Education in a Cultural War Era

Thinking Philosophically about the Practice of Cancelling

Mordechai Gordon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000580754
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In the past couple of years, much has been said and written in the media about the notion of "cancel culture" and the way in which various celebrities, journalists, politicians, ideas, and monuments have been cancelled. Yet, the conversations taking place on this issue have been largely uninformed, lacking intellectual rigor, and devoid of the historical and cultural context that could help make the contested debates more enlightening. Mordechai Gordon investigates the phenomenon of cancelling historically as well as how it became an issue recently. The book presents some compelling philosophical arguments against the practice of cancelling and highlights various educational dangers and risks that emerge from this practice and deserve our attention.

1 THE CONTESTED DEBATE OVER THE MEANING AND VALUE OF CANCEL CULTURE

DOI: 10.4324/9781003214984-2

Introduction

In the past couple of years, much has been said and written in the media about the notion of “cancel culture” and the way in which various celebrities, journalists, politicians, ideas, and monuments have been cancelled. Yet, the conversations taking place on this issue have been largely uninformed, lacking intellectual rigor, and devoid of the historical and cultural context that could help make the contested debates more enlightening. This chapter is designed to launch our exploration of the current debate over cancelling while addressing many of the problems with the way in which this debate is being waged. More specifically, the aim of this chapter is to define the terms of the debate, dispel some lingering myths, give some historical background, and pave the way for the discussion that will follow in the subsequent chapters of the book. In what follows, I first take on the notion of cancel culture head-on while arguing that it is a problematic term that should probably not be used. Then I analyze the distinction between cancelling and accountability and argue that the latter, though also problematic, is a better way of bringing individuals and ideas to justice. Following the discussion of the difference between cancelling and accountability, I address the issue of the misuse of political correctness as well as its current manifestation in the notion of wokeness. In the final parts of this chapter, I examine the questions of how cancelling became an issue recently as well as why it poses a significant educational risk that deserves our attention.

The Problem with the Term Cancel Culture

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines the term cancel culture as “the action or practice of publicly boycotting, ostracizing, or withdrawing support from a person, institution, etc., thought to be promoting culturally unacceptable ideas” (OED, 2021). According to this dictionary, cancel culture is a relatively new phrase and its first use can be traced back only about five years to 2016. In contrast to the term cancel culture, both the verb cancel and the noun culture have a long etymological history spanning hundreds of years. The transitive verb cancel has several meanings including to “annul, render void or invalid by so marking” as well as to “obliterate, blot out, delete from sight or memory” (OED). Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Ligaya Mishan notes that cancel is “a consumerist verb, almost always involving a commodity or transaction. Readers cancel magazine subscriptions; studio heads cancel TV shows; bank tellers cancel checks to show that they’ve been exhausted of value” (Mishan, 2020). The current usage of cancel in the term cancel culture is akin to the consumerist verb and refers to an attempt to withdraw one’s support from someone, such as a celebrity or an entity, like a company or state in response to particular words pronounced or actions taken by these entities. Thus, to cancel is to boycott or ostracize people, companies, or things that one considers offensive or illegitimate.

The noun culture has several distinct meanings ranging from the cultivation of land to the refinement of mind, taste, and manners. However, the more common use of the word culture suggests something different, having to do with the set of shared attitudes, values, and practices that characterize a society, an institution, or an organization. Hence, culture refers to the beliefs and customs that people in a certain part of the world have in common. Given this understanding of the noun culture and how we defined the verb cancel earlier, I submit that the term cancel culture is misleading at best and nonsensical at worst. That is, there is no evidence that suggests that the citizens of the United States believe that cancelling is the best remedy that should be applied to punish individuals or institutions that cross the line of socially accepted behavior. Further, I am not aware of data that shows that cancelling has become a cherished value akin to individual freedom or personal choice, which for better or worse are part of the American psyche and lifestyle.

What’s more, if the emphasis in the word culture is on those values and practices that a society shares, the way in which the term cancel culture is being used currently in the United States points to precisely the opposite—the attitudes and customs that appear to be dividing the citizens of this country. This term suggests that there are elements of American culture that are getting cancelled for being objectionable, offensive, or inconsistent with social norms. So which aspects of our shared values are being challenged and need to be cancelled today? Those who have embraced the term cancel culture typically dodge this question since they want us to believe that the people advocating the cancelling have gone too far and are attempting to radically transform American society and traditions. Yet what is obfuscated by the term cancel culture is the simple fact that American culture is not monolithic but rather much more diverse, ambiguous, and contested than we generally like to admit. Consider, for example, the different types of foods that are craved and readily available in the United States (e.g., Mexican, Chinese, Italian, and Middle Eastern). Consider also the wide-ranging religious traditions that people in this country follow, not to mention all the people that identify themselves as atheists or agnostics.

In short, it would be much more accurate to refer to American cultures rather than culture since our society does not have a uniform set of traditions and values. Yet that simple fact undermines the entire claim of those obsessed with the notion of cancel culture since their underlying assumption is that there is a distinct and widely shared culture that is being cancelled, which needs to be protected at all costs. In contrast, I wish to advance the argument that while the term cancel culture is misleading and unhelpful, it does make sense to talk about cancelling individuals, ideas, and things (like monuments). Individuals have been condemned, fired from their jobs, ostracized, expelled from their country, or even in some cases murdered for holding controversial points of view. Ideas have been banished for challenging the status quo, for being offensive to those who were historically marginalized, or for a host of other reasons, some justified others not. Monuments, flags, and other Confederate emblems have been taken down recently in the United States because of their racist symbolism and because they continue to inspire violence even today.

I will have more to say about the cancelling of individuals and objects like Confederate monuments in subsequent chapters of this book. Here, I wish to provide a couple of examples of attempts to cancel individuals or a set of ideas that proved to be problematic and counterproductive. The first case pertains to Donald Hindley, a professor of politics at Brandeis University. In 2007, Hindley, who had been teaching for nearly half a century, was found guilty of racial harassment for discussing the word “wetbacks” in his Latin American Politics course. Greg Lukianoff notes that Hindley “explained the origin of the word—it derives from immigrants crossing the Rio Grande—to criticize its use. For that, he was found guilty without a hearing and without even knowing the specific allegations against him” (Lukianoff, 2014, p. 204). As a result of this innocuous act, Hindley was not only censured by the Brandeis administration but a monitor was placed in his classes to ensure that he does not engage in further harassment activities, and he was required to attend anti-discrimination training. Eventually, after the Faculty Senate, the local media, and the ACLU of Massachusetts intervened to defend Hindley, the Brandeis administration removed the monitor and issued a letter stating that the professor had learned the lesson. Yet, as Lukianoff shows, by then, the damage to Hindley had been done and the principle of freedom of speech on the campus of a major American university took a serious hit.

The second case of cancelling happened more recently when Howard University decided in April of 2021 to close the Department of Classics as part of its “prioritization efforts” and what appears to be a restructuring of some academic programs. In an op-ed published in the Washington Post, Cornel West and Jeremy Tate argue that Howard University’s decision is a “sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture” (West & Tate, 2021). West and Tate remind us that both Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King were steeped in Classical philosophy even as they attempted to go beyond these ideas and discover their own voices. They write that

The Western canon is, more than anything, a conversation among great thinkers over generations that grows richer the more we add our own voices and the excellence of voices from Africa, Asia, Latin America and everywhere else in the world. We should never cancel voices in this conversation, whether that voice is Homer or students at Howard University.

(West & Tate, 2021)

The problem with Howard University’s decision to eliminate the Classics department is that its students will no longer get the benefit of being part of a conversation among the thinkers of the Western canon and those that have challenged that canon. West and Tate point out that this ancient dialogue is essential since it addresses questions such as what type of human beings do we want to be and why it matters. They note that the conversation “is about living more intensely, more critically, more compassionately. It is about learning to attend to the things that matter and turning our attention away from what is superficial” (West & Tate, 2021). The point that is worth emphasizing is that cancelling professors, authors, and concepts can have a detrimental impact by shutting down discussions, ones that can enlighten people and expose them to profound ideas with which generations of thinkers have been grappling.

Cancelling and Accountability

Since the term cancel culture is relatively new, to date, very few books and only a handful of scholarly articles and reports have been written devoted to this phenomenon. A noteworthy exception is Alan Dershowitz’s book titled Cancel Culture: The Latest Attacks on Free Speech and Due Process. Motivated in large part by personal grievance about his own cancelling following allegations of sexual misconduct, Dershowitz’s book is laden with self-pity and a sense of being unjustly abused and villainized. Still, his book is important to read since it situates the current phenomenon of cancel culture in relation to its antecedents such as the McCarthyism of the 1950s. More significantly, Dershowitz’s book makes a legal case, based on his own example and that of other prominent figures, that today’s cancel culture represents an assault on free speech and due process. Summarizing the argument made in his book, Dershowitz writes

Cancel culture causes more problems than it solves. It falsely accuses; it applies a double standard of selectivity; it fails to balance or calibrate vices and virtues; it has no statue of limitations; it provides no process to challenge cancelations; it is standardless, unaccountable, not transparent, and often anonymous; it hides personal, ideological, and political agendas; it can be abused for revenge, extortion, and other malign motives.

(Dershowitz, 2020, p. 124)

For Dershowitz, the danger with the current assault on liberty and fair treatment comes “not from evil tyrants, but rather from people who consider themselves ‘woke,’ ‘do-gooders,’ and ‘progressives’” (Dershowitz, 2020, p. 11). Although he acknowledges that many of those advocating the cancellations today are well-intended and motivated by a desire to make the world better, Dershowitz believes that they are ill-informed and lack an understanding of how cancelling impacts the well-being of a democracy. The problem with Dershowitz’s book is not with his main thesis—that cancel culture poses a grave danger to free speech and due process—but with the lack of complexity and nuance in the way that he addresses this practice. For instance, Dershowitz seems to be unaware that the term cancel culture is itself misleading and that it may conceal more than clarify the issues at stake. Moreover, his book does not adequately distinguish between individuals that were justifiably cancelled (like Bill Cosby and Alex Acosta, the former U.S. attorney who gave a sweetheart deal to Jeffrey Epstein) versus others that were not (e.g., Colin Kaepernick and Al Franken). In fact, Dershowitz does not consider the possibility that there are cases in which cancelling someone or something may be necessary to protect democracy, an issue that I address in Chapter 5 of this book.

A more nuanced and measured critique of cancel culture appeared in July 2020, when 150 public intellectuals, professors, and writers published an open letter in Harper’s Magazine protesting this practice. While acknowledging the value of the protests for racial and social justice that were taking place at the time this letter was circulating, the signatories warn against the dangers that can come to a democracy when ideological conformity is substituted for open debate and toleration of differences. The letter goes on to note that

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.

(Harper’s Magazine, 2020)

I have quoted at length from the Harper’s Magazine letter since it provides an excellent account of what is at stake for individuals, institutions, and democracy itself when cancelling becomes the norm. The restriction of inquiry, freedom of expression, and debate to a relatively narrow range of acceptable opinions is characteristic of societies that are antagonistic to liberty, truth, and social justice. In contrast, democracy thrives when citizens take risks, experiment with new ideas, and engage in sharp debates with opposing viewpoints. Moreover, the problem with the practice of cancelling is that it replaces debate and critique with summary punishment. As Graeme Wood notes, “the punishment ranges in seriousness and could include withdrawal of a job or just an invitation, but the salient point is that it is meted out instantly and without deliberation, often as the result of a mob action” (Wood, 2021). For Wood, a sign that a society is plagued by intellectual and institutional rot is when criticism and conflicts are no longer valued and hasty, unfair punishment becomes the norm.

In her New York Times Magazine article “The Long and Tortured History of Cancel Culture,” Mishan writes that “some prefer the more sober term ‘accountability culture,’ although this has its own complications….” Mishan points out that the notion of accountability has been in use in the co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Contested Debate Over the Meaning and Value of Cancel Culture
• 2 Socrates, Spinoza, and Other Cancelled Thinkers
• 3 Cancelling During the McCarthy Era
• 4 Philosophical Arguments Against Cancelling and Restricting Speech
• 5 When Is Cancelling Warranted?
• 6 The Educational Dangers and Risks of Cancelling
• 7 Education for Open-Mindedness
• Index