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Cancel Culture Is Not About Limiting Speech

Cancel culture is real—despite the skeptics.  Note 25 concrete examples, mostly from across the pond.  But the libertarian SpikedOnline, where this article appeared, frames the phenomenon as a threat to free speech.  Not quite, as Russ Dauthot notes in “10 Theses about Cancel Culture.” From thesis #3:

The canceled individual hasn’t lost any First Amendment rights, because there is no constitutional right to a particular job or reputation. At the same time, under its own self-understanding, liberalism is supposed to clear a wider space for debate than other political systems and allow a wider range of personal expression. So you would expect a liberal society to be slower to cancel, more inclined to separate the personal and the professional (or the ideological and the artistic), and quicker to offer opportunities to regain one’s reputation and start one’s professional life anew.

Read all theses if you want a nuanced understanding of a phenomenon that is indeed deeply troublesome, though not necessarily the end of democracy.

More Revelations at The Times

One insidious effect of cancel culture is that it leads to what one might call resignation culture.  This last week, conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan resigned from the New York Post on the heels of opinion editor Bari Weiss resigning from The New York Times. Sullivan explains his reasons today here, which he sums up like this:

A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entirely their prerogative. They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. Actually attacking, and even mocking, critical theory’s ideas and methods, as I have done continually in this space, is therefore out of sync with the values of Vox Media. That, to the best of my understanding, is why I’m out of here.

Here is Weiss’s full explanation for her resignation.  An excerpt:

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions.

Add this to the recent forced resignation of Editorial Page Editor James Bennet for inviting conservative Sen. Tom Cotton to write about the George Floyd unrest, one has reason to wonder, when it comes to The Times, if it can be called “the paper of record” anymore. So argues Douglas Murray in The Spectator.

For several generations now the New York Times has been seen as America’s ‘paper of record’. You might have appreciated some aspects of it more than others, and it may have been a little dull, but it was reliable; even necessary. A sort of journalistic fibre. Then at some stage in recent decades, it started to exemplify a rot which has wormed its way through much of the legacy media. Its reporting became unreliable and its comment pages monotone. The paper became increasingly unreadable. If there was one reason above all, it was that it became untrustworthy.

The Times is still a great paper, and more trustworthy than Murray lets on. It still includes thoughtful commentary (note my Russ Douthat link above) and some wonderful deep reporting. But it’s not the source for objective coverage always (I’ve noted this in areas I know something about, like religion reporting). Still it’s a liberal outlet that must be read if one wants to understand the diversity of American reporting and opinion.

What’s at the Heart of Cultural Ferment?

I ran across a couple of pieces this week that try to step above the fray to wonder aloud about why our culture has become so extremist, chaotic, and radically activist.  In the first, a former Icelandic prime minister looks at recent social media furor in his homeland to suggest we’re in a completely new era politically.  The second looks at it from the perspective of social psychology to argue “With the collapse of the private sphere, potent private emotions collide with public affairs.”  For example, after noting a number of recent violent protests and riots, the author notes,

Anger is a huge story and thus a fat analytical target. Most of these explanations have some merit to them. However, all take it for granted that the anger is justified—the analyst’s job is simply to discover a cause commensurate with its enormity. I think that assumption begs a lot of questions. All the incidents I mentioned took place in relatively free and prosperous nations. The actual persons venting anger tended to be articulate, well educated, and highly mobile. I doubt a single one hit the streets without a smartphone.

It's very difficult to understand the ferment we’re experiencing now, but I tend to agree with those who believe it’s bigger than racial injustice or the coronavirus lockdown or Donald Trump or the previous and coming recession or liberalism gone mad—that is, it’s bigger than current news trends. I envy historians of the next generation who, with more perspective, may be able to get a better handle on this.

A Theology of Walking

On a more meditative and slower-paced note, let’s think about walking, or better, think while we’re walking.

We walk because three miles an hour, as the writer Rebecca Solnit says, is about the speed of thought, and maybe the speed of our souls. We walk because if we go much faster for much longer, we’ll start to lose ourselves: our bodies will atrophy, our thinking will jumble, our very souls will wither.

So writes Mark Buchanan in his new book, God Walk: Moving at the Speed of Your Soul, reviewed by John Wilson in Christianity Today.

A Model of Charitable Engagement

Another activity that can lift the soul is listening to Father Robert Barron. Here’s a video produced for this past Independence Day, arguing “When we take belief in God out of that equation, the foundation of our liberal democracy gives way.”  Watching this took me to another video of his, which he recorded after the death of the iconoclast atheist Christopher Hitchens, who could be mighty bitter towards Christianity. It is a model of charitable engagement.

Grace and peace,

Mark Galli

markgalli.com