Cancel Culture

Cancel culture is out of control, worsening the very problems it purports to denounce.

Now, before you cancel me, or mail me an envelope full of ricin, hear me out. Given my generally centrist reputation, my statue should perhaps not be toppled quite yet. And just to be clear, there is a time and a place for expunging symbols of wickedness from society– but not every historical figure or current business leader is or was Adolf Hitler.

Cancel culture is no new thing, it’s just a new name for shunning, ostracising, or excommunicating, and removed only in degree from lynching. There’s nothing new about the ultimate cold shoulder. Mob justice is wrong whether practised by the right, the left, the church, or the Grade Nine Princess Club.

Let’s first agree on this: humans do nasty, horrific things to one another, the strong and crafty doing as they like to the gentle and the innocent. It’s nothing new– Hitler was a monster, but he could have taken lessons from Ghengis Khan and Tamarlane.

As you read this, thousands of your fellow beings are in torture chambers, and somebody somewhere is getting rich by cutting corners on safety standards, maybe even on a product you use. As Lewis Black puts it, we need rules because we’re all just a few hairs away from baboons.

Without doubt much of Canada’s treatment of First Nations was and is despicable, and without doubt America needs to own up to the centrality of slavery in its history. There’s no way to candy coat this stuff.

Individually, many of us quietly continue to think that being white, or being male, makes us special, and we don’t think there’s a problem with that. We just want everyone to shut up about it and move on. And that’s wrong.

But cancel culture is not the way to fix things. In fact, it’s part of the problem. It has at least five damning faults.

The first is that it’s of a kind with corporal and capital punishment- emotionally satisfying to the mob, but crude and ultimately ineffective to reform society. It doesn’t deal with the root, and often turns the offender into somebody’s martyr. Surely that’s a fail.

Secondly, it’s mob rule, a twenty-first century form of lynching- arbitrary, uncontainable, and irreversible. Like the mob of Paris, it may some day come for you, too.

The third is that it’s blunt and non-nuanced – all or nothing. It sharply bifurcates the world into good guys and bad guys, nothing in between. Take for example, Sir John A. Macdonald.

Sir John had faults aplenty, and admitted to most of them. Without doubt he was a driving force behind Canada’s Indian Act whose primary purpose was to assimilate First Nations into white culture by whatever means necessary. We can’t whitewash that.

But if we throw the baby out with the bathwater, we do a disservice to his lifetime of building a very special country that might not otherwise exist. Toppling his statues and renaming highways robs him, and us, of a valuable memory of a devoted patriot. We need a little nuance here.

The demonization of historical figures also relies on another fallacy: selective application of today’s standards to yesterday’s realities, arbitrarily picking and choosing in hindsight which rules should apply, and to whom. Robert E. Lee led his armies against constituted authority. So did George Washington. Both were slave owners. One is celebrated, one is demonized.

But the most damning fault is that cancel culture lets the rest of us off the hook. Exempted are parents who indulge their little boys and teach them that their maleness entitles them to liberties, and for that matter, parents who teach their little girls that it’s OK to trade on such liberties for their personal advantage.

We exempt the lawyers and bureaucrats who helped Sir John write the Indian Act, and the “good people” who worked in the residential schools, but chose to look the other way. We give no thought to the European bankers who prospered on slave-picked cotton, or industrialists who profited on the production of Zyklon B.

I’m also exempt, notwithstanding decades of telling jokes which relied for their punch line on ethnic and gender slander.

We’re all part of the problem, but we need to be part of the solution. The truth is that we all need to grow up and take some responsibility. I need to check some quiet assumptions of superiority and privilege, and maybe you do, too.

Racism, sexism, and exploitation won’t be driven out by histrionics, but only by a conscious extirpation by you and by me of all the little privileges we accept which come at a cost to others.

“Cancel culture” is nothing but scapegoating which only perpetuates bad habits. What we really need is to cancel our pervasive culture of taking advantage of one another, excusing ourselves, and turning a blind eye.