Introduction:
The best (by which I mean the strongest and most reasonable) argument I have ever encountered against
canceling,
cancel culture, or
call-out culture is the one recently made by Natalie Wynn in her video essay
Cancelled. The best argument I have ever encountered in favor of the practice was made by C.S. Lewis in his book
Reflections on the Psalms. Unsurprisingly given the quality of these two minds—dissimilar though the personalities behind them are—both arguments are exceptionally nuanced and more than a little ambivalent. Neither Lewis nor Wynn are quite able to make up their
minds on the subject.
Please do not take my celebration of the arguments by Wynn and Lewis (both of which I will discuss below) as a suggestion that either of them has somehow managed some sort of definitive treatment of the subject—neither has—or that someone interested in the topic would be sufficiently informed by engaging with their arguments. What I
am saying is that their arguments—each taken as a whole—are the strongest and most reasonable for and against cancelling; both are best experienced within the context of a much larger contemporary discussion.
There is probably also something intriguing to me about the social and historical location of these two folks and the way in which their respective positions are opposite what one might predict. Lewis was an Oxford don and celebrated author. Wynn is a purposefully lapsed philosophy student and trans woman who is best known as a video essayist. To be fair, the two are both white, share an education in philosophy, a particularly winsome way with words, opposition to fascism, and a tendency to incorporate alcohol into the text of their work but beyond that the contrast is pretty stark. Then of course I am drawing on the theory work of a black neo-pagan anarchist for my overall analysis. And yet it is the curmudgeonly Oxford don who provides the argument in favor of cancelling while the trans leftist vloger supplies the argument against.
While I intend to look first at Lewis' argument in favor of cancelling, I am going to quote Wynn in the process definition she gave for cancelling as it was first intended as the basis for my working definition in this piece:
It [canceling] started as a vigilante strategy for bringing justice and accountability to powerful people who previously had been immune to any consequences for their actions.
Cancelling then, for the purposes of this piece, will be defined as the bottom-up imposition of social opprobrium against someone who is understood to have violated community moral standards.
C.S. Lewis:
What I have called Lewis' argument for cancelling makes up most of the chapter titled
Connivance in
Reflections on the Psalms. Lewis intended argument in the chapter has to do with understanding those
Psalms in which the Psalmist professes hate for those whom he takes to be the enemies of God. The phenomenon, as Lewis sees it, is then the question of how we ought to relate to those we take to be evil—should we hate them? Lewis' first thought is that we should reject such suggestions altogether:
Now obviously all this—taking upon oneself to hate those whom one thinks God's enemies, avoiding the society of those one things wicked, judging our neighbors, thinking oneself "too good" for some of them (not in the snobbish way, which is a trivial sin in comparison, but in the deepest meaning of the words "too good")—is an extremely dangerous, almost a fatal, game.It leads straight to "Pharisaism"(1) in the sense which Our Lord's own teaching has given to that word. It leads not only to the wickedness but to the absurdity of those who in later times came to be called the "unco guid".
but by the end of the paragraph he has admitted a countervailing factor, the analysis of which ends up forming the bulk of the chapter:
But we must not be Pharisaical even to the Pharisees(1). It is foolish to read such passages without realising that a quite genuine problem is involved. And I am not at all confident about the solution.
Without using the term, what Lewis identifies is the problem of
social capital and the way in which it is accumulated by the wicked in the absence of public approbation. Lewis describes the problem so well that it is worth quoting at length:
We hear it said again and again that the editor of some newspaper is a rascal, that some politician is a liar, that some official person is a tyrannical Jack-in-office and even dishonest, that some celebrity (film-star, author, or what not) leads a most vile and mischievous life. And the general rule in modern society is that no one refuses to meet any of these people and to behave towards them in the friendliest and most cordial manner. People will even go out of their way to meet them. They will not even stop buying the rascally newspaper, thus paying the owner for the lies, the detestable intrusions upon private life and private tragedy, the blasphemies and the pornography, which they profess to condemn.
I have said there is a problem here, but there are really two. One is social and almost political. It may be asked whether that state of society in which rascality undergoes no social penalty is a healthy one; whether we should not be a happier country if certain important people were pariahs as the hangman once was—blackballed at every club, dropped by every acquaintance, and liable to the print of riding-crop or fingers across the face if they were ever bold enough to speak to a respectable woman. It leads into the larger question whether the great evil of our civil life is not the fact that there seems now no medium between hopeless submission and full-dress revolution. Rioting has died out, moderate rioting. It can be argued that if the windows of various ministries and newspapers were more often broken, if certain people were more often put under pumps and (mildly—mud, not stones) pelted in the streets, we should get on a great deal better. It is not wholly desirable that any man should be allowed at once the pleasures of a tyrant or a wolf's-head and also those of an honest freeman among his equals. To this question I do not know the answer. The dangers of a change in the direction I have outlined are very great;so are the evils of our present tameness. [emphasis mine].
On the one hand, Lewis is concerned about what it means to live in a world in which evil (let us not be shy in calling oppression, marginalization, racism, sexism, and many of the other sins for which people are frequently subject to cancelling "evil") behavior is liberated from any social consequences. It would be one thing (and Lewis raises his concerns in this direction in
The Abolition of Man) if the problem were that society no longer disapproved of the evil behaviors—but that is not the issue in play for Lewis here or in our contemporary discussion about cancelling. In the situation Lewis is concerned with, society still recognizes
that the behavior is evil but has chosen not to impose any social punishment. In effect, the behavior is being called out (or is so generally well know that no call out is even necessary) but the person involved is not being canceled. Lewis reflects later on in the chapter:
Many people have a very strong desire to meet celebrated or "important" people, including those whom they disapprove, from curiosity or vanity. It gives them something to talk or even (anyone may produce a book of reminiscences) to write about. It is felt to conger distinction if the great, though odious, man recognises you in the street.
and he goes on to speculate about the ways in which peer pressure in combination with this dynamic can incline us towards acceptance and even embrace of what we knew to be evil before the whole process started.
Throughout all of this argument in favor of censure or cancelling of those who behave wickedly Lewis makes a distinction which is both vital to him as a Christian and a basic tenet of those who, today, speak or write in favor of cancelling. In contemporary parlance we say that it is vital to always "punch up and not down", or as Lewis put it:
how ought we to behave in the presence of very bad people? I will limit this by changing "very bad people" to "very bad people who are powerful, prosperous, and impenitent". If they are outcasts, poor and miserable, whose wickedness obviously has not "paid", then every Christian knows the answer. Christ speaking to the Samaritan woman at the well, Christ with the woman taken in adultery, Christ dining with publicans, is our example. [emphasis mine]
Thus I think it fair to summarize Lewis' view of cancelling as a dangerous practice which may nevertheless be necessary for the protection of justice and the overall health of both the individual and society but which should always target only those who are "powerful, prosperous, and impenitent".
Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints):
Natalie Wynn has a whole lot to say about canceling. Given that her (first in a series?) video essay on the subject (embedded below) is more than an hour and a half long I will summarize her argument though I certainly recommend watching the entire essay as she provides a full series of examples and evidence in support of her core claims.
As something of a sincere (if amused) content warning for constitutionally conservative folks: Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints) engages at an entirely different register from C.S. Lewis and so if you came to this post for the Lewis this could be more than a little jarring. Wynn uses a whole lot of bawdy humor, sarcasm, and cussing. If that isn't your thing, be warned.
Wynn breaks cancelling as it is currently practiced (I want to come back to this later) into 7 "Tropes" each of which she unpacks and illustrates over the course of her essay. In contrast to Lewis, who was working almost entirely with hypotheticals, Wynn cites events either from her own experience of being canceled or from well known and/or well documented cancelings. Thus while Lewis' writing on the subject works from general cases—what sort of situations and people seem to merit canceling—and allow the reader to discern in particular instances whether a given person or action qualifies, Wynn works from the particular—such and such things happened when so and so was canceled—towards generalized conclusions about whether or not canceling is a valid/moral/appropriate action.
I have cited Wynn's definition of canceling above and already it should be clear that Wynn is at least as nuanced as Lewis in here analysis. Although she comes down against canceling—or at least against canceling in many of the contexts in which it currently occurs—she recognizes some important values in it; specifically she recognizes that canceling is/can be/started as a tool for bringing
justice into situations where, because of—to borrow from Lewis again—"people who are powerful, prosperous, and impenitent" have been able to escape justice. Her argument is thus not against the tool as such but against what she sees as contemporary and common misuses of a powerful tool.
1. The Presumption of Guilt
The first of Wynn's seven Tropes of canceling is the presumption of guilt. Specifically because contemporary canceling began as a corrective to an unjust legal system—by which I very explicitly mean a legal system in which those with prosperity and power are often able to avoid many legal consequences for their actions—it does not claim or require the same standards of proof as a courtroom. In fact canceling is, at its core, theorized as a practice of the dispossessed. If you have really been wronged—wronged in a way that is common among people like you—by someone who is protected from justice by a legal system which is biased in favor of people like the person who wronged you, then speaking out and simply hoping to be believed may well be your best or only option.
Obviously this trope is, and clearly has been, subject to tremendous abuse. But the presumption of guilt is not a flat or neutral trope. In fact (and Wynn references this in her essay) it is really the presumption of guilt on the part of the powerful when the accusation is made by someone who is marginalized. On this level it can (or, at best, should) operate as a corrective to an unjust legal system. The problem (and this analysis comes from Angie), is that in both liberal and leftist contexts, marginalization is itself a source of social power specifically because both liberals and leftists axiomatically accept the proposition that existing power structures are unjust. This means that an accusation, by dint of being also a claim to the status of marginalization, becomes simultaneously the acquisition of marginalization which thereby "confirms" the legitimacy of the accusation. Of course the very axiomatically accepted belief which drives this problem has a strong historical and evidentiary basis: existing power structures are in fact unjust, do in fact server the interests of the powerful, prosperous, and impenitent, and it is in fact reasonable therefore to weight our judgement in favor of the socially, legally, historically marginalized. Looming behind all of this, of course, are two intractable facts that punishment of the innocent is, itself, unjust; and that real victims of real oppression are often not believed.
It strikes me that the tension created by this trope will remain so long as the unjust situation which gave rise to it (or at least the positive form of it: "believe marginalized accusers when their claims are credible") remains in place. While life in the tension between this trope and the presumption of innocence is uncomfortable, I will hazard that living in that tension is more just than simply resolving it in favor of either of the two dynamics which create it.
2. Abstraction
Wynn explains abstraction, the second trope, as the process of shifting from specifics of an individual persons specific misdeed (person X did Y) to the claim that that person does that sort of deed. Wynn uses the example of a young you tube semi-celebrity who was accused of something fairly specific which was then abstracted into a much larger species of evil, a species which contains acts far more heinous than the act of which he was initially accused. This trope does seem to be a particularly large problem in the context of the current internet. In tandem with the third trope (discussed below) it has the effect of shifting accusations from things people have done (and may or may not have repented) to identifying them as evildoers as such.
3. Essentialism
Essentialism is, in Wynn's analysis, the process of identifying the accused with the crime. On one level this seems like a ubiquitous enough process—we do it all the time when anyone other than ourselves (or maybe those we love) commit acts of evil—it is the linguistic shift from "Bob stole something" to "Bob is a thief", the identification of a person with their action(s). Now the process of deciding how many times someone needs to do something before we should identify them with it (essentialize them in Wynn's parlance) is often a subjective and vague one. Kill one person in cold blood and it does not seem at all unfair to call you a murderer; lie once in order to avoid an awkward social situation and it is probably unreasonable (even if technically accurate) to say that you are a liar. Notice that the effect of this trope is magnified by the one above (abstraction) because, in general, the more an action is considered evil, the more reasonable it feels to essentialize it. Thus if someone—let's say Bob—were to once take home a ream of printer paper (the specific act) it would not necessarily feel reasonable to essentialize them as a thief, but once the action has been abstracted (Bob steals) it is much easier to essentialize Bob as "a thief".
It is around this point that Wynn starts to make the significant (if largely unstated) distinction between canceling as it could or should be and canceling as it often occurs. In fact from this point in her essay forward it becomes fairly clear that Wynn's tropes in fact frame what we might call "toxic canceling" as distinguished from canceling in theory or canceling as such. Put another way, we can read/watch Wynn's essay as a critique of how Tropes 2-7 have damaged a social justice tool which could otherwise be used well, if carefully.
4. Pseudo-moralism/Pseudo Intellectualism
This trope, pseudo-moralism/pseudo-intellectualism, is probably the weakest part of Wynn's argument—if only because it is always finally impossible to know another person's real intentions—but it is also the least necessary for the structure of the argument as a whole and for the conclusion. It does, however, pack a significant rhetorical punch and it sets up a parallelism with a psychology Lewis addresses, that of the
bandwagoner or
conniver. Whereas Wynn argues that many of the people who participate in cancelling (both those who make the initial accusation and those who participate in the actual canceling itself) operate in bad faith—that the reasons they give for canceling the various subjects are not their real reasons, that in fact they were motivated by a sort of crowd masochism and the joy of seeing apparently powerful people "taken down a notch"—Lewis spends several paragraphs (discussed above) working through the potential motives of people who choose to give evil folks a pass. In effect, whereas Wynn examines the psychology of those who cancel in bad faith, Lewis examines the psychology of those who fail to cancel in bad faith. Thus these two psychological temptations taken together serve as the Sylla and Charibdis between which a healthy culture will have to navigate
In Wynn's words:
Moralism or intellectualism provide a phony pretext for the call-out. You can pretend you just want an apology, you can pretend you're just a concerned citizen who wants the person to improve. You can pretend you're simply offering up criticism when what you're really doing is attacking a person's career and reputation out of spite, envy, revenge, I mean it could be any motivation.... It's schadenfreude right? This kind of petty sadism.
Wynn's follows this statement with an immediate acknowledgement that not everyone involved in a given canceling is insincere but maintains that bad-faith motives must account for a significant portion of the act. The body of evidence she supplies in support of this claim are bound up in the next trope:
No Forgiveness. Wynn effectively argues that if the stated moral or intellectual grounds for the canceling were genuine then an apology (what I think she is really getting at is evidence of what Lewis would call
repentance) on the part of the accused ought to result in the end of the canceling—at least the sort of internet malpractice cases which Wynn is concerned with. She then supplies a significant collection of evidence that said forgiveness does not, in fact, take place.
5. No Forgiveness
It is on trope 5 that Wynn and Lewis come into near synchronicity. Remember that for Lewis, the value of call-out and/or canceling resides in it's application to the "powerful, prosperous, and
impenitent". While Wynn chose to use the language of forgiveness, it is clear from the way she discusses the forgiveness which is withheld that she is not suggesting that there needs to be any sort of total reconciliation between the accuser and the accused (she knows as well as Lewis that it is a monstrous thing to
force or
require a victim to reconcile to their oppressor) only that the canceling should be revoked. The canceling endures after an apology because, in Wynn's words:
Cancelers will often dismiss an apology as "insincere" no matter how convincingly written or delivered. And of course an insincere apology is [taken as] further proof of what a machiavellian psychopath you really are. Now sometimes a good apology will calm things down for a while, but next time there's a scandal the original accusation will be raised again, as if you never apologized.
Where Wynn and Lewis meet is in the conclusion that, whatever its total merits, a culture which includes canceling has gone bad in the moment that it fails to provide a mechanism for redemption of the canceled or called-out. But then this is one of the ways in which I think Christianity has something really substantial to offer not just online-liberal-and-leftist-discourse but the world as a whole. Christianity is nothing if not a religion of redemption. We are resurrection people and I will argue until I am blue that a society will always be limited in any attempt to move towards justice until it learns both to unflinchingly identify and own its own evils—both structural/corporate and instantiated in individual persons—though that unflinching gaze so often feels like death, and to embrace redemption, resurrection from that death. I have written elsewhere (
A Funeral Oration for C.S. Lewis and
On the Resurrection of the Dead) about what this process could look like in its application to Lewis himself as a model for applying it generally.
From this point in Wynn's analysis forward she is describing a form of cancelling which is so thoroughly corrupted that Lewis would, of necessity, have been in near lock step with her in condemning it.
6. The Transitive Property of Cancellation
To her credit, this trope—the Transitive Property of Cancellation—seems to upset Wynn the most. As she describes it (and recounts her own experiences with it), the transitive property of cancellation is the dynamic whereby a failure to participate in canceling a particular person results in being canceled yourself. Wynn shares the stories of a number of people, some friends and acquaintances and some who did nothing beyond showing support for the statement of someone else who had publicly refused to cancel Wynn, who have been on the receiving end of this dynamic. The accounts are heartbreaking. Further, Wynn's account of this transitive effect further demonstrates a certain mob mentality effect which seems to occur once the canceling process has begun. Specifically where there is
some awareness of the original "punch up not down" rule when it came to the original cancellation (of Wynn) insofar as it was justified on the basis of her social media semi-fame, the application of this transitive property has in fact resulted in attacks on, and harassment of, people against whom these attacks are unambiguous cases of "punching down".
As for Lewis, while a case could be mounted that those who refuse to cancel Wynn might fall into the category of
band-wagoners and that they would therefore merit canceling on that level, that argument founders on the fact that Lewis never even suggests that merely being a band-wagoner should rise to the level of canceling. In fact, Lewis tacitly argues against canceling band-wagoners by exemplifying the opposite.
In
Connivance Lewis outlines a specific interaction he had with a band-wagoner of the worst sort (that is, for Lewis, a band-wagoner who associates with evil in order to gain access to their evil) and throughout he carefully masks the identity of the person whom he is using for an example. The story Lewis tells about the young man is damning and his conclusion is just as cutting:
Here is the perfect band-wagoner. Immediately on the decision "This is a revolting tyranny", follows the question "How can I as quickly as possible cease to be one of the victims and become one of the tyrants?" If i had been able to introduce the young man to someone in the Ministry, I think we may be sure that his manners to that hated "meddler" would have been genial and friendly in the extreme.
And yet, given the opportunity, Lewis declines to identify and thereby cancel even this worst of bandwagon offenders.
This trope also engages in some of the
worst excesses of disgust based moral reasoning but that will have to wait for a separate essay.
7. Dualism
The Dualism trope (Wynn's last) is almost inevitable given the previous 6. It amounts to an impossible reduction of all people into the simplistic categories of
good and
bad or
good and
evil. And uses that to justify nearly any quantity of abuse and harassment of the
evil. Hopefully by now the circularity of the process is becoming clear and the
reduction to dualism (because almost none of these processes begin with dualism) is emerging as almost an inevitability. If a group permits itself first to assume guilt (1-Presumption of Guilt), then to equate specific actions with larger and broader species of evil(2-Abstraction), reduce the accused to their offence (3-Essentialism), insulate itself against introspection(4-Pseudo-Intellectualism/Pseudo-Moralism), cut off all avenues of redemption (5-No Forgiveness), and then expand the censure to include guilt-by-association so that any speaking out in defense of the accused results in similar treatment (6-The Transitive Property of Cancelation), the reduction of the whole discourse to black and white terms is practically unavoidable. The first, second, and fifth tropes all but forbid the introduction of nuance, and the sixth trope enacts penalties against anyone who might try to introduce any significant complexity to the conversation.
The great power of reductive dualism after all is its motive function. A reduction to dualism obliterates all scruples. Certainly dualism has a sort of ontological strength as well, Lewis refers to the spiritual/religious iteration of it as (next to Christianity) "the most reasonable creed on the market". Good and evil are vital as moral polarities of course, but humans and human societies do not exist at the poles, we exist along a spectrum between them. Reduction to dualism forces us to ignore the good or the evil in a person in order to act for or against them. But since all people contain both good and evil, acting for or against them will always be a mixed bag. By reducing to dualism we act against evil (and in so doing also against the good which the reducing process ignores) or for good (and in so doing also for the evil which the reducing process ignores). It is therefore vital that we, to quote
one of the godfathers of vlogging) "learn to imagine one another complexly".
Or as Lewis put it in
The Weight of Glory:
The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.
All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.
Conclusion. A Reflection and Some Recommendations:
It is worth noticing that Lewis' and Wynn's arguments form a
chiasm. Lewis begins from the position that canceling is wrong and then responds to his initial position with an argument that a lack of canceling is a symptom of an unhealthy culture; Wynn begins by recognizing the good and necessary role that canceling plays in situations of injustice and then responds to her initial position with an argument that, in the form it currently takes, canceling has become only another form of injustice. This chiastic structure ought to suggest a point where the two arguments meet, and that there may be some treasure buried at the spot marked X.
Both Lewis and Wynn acknowledge that canceling is an attempt at correcting a particular injustice. Where Wynn refers to "bringing justice and accountability to powerful people", Lewis agrees that "It is not wholly desirable that any man should be allowed at once the pleasures of a tyrant ... and also those of an honest man". On both accounts there is a need for a mechanism for bringing at least a modicum of justice in situations where existing power structures are unable or unwilling to act. And in fact both authors are consciously dealing with cases outside of any formal justice system. Of course, there are many important reasons for the existence of the bureaucracies and official structures of legal justice, but it would be foolishness to suggest that even the best justice systems is perfect. Whether because it is built to err against wrongful punishment, because it was framed by people who themselves had broken (racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, etc...) notions of process and justice, or simply because there are some injustices which the public does not want the state to involve itself in, there will—I would go so far as to say
should—always be some holes.
Still the fact that all justice systems have fail-points means that there are always victims without recourse to those systems, and to be content to leave things at that—to dust of our hands and walk away—is unconscionable. Thus the need which canceling attempts to meet.
And yet, as both Wynn and Lewis are aware, an unregulated, people-driven justice mechanism is one of the most dangerous things in the world; it is neither accidental nor inappropriate that the darker days of the French revolution and even the terror are frequently invoked in this conversation since the reign of terror is the natural end point
if, and only if, the worst excesses and distortions of canceling prevail and are then joined to the violence of the state or of the mob.
Moving away from their point of agreement, the different perspectives and approaches that Wynn and Lewis reveal a very helpful outline of what a healthy cancel or call out culture might look like—or at least they provide us with protective guide rails.
On both accounts the operation is fairly straight forward. From Wynn's argument we simply invert tropes 2-7 to generate a look at what a just cancel mechanism could look like. To that I want to then add a few principles from Lewis, namely
charity (hoping the best for everyone) and
humility (keeping our own weaknesses in mind). Brought together the guidelines for just cancellation would look like this:
- (Lewis) In as much as it is possible, assume the best of everyone involved.
- (Wynn) Keep the call-out specific: What did the person do or say?
- (Wynn) Maintain the distinction between the action and the actor.
- (Wynn) Inasmuch as possible work to operate in good faith.
- (Wynn) Accept apologies (at least provisionally) and pay attention to behavior and speech over time.
- (Wynn) Allow discussion about the called-out person and respect the fact that relationships impact moral reasoning.
- (Wynn) The John Green Rule—Always work the imagine the other complexly.
- (Lewis) Engage in regular introspection, remembering that power corrupts.
