Compulsion to cancel is out of control

Mount Rushmore. From left, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln. Picture: Barry O'Brien

Cancel culture happens because we can’t help it. It is the grit in the eye that cannot be ignored, the intolerable noise that just has to end. It is what happens when one person says a thing, and another person finds the mere existence of that statement in the world to be simply intolerable.

Perhaps we most easily associate the urge to cancel with, say, student blue-haired warriors of woke with interesting pronouns, but the same urge exists in a harrumphing old colonel who is apoplectic in his conviction that a person with a vagina shouldn’t be called “Basil”. In the modern world, you will find it wherever and whenever one person wants another to shut the f*** up. It is involuntary. It is the scratching of an itch.

Scratching that itch on TV last week was the presenter Richard Bacon, who fronted a documentary on Channel 4 called Cancelled. He seems a genial soul, does Bacon, but the culture war permits no neutral Switzerlands. Having started out all even-handed, there he suddenly was barking, “yes or no, would you cancel Mount Rushmore?” at a student, which is a palpably insane thing to find yourself saying, even on Channel 4.

The statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee is removed from a park in Charlottesville, Virginia. Picture: Getty Images.

The student, by the way, said he totally would. You could see in his eyes, almost, the terror at the thought that years from now fellow social justice warriors might dismiss him out of hand because he’d been on national telly and failed to demand penance from a racist mountain. And all this after the comedian Jimmy Carr had been on saying, and I quote, “I’ve been cancelled before, so I know what it was like,” while backstage at one of his sellout gigs full of people who know and love him from the telly. While somehow, counterintuitively, also being a voice of good sense.

This, though, is an inevitably counterintuitive business. In the wilds of social media there are many who would insist that cancel culture doesn’t even exist and will do their utmost to cancel you for suggesting that it might. On the one hand, they do seem to have a point, what with virtually every high-profile cancelee ending up writing at least one high-profile newspaper column about it – assuming they didn’t have one already – before going on the telly, and then perhaps on tour.

I’ve now received so many death threats I could paper the house with them, and I haven’t stopped speaking out. Perhaps – and I’m just throwing this out there – the best way to prove your movement isn’t a threat to women, is to stop stalking, harassing and threatening us. 8/X

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 22, 2021

On the other hand, you do need to acknowledge that further down the pecking order free speech has clearly been chilled, and that even higher up, academics have indeed been hounded out of universities, and that the brilliant JK Rowling has, in her own words, received “enough death threats to paper my house”. And if you fail to acknowledge this, ironically enough, you will run the risk of getting cancelled by precisely the people who are usually the most fervently against anybody cancelling anybody, but who suddenly seem minded to make an exception.

This, though, is not about who gets cancelled, and how, or even why. As I said up top, it is about compulsions. To understand these compulsions, consider yesterday’s helpful reports of a culture war battle at Durham University’s South College, after – or I suppose, during – a speech made by the Sunday Times columnist Rod Liddle. Did you see? It had everything.

In precis, if you missed it, Liddle was attending a formal Christmas dinner, during which he ridiculed the concept of structural racism and declared that men have “a long, dangling penis”. I’ve always imagined this to be pretty much what Liddle always does at dinner, even when dining alone, but in this case he does consciously appear to have been trying to upset people. Not that he had to try hard, because some had walked out even before he began speaking. Others fled midway. The principal, Professor Tim Luckhurst – who had invited him – shouted “pathetic!” at them as they left. For the university, this prompted an investigation “as a matter of urgency”. Luckhurst has now apologised.

The small but, I think, vital contention at the heart of this column is that Luckhurst’s compulsion to shout at his own students was not actually so different from the students’ compulsion to walk out on Liddle. Indeed, I’d go further and say that Liddle’s combative urge to maintain the sorts of free speech standards whereby one can talk about penises at a formal dinner in front of students who really don’t want you to is also not that different from the students’ combative urge to maintain standards altogether more penis-free. All three are confronted by people whose worldview is very different from their own and just can’t bloody bear it. All three feel the itch, all three have to scratch.

In his new podcast series Things Fell Apart, the writer Jon Ronson gradually makes it plain (I think intentionally; I haven’t finished it yet) that the culture wars are a product of mass media. The American religious right’s all-consuming loathing of abortion, for example, did not evolve organically from their faith (as with Catholics, for example) but instead spread thanks to films they all went to see and cable TV preachers they all watched. And suddenly, it couldn’t be ignored.

Forty years on, we are all losing the knack of ignoring. We are all, increasingly, terribly, terribly bad at tolerating that which we find objectionable. The woke go hunting for transgressions, and the anti-woke go hunting for the woke. The urge is the same: to ridicule it, trounce it, destroy it, make it go away. This meltdown is bipartisan.

Yes, there are indeed people who can find no peace in a world that contains a single bad joke or a nasty speech or a mountain with the wrong face on it, and yes, that’s indeed pathetic. The rest of us, though, are going to need to find a way to make peace with that.

The Times