IS "CANCEL CULTURE" A REAL THREAT TO THE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS?
INTRODUCTION:
Back on July 7th, there was an open letter published on Harper's Magazine website with 153 signatories — including many notable scholars like Anne Applebaum, Noam Chomsky, Nicholas Christakis, Francis Fukuyama, Jonathan Haidt, Shadi Hamid, Parag Khanna, Mark Lilla, Deidre McCloskey, John McWhorter, Yascha Mounk, Steven Pinker, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Allison Stanger, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Fareed Zakaria — that decried the stifling of free expression & open debate in the news media, academia, and other cultural institutions. In this meetup, we'll discuss whether or not their concerns are well-founded. Is "cancel culture" a threat to the marketplace of ideas, or is some degree of "cancellation" useful to combat bigotry & extremism?
To preface our discussion, we'll need to define "cancel culture". Over the last couple years, the term has been applied to several types of actions by angry mobs, listed here in order of escalating severity:
(1) Calling Out & Online Shaming: mass forms of online criticism (a.k.a. "dogpiling"), with the aim not of starting a debate but rather coercing a speaker's apology, retraction, or withdrawal from a platform (a.k.a. self-cancellation).
(2) Deplatforming: shutting down speakers by denying them access to a physical venue, shouting them down, using a DoS attack on their website, or getting them kicked off an online platform.
(3) Employer Doxing & Political Boycotts: revealing a person's employer, mass calling their manager, picketing a business or deluging a consumer feedback site with negative reviews (a.k.a. review bombing), organizing a boycott, or threatening a libel lawsuit (a.k.a. SLAPP) — all to coerce an employer to censor, discipline or fire an employee for their speech.
(4) Character Assassination & Blacklisting: ruining a speaker's reputation so they're unemployable in their chosen profession.
(5) Political Harassment & Stochastic Terrorism: forms of protest that aim to publicly humiliate a person & advertise their vulnerability in a way that could be seen as incitement or a veiled threat; for example, online tactics like "doxing" that reveals their home address, or in-person tactics like "escrache" (protesting outside a public figure's home), loudly confronting & mobbing them in public (a.k.a. "struggle sessions"), or mock assassinations like "milkshaking" & "glitterbombing".
(6) Political Violence: clearly criminal acts used as a form of "direct action" to silence a speaker, either online (e.g. cyber-extortion, death threats, swatting), or in-person (e.g. intimidation, assault, assassination).
Even though the 1st Amendment protects freedom of speech and the Supreme Court banned various government infringements on this freedom in several major cases in the 20th & early 21st centuries, extra-legal penalties for controversial speech have always been present, such as loss of employment, social ostracism, and physical violence. The types of speech viewed as controversial have shifted over time, and the intensity of the persecution of dissenters has waxed & waned depending on the political climate. There were several waves of private political persecution in the 20th century, notably anti-union vigilantism & racial pogroms in 1919-1920, the anti-communist blacklists of the 1950s, and the firing, evictions & physical attacks on Civil Rights activists in the 1960s, but these were heavily supported by government efforts to stamp out "subversives" as part of the war on communism.
Thankfully, in more recent decades, private political persecution hasn't usually been backed by government force, although it's still aroused controversy. Starting in the late 1980s, left-wing college activism began to pressure students & faculty to conform to new speech norms - i.e. "political correctness" — lest they be branded racist, sexist & homophobic. After the 9/11 attacks, conservative pundits used "patriotic correctness" to pressure critics of the War on Terror to shut up & "support the troops" lest they be branded traitors.
Modern "cancel culture" can be thought as a successor to these earlier forms of political shaming, albeit amplified by increased polarization and the ease of coordinating mobs via social media. "Cancel culture" also has more of a tendency toward "purity spirals" where activists call out those who are nominally on the same side of the political spectrum.
"Cancel culture" closely relates to ideas about the "marketplace of ideas" and the "public sphere". In two meetups in 2018, we addressed the role of universities and the mainstream news media in shaping the "public sphere" — i.e. areas in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. This notion of the "public sphere" as an integral part of liberal democracy is related to Karl Popper's idea of the "open society". As a philosopher of science, Popper considered all truth to be provisional & subject to revision, and thus he favored an “open society” where each citizen has the right & duty to engage in critical thinking on matters of public concern. Popper contrasted the “open society” with the “closed societies” of theocracies, communism, and fascism where the authorities determine the official “Truth” and it is relatively fixed and can’t be easily revised even when it’s manifestly wrong.
The “open society” also relates to John Rawls’ concept of “reflective equilibrium”, which is the idea that a society can arrive at relatively stable & widely agreed-upon moral principles through public discussion & reflection. If this process is short-circuited by an attempt to impose moral principles from the top-down, it creates a risk that not enough of the populace will “buy into” the official morality and the public sense of a morally binding “social contract” will break down. Authoritarian orthodoxies rely on what the social scientist Timur Kuran calls "preference falsification" — i.e. people can't say what they really think and thus they don't know how unhappy others are. This creates an opportunity for "preference cascades", critical moments when people realize their private feelings are shared by a large portion of the population and they collectively revolt against the false consensus.
Many political activists on both the far left & far right, as well as radical centrists, reject the idealized Enlightenment view of the "public sphere" and don't see the "marketplace of ideas" as fair or neutral. Those on the left often argue that the mainstream news media is manipulated by corporate advertisers & right-wing propaganda, whereas those on the right often view both the news media & academia as politically biased against them. Activists on both sides often argue that gatekeeping institutions "socially engineer" a false public consensus to ensure it stays within certain boundaries, a.k.a. the "Overton window". As we discussed at another meetup in 2018, some activists have used the internet to establish a "counter-public sphere" through alternative news blogs & podcasts to promote their ideas.
"Cancel culture" is a different strategy that aims to move the Overton window by hijacking the gatekeeping institutions rather than bypassing them, and "cancellation" silences those who disagree rather than persuading them to change their minds. In this discussion, we'll consider whether or not this tactic is legitimate.
RELEVANT MATERIAL FROM PAST MEETUPS:
In the above Intro, I mentioned 3 past meetups where we discussed the "public sphere" concept as it relates to universities, the news media, and the rise of alternative media. Here's the links to those discussion outlines:
Back In February of 2019, we had a meetup entitled "Outrage in the Digital Age". We discussed the psychology of moral outrage and how it carries both benefits & costs, the way outrage is harnessed via the internet by activists to "get out the vote" and push for social change (which occasionally backfires), how the ethics of shaming relate to public apologies & forgiveness, and whether comedy provides a better vehicle for creating social awareness of hypocrisies & absurdities rather than outrage & shaming. https://bit.ly/2DvYl31
The Skeptics had a meetup back in July of 2018 entitled "Memes, Trends & Cultural Evolution". In the 3rd section we discussed Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's "spiral of silence" theory and Nicholas Nassim Taleb's "minority rule" theory and how they use different mechanics to explain how highly vocal activists can force society to accommodate their social preferences. Whereas Noelle-Neumann's theory depends mostly on "cultivation theory" (i.e. how media shapes our perception of reality) and "social desirability bias" (i.e. tendency to underreport taboo opinions & overreport trendy opinions), Taleb's theory depends more on the "concentrated benefits" a minority can reap from forcing society to accommodate their preferences and the "diffuse costs" of accommodating a minority that is highly vocal & intransigent. https://bit.ly/30DoBBp
