Press F to Cancel
I wrote this during the zenith of the cancel culture debate, mid-way through 2020. Time has borne out how skewed such a culture is to incumbent individuals, moreover, how silent they are in defending the speech of those that do not align with their beliefs. There is no free speech, it is ultimately a matter of power relations, hence the pressing need to be organised.
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.
A Letter on Justice and Open Debate
Judging by this statement one would be forgiven for thinking that our recent past were halcyon days that are now under grave and imminent threat from the growth of ‘illiberal’ tendencies. A past in which people boldly proclaimed their controversial positions and others vigorously debated them, showing neither venom nor malice as their wits flared. Onlookers stood in awe at the sheer breadth of debate. No idea deemed too radical, no idea too far afield.
This signed letter is a convenient synecdoche for the wider narrative that has been developing. It is not explicitly mentioned in the letter, but what it alludes to is well known — ‘cancel culture’. The following passage illustrates this concept in action, albeit without any explicit examples:
Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a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.
These are reasonable fears to have — of an overbearing censoriousness that leaves people fearful of speaking out and sharing their opinions in the event that they lose their job. To understand the letter as a self-contained piece — a conceptual argument — one that ostensibly fights for freedom of speech, is tempting. It carries with it noble connotations of Socrates, extolling his philosophy on the streets of Athens as he challenges onlookers to debate his ideas.
However, it is unavoidably derived from and embedded in material conditions. Representing the views of a group of people who are of a distinct socio-economic class and is an article that was deemed worthy of publishing by one of the largest publishing houses in the world. There are no pure concepts nor pure arguments, it was a letter spurred on by the experiences of those that wrote it. It follows then, that the letter itself is embedded in those conditions and our analysis must be rooted in this fact.
2020 will be spoken of for decades to come, hopefully. Or, for the pessimists out there, 2020 will drown under the coming storm. From either perspective 2020 represents a build-up of quantitative factors (economic crises, rising unemployment, mass unrest, health crisis, Cold War escalation) that look to be approaching change of a qualitative nature. These are epochal times to any onlooker and the air is pregnant with uncertainty.
The so called ‘social-contract’ is being devoured by the manifold pressures acting upon the working-class. Government responses display a logic consistent with the previous crisis, that is, reducing interest rates, increasing liquidity for banks and bailing out industry leaders. The scraps fall from those lofty heights, dancing and twirling through the air in their austere meagreness before gently landing at our feet, looking diminutive and absurd were it not so tragic. We are sombrely told of the heavy price to pay for our spending spree (communalism is only ever invoked in times of crisis, rugged individualism otherwise), preparing us for yet heavier burdens to be placed on our backs already crooked from the last crisis of capitalism.
This degradation of material circumstances is matched, naturally, by an intensification of discourse. The countervailing forces to the growing popular unrest is often manifest in the ‘commentariat’. Those in senior positions within media, publishing, academia and journalism; who embody the ideology of the ruling classes so completely, that they act as a proxy through which they defend their ideals. They can be described more simply — as reactionaries. Those who once had some semblance of progressive ideals, however perfunctory they may have been, fail to acknowledge the abundance of history that proves the inevitability of our own ideological obsolescence. They profess sympathy for the desire to change things, but not the behaviour necessary to turn this desire into a material advancement — MLK has much to say about such people and their ‘polite racism’.
The tenability of these views decay as they grow in stronger and stronger opposition to the lived experience of millions. Widespread adoption of social media platforms means the articles or opinions that promulgate these views shared by such people are never far from critique. Those who once ran in tight social circles and only ever manoeuvred within a narrow tranche of society; attending galas, dinners, charity-balls, award ceremonies and all other manner of social gatherings; are now exposed to the instant feedback of rebuttals, counter-polemics and criticism.
Our popular outcries are perceived much like how Cicero viewed the plebs of Ancient Rome: as the ‘city dirt and filth’, the ‘scum from out of the city’, the ‘unruly and inferior,’ ‘a starving, contemptible rabble’. When the plebs set their sights on political agitation for equity and class injustice, Cicero gave them a name that is now forever embedded in our vernacular — the ‘mob’. This ‘mob’ carries with it an aesthetic that has been persistently conveyed in the intervening centuries, of brave individuals fighting to espouse their ideals over the cacophony of a baying crowd. Modern liberal democracy seems to have the same problem with large groups of people, the masses, the dêmos— as that of ancient kingdoms and feudalism.
Whenever large groups of people coalesce to express a will or view, they are automatically dismissed as ‘mindless’ or ‘manipulated’. Purity can only ever exist in individuals or especially small groups of them. This creates an intractable problem; the political, media and scholastic apparatus can only be inhabited by an incredibly small number of people in relation to the wider population. Yet, these groups have an effective monopoly on the conveyance of opinions and perspectives. However, such apparatus serve no purpose without the public as an audience.
With this relationship, that between these apparatus and the public in mind, by what mechanism can dissent be conveyed in an ‘acceptable’ manner? The inherent size imbalance between the two prefigure that disagreements will always be presented as thousands or tens of thousands against a handful of people. That is, a huge mob against a few brave individuals. And these disagreements will often be portrayed as aggressive attempts to silence ‘dissent’ and ‘police opinions’.
This intractability is not a conundrum to be solved, it is the defining feature for maintaining the pretence of ideological unity. These ‘funnels’ ensure a predictability of behaviour and thought within the apparatus. By nature of career advancement, employability, competition, etc. Through determining acceptable dissent to only exist in ‘civil’ disagreement and imploring those who do disagree to force themselves through this funnel — only reaching the other side through the subconscious assimilation of the very ideals that inflame the popular will — they dissipate popular energy by forcing it through filters that inevitably eradicate dissent. Resulting in a unifying ideological dominance amongst these apparatus and a conspicuous absence of those expressed by the masses. This absence is regarded as proof of the transient nature of this popular ideology, a fleeting emotional fancy that grips people as they follow each other to prey on lone commentators. In their reality, the sheep descend upon the wolf, tearing it asunder in incoherent rage.
In what context was this letter penned? Going by purely the unemployment assistance figures in the US, over 30 million people are unemployed; over half-a-million have died from COVID-19; ICE is holding migrants in camps for an indeterminate amount of time in horrific conditions, with thousands of children unaccounted for; protesters fight for justice as police, armed to the teeth, violently suppress their right to assembly; the US speaks with ever-growing hostility in reference to China and continues to choke countries through sanctions.
This contrast carries in it an inescapable truth, that larger flames are followed by louder trivialities. Well established, wealthy, non-labouring classes in privileged positions decry illiberalism, while the masses are slowly suffocated by the hostile, exploitative environment they reinforce and nourish through the course of their careers. They continue to write in highly-circulated publications, work in eminent academic roles, publish government propaganda as news and be free from the vicissitudes that have entangled so many others. When confronted, even nominally, they throw their hands up and hide behind the façade of ‘discourse’. As if the positions they hold are purely on the basis of their ideas, not on the material reality they serve to reinforce.
Socrates ranted and raved about the dangers of democracy, that Athens should be ruled by a group of ‘enlightened philosopher kings’. His ideas did not drift away with the salty coastal breeze, but embedded themselves in the minds of other citizens. A tyrant took power on the basis of his philosophy, and Socrates was made to drink hemlock on the basis of the tyrant.
