Ending Cancel Culture

why it requires more than a push of the button

High on the fumes of Trump’s nearing reinstallation, the political Right can be heard proclaiming the end of Cancel Culture. The first giveaway that things may not be quite that simple are intimations from some in the same circles that what should be done from January 20 is to turn the cannon of lawfare by 180 degrees and start taking aim at the opponents of the new administration. But there are many more signs that the phenomenon known as Cancel Culture is rooted rather more deeply than a single, and simple, political affiliation. Maybe it was called a culture for a reason, though my own impression is that it reaches even more deeply than our consciously pronounced thoughts. Whether true or not, cancelling this curse on society will require more than simply pushing a button, or - indeed - winning an election.

In another place on this Substack, I hinted at the educational aspect to Cancel Culture, calling the behavior tantrumism. It can only be a spoiled and pampered generation that expects to nag and cry until they get their way. They were never told ‘no’. In addition, only an immature child - you’d think - would organize his social world in two neat boxes of ‘besties’ on the one hand and of will-never-talk-to-you-agains on the far end. More proof for the suspicion that, besides hardship, times of affluence create their inevitable disasters, too.

Another aspect of Cancel Culture is technological, though the tech world of 0s and 1s has a similarity with the binary choices of the immature hinted at above. It is clear that ‘social’ media not only harm young people, but also allow young people to cause harm to each other and the rest of the world. The more one’s social world is substituted by clicking and undergoing likes, blocks, and primal responses to a complicated world, the more lonely one gets. And of course, these habits constitute an inescapable vortex, once there is too little left of an actual social life to counterbalance what was never more than a shallow substitute to begin with.

If we carry this type of behavior to a higher level of abstraction, we can liken it to an even more pervasive way that technology has conditioned our behavior. We have a remote-control complex. Our instant control over our environment has become so persuasive, that we have come to expect similar mastery over each situation, and over any object, animal, or person. That this devolvement of our interaction with the world may go deeper than just a habit engendered by technology is something Iain McGilchrist has suggested with his hypothesis, claiming that our obsessive thirst for control as such, expressed by our grasping right hand, and operated by our left brain hemisphere (you can read a short review of his theory here).

In a longer piece I am working on now, I hope to render plausible that this obsessive way of looking at things can also be related to our uniquely linear understanding of time, today. Both the so-called progressives and the proponents of material progress - groups which at the surface seem anything but similar - can only conceive of moving forward by pushing toward some imaginary, indefinite horizon. As if any step we can take away from what we know is necessarily an improvement. What we thereby give up on are common sense, wisdom, and the sobering acknowledgement of life’s recurring difficulties. And this laziness and superficiality can also be identified in the package deals that the endless partisan, binary, voices try to sell to us. And it can seem attractive enough, not to disentangle complicated arguments and difficult choices, but rather go for an all-in or an all-out. Because that is what I find most worrisome about Cancel Culture. The insistent searching for in-groups and out-groups - having relinquished organic bonds through unique encounters with singular persons and situations - can eventually only lead to the call to wipe out life itself.