It’s Not Cancel Culture You Should Worry About, It’s the Fascists
Nobody in a Civilized Society Should Be Able to Hate
I never quite thought I’d see the day, but here we are. “Cancel culture” has become a major political issue — or at least the hard right’s trying to make it one. In the US, Republicans have called hearings into it (!), and in Britain, the government’s trying to regulate it. LOL.
I have complicated feelings about cancel culture. I don’t like it, but not in the way you probably think, or for the reasons that people usually put forward. So let’s talk about it for a second.
“Cancel culture,” originally, was college kids calling out celebrities on social media, maybe, coupled with a healthy dose of “de-platforming” particularly obnoxious ideas. I was wary of that, but for the reason of “free speech,” which I’ll come to. Because nobody should care much what celebrities think in the first place. I know, I know, that’s a utopian fantasy. But I think the Kardashians have done enough damage to our brains without us regarding their ilk as social or political oracles, too.
The “free speech” issue, though, has always struck me as a canard. Is “free speech” really what’s being “cancelled”? Of course not. There’s a weak and a strong criticism of this eminently foolish idea. The weak one goes like this. “Freedom of speech” is something we’re protected from the government taking away from us. Nobody has absolute freedom of speech, on say, Twitter, in much the same way that you can’t walk into a shopping mall and begin harassing someone. It’s just not on. The point of “freedom of speech” is to guarantee governments don’t censor. And it is not censorship, when, say, a company like Twitter or even here at Medium decides something is hateful, bigoted, supremacist, or just plain obnoxious, rude, and gross.
So what is it? It’s the protection of speech, and many other rights, too. The reason that we don’t let people wander around shopping malls punching other people in the face, or screaming names at them is to protect the rights of the firstperson. Their freedom of expression, association, of just hanging around and being themselves. Nobody has the right to harass someone else just for…existing.
But that is precisely what the hard right wants to do. On the one hand, they condemn “cancel culture.” But say something remotely factual on Twitter, like the international slave trade was invented by white countries, who in fact had a whole special currency for it — and you’ll quickly be met, especially if you’re a woman or minority, by a screaming, baying mob of lunatics, extremists, and fanatics. They’ll probably send you death threats. If you’re a woman, they’ll be kind enough to tell you should be raped.
What did you do wrong? Nothing. You just pointed out facts. And for doing that, you were harassed, probably for weeks or days. For many women, to the point that you left the platform altogether.
See the lesson. The hard right equates “cancel culture” with the right to harass and intimidate you just for existing. They think they should have the right to cancel anyone, in much, much harder terms than the left does.
The left is not sitting there trying to take away anyone’s personhood. But the hard right is. And that’s a crucial difference.
This is the same level of thinking — or not-thinking — that the Taliban or ISIS employed. And I’m not kidding about that — they, too, would fight insane culture wars. No, you can’t listen to that kind of music. No, this cultural artefact has this gender. No, you must never show an inch of skin below this level of garment. Nope — you always have to say “blessed” before naming a prophet. And so on. This is the level at which today’s hard right thinks.
But these two things are not equivalent. The left wants to “cancel” people culturally, for trying to take away personhoodfrom others. The right wants to cancel people politically, socially, and legally,in order to take away their personhood.
Do you see how vastly different these two things — both of which “cancel culture” refers to now — really are? Let me make it clearer.
The hard right seems to not want gay or trans or any other kind of LGBT people to exist. Period. It doesn’t want them to have secondary rights — like marriage, association, and expression. And all that, added up, is the removal of personhood. The negation of it. If you said to me “You can’t call yourself what you really believe yourself to be, so long as it’s not hurting anyone,” then I’d be pretty upset, too. So would the world’s, say, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Black people, indigenous people, and so on.
Why does the hard right want to take away people’s right to define themselves as they see fit? Because for the hard right, there is already a place everyone occupies. A ladder, left over from the Enlightenment, which is, well, not very enlightened. It’s essentially a hierarchy of race and gender. At the top of this hierarchy sit white men, below them white women, and then everyone else. Whites are at the top because they possess “reason” and “intellect,” and every other “race” has its own qualities. “Yellow” people are clever, but greedy, “red” people are brave and sometimes noble savages, brown people are jolly and dumb, and Black people are good for nothing but slave labour. Those fictions are still with us today. We call them, in modern terms, “unconscious bias.”
The right thinks that everyone should stay in their place on the old ladder of humanity. Where did that ladder come from, though? Well, if you press a right winger, they will cry “science!” But of course no such thing is true. If anything, science has debunked the idea that anyone has a place on any hierarchy or ladder genetically or biologically whatsoever — we are all just the same. Then, once you say that, they will get to the real answer. God.
This is how so many strands of American fanaticism intersect. God is the ultimate arbiter of rights, in American thinking. And so there is this constant tussle over what God really “wanted.” Did God invent gay people? Or didn’t he?
Wait, what reason do we have to appeal to the supernatural at all? I don’t believe that our rights come from God. Maybe my God isn’t your God. Maybe my God is just the ocean or forest. Rights, if they are anything at all…well, where do they come from?
Press a right winger, and maybe they’ll say: “reason.” Meaning that we’re back to that same old Enlightenment era ladder. But rights don’t come from reason. There’s no “reason,” really, that we should all have equal rights.
Rights are moral choices. The conflation of morality with philosophy is where America errs. I can never “prove” to you that we should have the same rights. You can only ever accept it, or not. There is no logic in the world that can “prove” it, because this is not about math, but about personhood, life, qualities, not quantities.
And because you can only ever accept it or not, the personhood of others, we are left in a very clear intellectual position.
The one position that can’t be allowed in the public spaces of a civilized society is this: someone else trying to take your personhood away. That’s because there’s no way to “debate” it, because it’s not about logic in the first place. What is it about? Greed, power, domination, hate, usually. You can’t logic that stuff away. It’s illogical from the get go. If someone wants to take your personhood away, “debating” them is the worst thing to do, because it conflates the religious and the moral with the logical and the philosophical, and makes that position, which is basically just hate, seem “reasonable” and legitimate and tolerable. But it’s none of those things.
That’s why college kids were precisely right to deplatform people pushing hate. Hate needs no debate. Why not? Let me put that to you another way.
Press a right winger on all the above, and they’ll eventually come back with “but intellectual diversity!” There’s no such thing. Human history is full of failed and foolish ideas, long since discredited, which deserve no place in the public sphere, either. Shall we “debate” child labour? How about female genital mutiilation? What about if the sun spins round the earth? If I’m a “knight” and you’re a “serf”? I could go on forever, the point is this: we don’t want “diversity” in ideas. We want truth in ideas.
And the truth that humanity has taken too long to understand, perhaps the ultimate one, is this. Being civilized is better. Civilized societies — places where human beings treat each other with kindness, dignity, justice, grace, goodness — they are far, far happier and more prosperous places over the long run. That is the entire story of human civilisation in a nutshell, but you must see how strange it really is. To this day, people believe the old lie that violence and brutality are where prosperity and fortune come from. They don’t. If that were the case, America would be a land of the rich, and Europe and Canada poor third world country now. But the precise opposite is true.
We don’t need to reexaimine the same millions of failed ideas hat made human history a living hell forever. We just want, when it comes to ideas, a greater truth. And the greatest but hardest truth of all is the one that the right wing doesn’t ever want told. Its belief system is the biggest failure in history. Hate and selfishness and greed and violence don’t lead anywhere, except maybe to America. Rights are just agreements we negotiate amongst ourselves, about who has power and how and why, according to our moral beliefs. And the only moral belief that makes any sense, if you understand how badly violence, greed, and hatred have failed humanity for millennia, is that everyone is a person, and their personhood is inalienable.
If anyone suggests the opposite, it’s only right that they should be “cancelled,” which is to say, ejected from the public spaces of a civlized society. Because they are the real cancellers, the ones who want to take not just “culture” away, but the social, political, and legal foundations of one’s humanity itself. Nobody should have to “debate” people who want them not to exist — because that isn’t something any form of logic can ever disprove, it’s just hate — yet in America, that’s still the norm.
Do you see the difference? Let me sum it up. The left, for the most part, wants to cancel those culturally who threaten to take away other people’s personhood. The hard right wants to cancel people as human beings who it thinks shouldn’t exist, taking away their legal, social, and political humanity, because morally, to the hard right, according to divinity backing ancient notions of supremacy, such forms of selfhood are forbidden. For the most part the left wants to culturally cancel fascists and supremacists. The right wants women, minorities and the LGBT, among others, not to have true personhood, cancelling — negating, removing, incinerating — their social, economic, political and cultural freedoms.
To any thinking person, these are not the same thing. “Cancel culture” means both of them, but it shouldn’t. What the hard right is doing is hate. What the left is doing is struggling against it. You should never conflate those things. Because that is what the fascists want, and that is why they try to confuse you by calling these two very different things the same thing to begin with.
Umair
March 2021