Cancel Culture Just is the Market-Place of Ideas
Guest post by Eric Schliesser
1. Free expression is probably at an all-time high right now, at least in the West. There is a huge variety of different venues for your writing, there’s a whole new world podcast for speeches and an ever-increasing supply of video outlets. The availability of these platforms and publishers doesn’t guarantee you an audience, but that’s not what free expression means.
2. Related to that, some of the technologies that have enabled easy speech have made counter-speech extraordinarily easy as well.
3. There are a lot more people who are not you than there are people who are you, and so easy counter-speech means that it’s entirely possible to get inundated with unpleasantness.
4. Because of (2 and 3), people are often careful about what they say, and may feel burdened by this.
5. It is hard to get (1) without (2). The ability to broadcast to others means that they can broadcast back.
6. (4) may hit socially well-positioned people, but it hits vulnerable people far more. — Ryan Muldoon “Free Expression and Evolving Standards” @Radical Classical Liberals
By ‘cancel culture’ I mean the organized efforts to silence others (e.g., their invitations rescinded, and their honorary doctorates denied, moved to assignments with other duties, etc.) without recourse to violence and state authority (that would be censorship).* I have defined it like this to be permissive to efforts that would also be classified as civil disobedience. In this sense cancel culture just is the marketplace of ideas at work. The currency in this market is approval/disapproval (or credit/discredit in the old sense). There is, thus, nothing especially new in cancel culture, although thanks to social media the mechanisms by which it operates are more virtual than ever before. Obviously, for some this is a reason to reject markets; these are the very people that still pine for Betamax.
That is, cancel culture is a disorderly market. It is very much at odds with a picture of democracy that emphasizes reasoned (and civil) debate. And so on a certain (deliberative) conception of democracy cancel culture is problematic as a mechanism of public opinion formation and preparing of collective action. This is why (they treat it as a virtue not a bug) deliberative democrats spend so much time on the pre-conditions of deliberative spaces.
But cancel culture is one of the ways in which otherwise dispersed and often disorganized individuals can make the more powerful take notice of their views. Sometimes it is very intimidating. I have been on the receiving end of such efforts, and it is no fun (especially when you realize the folk filling your inbox are affiliated with neonazis). And there is no doubt that cancel culture can shade into threats of violence or misfire at targets who are in no sense worthy of public opprobrium (just unlucky).
The previous two paragraphs elide a distinction; marxists (see William Clare Roberts) view cancel culture as crowds in action whereas the critics (e.g., Dan Crenshaw, who is one of the more thoughtful Republicans in the House) use ‘mob’. I prefer to see cancel culture (and here I am indebted to Tyler Cowen) as a thin association — sometimes there is coordination, mostly — in the headline grabbing cases — it seems to be individuals who come together to express their indignation. If the association is durable, we start (recall) calling it a faction or a party.+ (I return to this below.)
So far I have given a broadly Millian interpretation of cancel culture. He thought (recall here and here) that public opinion was needed to check the abuses of the powerful. But the price for that is, as he worried, the danger of conformism (policed by “vituperative” speech). And, there is no doubt that the cumulative effects of cancel culture, like all widely used preference aggregation mechanisms, may be conformism (yes, VHS displaced Betamax). So, while cancel culture is a possibly effective means in breaking up a cozy cartel, it may lead to a homogeneous landscape.
Now, one may think that indignation is the problem here. Indignation seems inimical to liberal political life. Yet, as A dam Smith reminds us, such sense of “sympathetic indignation” is at the root of justice. In its institutions this sense is sublimated and through the rules of evidence and reason redirected to proper ends. (Recall t his post on Srinivasan and the aptness of anger.) But this pushes the problem back because such sympathetic indignation may well be corrupted, and is often corrupted, by other commitments and interests. So, perhaps, on balance, and this is my own inclination, liberals should be weary of anything that encourages the crowd?
This is too easy because such indignation may well be at the root of political life. As Spinoza puts it in his Political Treatise: “men are led… more by passion than reason, it follows, that a multitude comes together, and wishes to be guided, as it were, by one mind, not at the suggestion of reason, but of some common passion…or the desire of avenging some common hurt.” (6.1) Somewhat surprisingly, as Chantal Jaquet has noted, this very desire is at the root of political authority “the right o f the commonwealth is determined by the common power of the multitude” and it is ground in the “desire to avenge some common hurt.” (3.9) Political life is a kind of sublimation and domestication of this subsisting indignation. The effect of righteousness is social peace.
What is noticeable in nearly all the critics of cancel culture is that they refuse to engage with the grounds of indignation. Tactically, one understands this move because it helps ferment polarization (and so opportunities for profit) and cement group identity. Morally it is a mistake because one fails to heed the call of justice. Strategically, it is a worse mistake because one, thereby, misses the causal forces that shape the changing directions of the tectonic plates, which are the sediments of and constraints on the marketplace of ideas, of political life.
In December 2015 (look at that date!) I noted that Trump’s rise to power within the Republican party was clearly an effect of the sense of indignation in that tribe and a loss of faith in its elites. I tend to view cancel culture in American public life as doing something similar to the intellectual opinion leaders of our time. Since our for profit public culture and media feed on indignation, we should expect a turbulent time ahead.** The market giveth and taketh away, and it dances to the tune of fortune.**
*I recognize that the meaning of ‘violence’ is shifting; but I can’t cover all bases here.
+At that point the comparison with a market may break down, and cancel culture becomes more like a union.
**I thank Nick Cowen for discussion, who should be mobbed for my mistakes.
Originally published at https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com.
