Preface for The Cancel Culture Panic
PREFACE
A Global Specter
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
—LEWIS CARROLL, Through the Looking Glass (1871)
Fear of cancel culture has gripped the world, an old fear in a new getup. Like many old fears (and many new getups), this one hails originally from the United States. In October 2020, an open letter appeared in Harper’s in which numerous intellectuals and artists complained: “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.”1 The venerable New York Times fears for freedom of expression in the United States and reports that cancel culture places on a “burden” on it in all walks of life.2 “No one—of any age, in any profession—is safe,” says The Atlantic.3 Several US state governments, as well as governments around the world, have passed, or are passing, laws designed to combat it. Elon Musk, self-proclaimed free speech absolutist, put it more succinctly on the service he now owns: “Cancel Cancel Culture!”4
During the presidential election campaign in 2020, Donald Trump discovered the topic for himself. Standing before the postcard motif of Mount Rushmore, he explained that cancel culture “is the very definition of totalitarianism,” is “completely alien to our culture and our values,” and has “absolutely no place in the United States of America.” It is a “political” weapon with the aim of “driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees.”5
This discourse, which was once as quintessentially American as only a Fourth of July address at Mount Rushmore could be, has long since become an export item. In October 2021, Vladimir Putin, against the backdrop of the preparations for his invasion of Ukraine, gave a speech at the Valdai discussion forum in Sochi. There he attacked the культура отмены as a dangerous Western import intended to gag and enslave Russia—his example was J. K. Rowling. In early 2022, Pope Francis warned against cancel culture as “a form of ideological colonization that leaves no room for freedom of expression.”6 His Holiness did not mention Harry Potter.
But above all, this American idea travels the globe in journalism and books. Articles the world over have cast a gimlet eye on US campuses. An entire class of experts has emerged, even if their expertise mostly consists of having been to a US campus, or knowing someone who has. Long, deeply reported books detail safaris among the “woke” or visits with the victims of cancel culture. Of course, although much of this immense cultural production is preoccupied with the United States, very little of it will ever filter back into the US public consciousness. Fernando Bonete Vizcaíno’s Cultura de la cancelación (subtitle: No hables, no preguntes, no pienses) will not appear in a British or American edition any more than will Nora Bussigny’s Les nouveaux inquisiteurs: L’enquête d’une infiltrée en terres wokes, Julian Nida-Rümelin’s Cancel Culture: Ende der Aufklärung, Costanza Rizzacasa d’Orsogna’s Scorrettissimi: La cancel culture nella cultura americana, Carmen Domingo’s Cancelado: El nuevo macartismo, or Mai Linh Tran’s Ich bin nicht woke: Eine Widerrede gegen Gendern, Woke, Cancel Culture und anderes Gedöns. You don’t have to speak any of these languages to notice in these titles the clear borrowings from US discourse—the inquisitors, the woke, gender, the new McCarthyism. But there are other aspects that, even if translated, likely feel a little alien to you. Cancel culture has long been a topic of global conversation, but unfortunately one downright Babylonian in its confusions.
This book grew out of my concern that the arguments thus traveling the globe are often selective and biased. Fear of cancel culture fixates on specific trends and data points that, without a doubt, reflect societal shifts requiring answers, but it blithely ignores others. My suspicion is that complaints about cancel culture don’t really solve anything, nor are they meant to. They are rather part of a moral panic. This is primarily related to what I will call the attention economy: People talk about cancel culture so that they don’t have to talk about other things, in order to legitimize certain topics, positions, and authorities and delegitimize others. The problem with the discourse around cancel culture is that it distorts real problems like a carnival mirror—problems of labor and job security, problems of our semi-digital public space, problems of accountability and surveillance. The conversation doesn’t offer solutions to the problems it describes in an overly tendentious way, and it keeps us from finding solutions we desperately need.
There’s a quote often attributed to Winston Churchill: “A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” My aim is not to win over those who would like to write the next article or the next book about the thought police, about the young leftist inquisitors or the new McCarthyism from the Left, about the end of the Enlightenment or censorious campus liberals and all the things they are supposedly no longer able to say. No, if these 200-odd pages are an attempt at anything, it is to encourage these people to at least change the subject.
Notes
1. “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” Harper’s (October 2020): https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
2. Editorial Board, “America Has a Free Speech Problem,” New York Times (March 18, 2022): https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opinion/cancel-culture-free-speech-p…
3. Anne Applebaum, “The New Puritans,” The Atlantic (August 31, 2021): https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-j…
4. Post on Twitter (X) by Elon Musk (May 19, 2020): https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1262783922708058113
5. “Remarks by President Trump at South Dakota’s 2020 Mount Rushmore Fireworks Celebration,” Trump White House Archives (July 4, 2020): https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-presi…
6. Philip Pullella, “Pope Warns About Dangers of ‘Cancel Culture,’” Reuters (January 10, 2022): https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN2JK171/