Over the past few weeks the literary and journalistic scene has exploded in discussion – or, if we are really being honest, diatribe – about free speech, open debate and the limits of discourse. This has been spurred on by the publication of an open letter in Harper’s magazine signed by notable writers and academics against what they describe as the spread of “intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty”.
Unlike Émile Zola’s J’Accuse…!, the most famous open letter in history, this one targeted no particular travesty of justice, although a few were alluded to. Rather, its subject was an “atmosphere” or “climate” of censoriousness. Although it is not mentioned by name in the letter, the topic in question is that spectre that hangs over contemporary discourse: “cancel culture”.
What is cancel culture, really? Well, nobody quite knows. Does it even exist? Some would say it’s just a term given to a number of practices that people dislike because they’re personally inconvenient or challenging. Others would argue that only someone acting in bad faith could deny that it exists. As some wag once remarked about Sigmund Freud’s “death drive”, there seem to be as many definitions of cancel culture as there are intellectuals. And maybe that’s the point.
One writer caustically remarked something to the effect that cancel culture was a jobs programme for younger media types who wish to displace their elders and take their positions. It’s true that it’s a jobs programme, although maybe not quite in the sense the writer meant. “Cancel culture” gives intellectuals something to debate, to talk and write about at a moment when most are cooped up indoors. Even better, it also comes with its own cant vocabulary that gives writers the actual words to use; no need to struggle with the hard and often unrewarding work of articulating reality in an original way, now one can just use the ready-made terms of debate.
Let’s call this a “chilling effect” or call that a “cancellation”. Hell, you don’t even need to string them together on your own! Just sign your name on a letter someone else wrote and you are part of a literary cause, engaged in a valiant struggle against the forces of darkness and ignorance. Or, if you like, you can practise the other cant, where the signees are powerful villains and craven defenders of privilege faced with overdue and righteous proletarian anger. How quickly the tedium of life and all its indignities, personal and professional, can be transformed into a moment of historic grandeur. One goes from being just another lowly so-and-so to someone Acting On Principle, part of a Big Thing, the cause, the movement. And so, the mob begins to form: the stuff of bad writing becomes the spur to bad action.
One of the ironies of the letter controversy is that some of its signatories immediately went about practising what it denounced: intolerance of opposing views, shaming and ostracising those who objected, and most of all, dissolving complex and thorny issues into “blinding moral certitude”. Mobs were called forth on Twitter to protest the rule of mobs. Was this hypocrisy deliberate? Perhaps in some cases, but more likely it’s the result of the type of writing one has to employ in order to get purchase on the internet: the stark division of the world into friends and enemies, the gross inflation of seriousness and symbolic significance, the intimation of dark intentions and dastardly conspiracies behind every statement. In short, the most melodramatic mode of writing and self-expression possible.
The complaints of the culture warriors mirror each other. Their belief, it seems to be, is that we are faced with a hostile environment – and if we don’t take maximal action on every front we will be totally overwhelmed by an insidious opponent. We are a committed and brave minority of truth-speakers. All reasonable people essentially agree with us but have been afraid to say so.
To make it all worse, this inflation of the symbolic significance of everything from statues to letters comes in the midst of very real crises. In the United States, where Covid-19 still rages out of control, we have the deepest unemployment since the Great Depression. The police are cracking the skulls of protesters and shooting unarmed people, and now it looks like thousands of people will be evicted from their homes. To be fair, many in the media are bravely covering these realities and trying their utmost to bring attention to them.
But in the face of most of these issues, many intellectuals, myself included, have very little to offer. We are powerless in the face of it all. Our opinions are as partially informed as most people’s, our biases provincial and narrow, our theories fitted to earlier times. And so like children we invent imaginary battles that make us feel big and flatter our vanity. Everything serious gets swallowed by these games, converted into the bleak anti-matter of the internet, where even the most good-willed of intentions are perverted into preening and self-advertisement.
Like the letter signers, I am also protesting against an atmosphere or a climate. I don’t think it’s the product of the left or the right, the young or the old, but the result of the vicious, levelling power of abstraction that social media represents. Every opportunity the internet offers for making us bigger, for increasing our power to act, for joining us with others, seems to be a trap that flattens and empties us out, and fills us up with much cruder stuff than was there before.
So this is my definition of what’s at stake in cancel culture: it’s not really a political phenomenon at all, but the gradual negation of all human capacity for meaning. Is that a melodramatic enough conceit to get attention on the internet? I certainly hope so.
• John Ganz is a writer living in Brooklyn and executive editor at Genius
