelled. We just pretend they are, while ideas or views deemed incorrect go underground, sometimes defiant, sometimes morphing into the extremes of our already polarised society. The war on humour is not a joke, and is just another front in the campaign against open minds and dissent.

Cancel culture can be dramatic and bring immediate gratification. Cultural products and historical eras take a pummelling, careers are junked and sometimes something momentous happens: a Twitter account gets vaporised. But these are all victories built on defeat, a tacit admission by activists that they cannot compete in a fair fight with contrary arguments, with sceptics or critics. And they impose the costs of their failings on the rest of us.

For every incautious public figure put in stocks online and pelted with abuse, there are hundreds who keep their heads down and get the message: there’s no upside in making an honest or informed contribution to solving a difficult social issue if it’s capable of being reduced to a booby-trapped identity politics cause. Much better to chant the latest slogans with the mob. Punishments and rewards such as this are calculated to create an uncivil society with unsolvable problems.

Science and technology are inseparable from modern achievement, but even they go wrong without a climate that prizes good-faith thinking aloud about genuinely difficult problems, and these are often the hot-button issues that derange social justice warriors. A society that works, that is capable of fixing things and making progress, has to be able to draw out the talents and goodwill of its citizens, giving them room to have big, open-ended discussions where fact and argument can close the gap between extremes and find pragmatic solutions in the middle ground. It’s inevitable that sometimes people will get the tone wrong or misconstrue a problem, but constantly taking offence and hitting the cancel button takes us only further away from the objective of social progress in the real world.

Cancel culture is caught up with symbols and language, adept at the worst possible interpretation, indifferent to context and human fallibility. Its response to actual suffering is utopian hype and this means the purity tests get ever stricter. Today’s tormentor is tomorrow’s tormented. Witness comic actor Josh Thomas. One moment he was cancelling Coon cheese, the next he was being dragged on Twitter for ancient musings about the travails of multiculti casting. It’s true cancel culture is overwhelmingly a vice of self-identified “progressives”, but conservatives should not exult if cancellers are cancelled. When anyone feels compelled to abase themselves in public with a ritualistic confession, everyone who witnesses it shares in the humiliation. This kind of thing is an insult to contrition and remorse, which are profound human qualities. It’s striking that cancel culture and wrongthink lynch mobs are strongest in the Anglosphere. Here is a new puritanism, but this time with no hope of redemption for sinners. It goes under a secular banner of social justice with a bland “safetyism” in which unliked words are supposedly body blows.

Progressive opinionistas one moment insist cancel culture is not even a thing; the next they trivialise it as if freedom of speech is just licence to make racist jokes. No freethinkers barrack for racism but it’s perfectly legitimate to argue that anti-racism has become so overzealous, applying a jaundiced lens of race to every controversy, that it tends to promote the evil it claims to oppose: a toxic obsession with race as an attribute of overriding importance.

What’s being cancelled is not only elective entertainment but also essential ideas. In the public square of social media, where at our peril much of our politics now takes place, discussion and voices at odds with progressive groupthink are routinely shut down. A narrow progressivism focused on symbols rather than reality is influential also in major corporations, the bureaucracy, many media outlets and higher education. It is shielded by an emotive culture of taking offence, and this is vulnerable to the twin attack of ridicule and reason. That is why comedy is targeted as well as open conversation. It’s a mistake to see this as inevitable, as if Generation Z is totally woke and will inherit the Earth. The bad ideas driving cancel culture come from baby boomers long entrenched in institutions. Their gatekeeping is far from universally popular with young people, and there are signs of growing restiveness with the constant anxiety and group conformism that is life in the social media police state. Don’t assume youth will tolerate their freedoms being put in a state of suspended animation.