from the cancel-culture-is-a-moral-panic dept
I think, by this point, I’ve made my overall views on the hype around “cancel culture” pretty clear. To me it seems to be just as much of a moral panic
about free speech as most other moral panics, though couched in
language that pretends it’s about supporting free speech. As with most
moral panics, that’s not to say there aren’t some legitimate
concerns about whatever is at the heart of the panic, but the actual
concerning bits are rare and quite limited, whereas the panic assumes
that it’s widespread and pervasive.
Even worse (to me) is that those running around screaming about
cancel culture are, all too often, using the very rare cases of
legitimate concern to effectively raise a barrier against perfectly deserved criticism and accountability
for those who were previously untouchable, but who might actually
deserve some criticism and accountability. That is, it often feels like
the hype around “cancel culture” is, in fact, an attack on free speech,
rather than in support of it (as its proponents claim). It’s the attack
on those who are speaking out and criticizing the speech of others —
which should be seen as quintessential free expression.
All of this came to mind as I read Eve Fairbanks recent piece in The Altantic, where she discusses her own shock that she wasn’t “canceled” for her latest book.
She was concerned that, as a white writer, who wrote about race issues
in South Africa — where she has lived for over a decade — she would face
a screaming mob who was upset because she wrote about Black South
Africans while not being Black herself. Almost all of this fear was
based on people fretting to her about all they’d heard about how
pervasive cancel culture had become in America.
Friends and colleagues told me that one of my biggest jobs ahead
of publishing my book would be to take careful steps to avoid
cancellation for writing about race. (I am white.) My book, The Inheritors,
follows several South Africans as they grapple with their
white-supremacist country’s rapid transfiguration into a Black-led
democracy. It begins with a young Black woman’s memory of preparing to
go to school—she was one of the first Black students at an elementary
school that for a century accepted only white kids—and ends on her
mother’s reflections. Ninety percent of South Africans are Black, and
I’d felt frustrated reading decades’ worth of writing, even
by Nobel-winning progressives,
that envisioned South Africa through anxious white families’ eyes. Two
editors, though, told me in private conversations to evade criticism by
cutting the manuscript so it focused exclusively on white people.
She goes on to give numerous other examples of people warning her
about how much trouble she was going to get in for her book. And… then
none of it happened.
Indeed, she notes that she ended up “self-censoring” herself not (as
the cancel culture proponents would have you believe) out of fear that
the cancel culture folks were coming for her, but because of how often
everyone told her the cancel culture mob would definitely be coming for
her.
I hid the book a little, in other words. I self-censored, not—it
seemed to me afterward—because of a direct fear of censorious mobs, but
because of the way the threats to free speech are now depicted in
innumerable essays and whispered rumors from elders in the world of
letters.
But, nothing at all happened. No one was pissed off. No one freaked
out. She wasn’t canceled. And so now she’s coming around to what many of
us have been saying all along. The whole narrative about cancel culture
is itself a kind of moral panic:
The experience made me wonder: Why do we assume that cancel
culture is a pervasive reality, and what’s the impact of that
assumption? When the Times wrote in its editorial that Americans “know
[cancel culture] exists and feel its burden,” the paper was referring to
a poll it commissioned in which 84 percent of respondents said they
believed “retaliation” and “harsh criticism” against opinions now
constitute a “serious” problem. But substantial numbers of Americans
also believe the 2020 election was fraudulent without that being the
truth. I began to think that the way pro-free-speech advocates
now talk about speech suppression constitutes a driver of the perception
of it. And that, paradoxically, concern about cancel culture has itself
become a threat to free speech.
It’s that last line that struck me as the most interesting, and
telling, piece in the whole thing. As with lots of moral panics, the
panic itself, based on little but overhyped and exaggerated anecdotes
and stories, ends up becoming a weird sort of self-fulfilling prophecy,
in that it causes people to act as if it is true, even if it’s not.
Fairbanks then compares it to all the nonsense being pushed in the
media these days about crime rising. The media and politicians keep
pushing this nonsense narrative that crime is rising, even as the data shows it really is not.
But, the data is less important. The narrative lives on, and because
people believe that crime (and cancel culture) is a problem, they act as
if they are really happening, and the end result is, in some ways,
effectively the same:
It might sound strange, or even offensive, to suggest that
writing about threats to free speech could make people afraid of
speaking. The thing is, we know this is how behavior works in other
domains. When writers emphasize adverse reactions to vaccines, people
shy away from taking them. People clean supermarket shelves out of
toilet paper, creating a shortage, just on the warning that a shortage
might happen. Americans consistently believe crime is rising
nationwide even when it’s falling. In studies on crime and public
behavior, researchers reliably find that increased worry in the
press, on social media, and in public opinion—the same outlets on which
journalists rely to describe cancel culture’s reality—do not correlate
well with changes in crime rates. They also find, as one analysis put
it, that “ironically, fear of crime” can “lead to other behaviors” that
drive crime up: installing ostentatious security features, fleeing “bad”
neighborhoods, voting for heavy policing that aggravates conflict
between people and law enforcement.
This is one of the many reasons why I keep calling out exaggerations
around cancel culture. Because those exaggerations, and the associated
moral panic, are actually causing much of what those pushing that
narrative fear is happening… to actually happen.
It remains perfectly reasonable to call out specific
situations where you can talk about why that specific scenario is
egregious or problematic, and let people discuss those specifics. But by
continuing to promote the myth of pervasive cancel culture,
you’re actually doing more to create the kinds of “self-censorship” that
people are whining about. Of course, for those who have built up a
reputation as being the voices decrying cancel culture, they actually
benefit from the self-fulfilling prophecy part of it all, but that
doesn’t meant that the people who are actually working for free
expression need to help them just to assuage their own insecurities.
Filed Under: cancel culture, eve fairbanks, free speech, overhype
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