Between Mob Justice And Moral Relativism: Rethinking Cancel Culture

I want to define cancel culture because I think people are equating many different things that are not cancel culture.

If you cancel or criticize someone, for example, that is not a legal ban on their behavior; that is social ostracization; sanction for behavior or opinion. Not legal sanction, not banning people, not trying to jail people, just people not wanting to hang out with you.

Cancellation can range from people criticizing you to people wanting to not hang out with you, to people firing you, to people deciding no one can hire you. It’s a whole range of activity.

There are basically three generalized perspectives on cancel culture.

One: Any violation of any taboo ought to be treated with the harshest possible measure of cancellation, ruining people’s lives for any level of rhetorical transgression. 

Two: No one should ever be canceled for any reason. So no criticism, no social ostracization, no calling out, nothing. You can say whatever you want and there will be no consequences.

Three: the more moderate, complex and true perspective, which is that some behaviors or opinions are genuinely disgusting and should receive social sanction and other behavior should not. The level of forgiveness and social sanction ought to vary, because you might be talking about whether you want to have dinner with somebody or you might be talking about whether someone should be able to hold a job — which is much, much harsher — or you might be talking about whether or not you want somebody in your school.

The problem with the first perspective is that it is censorious. It prevents useful conversations from happening. It’s unforgiving, it’s uncharitable. For roughly 20 years in this country we saw people being canceled, socially ostracized, losing jobs, losing career opportunities, or being destroyed for correct opinions such as “Men are not women” or for saying a word in Mandarin that sounded like the N-word. Social media mobs were activated in order to destroy people who violated any taboo. The lines were bright, and if you crossed the line, you were destroyed.

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This led to a reactionary response, which moved to perspective number two, that cancellation should never happen. No criticism, no social sanction, that criticism is never, ever the answer, which is where we are now.

The problem with this perspective is that if there is never any social sanction or criticism or ostracization for bad behavior or terrible opinion, that’s moral relativism, in which the ugliest opinions and expressions are supposed to be given equal credibility with decent or even controversial but useful opinions.

The real answer in a normal society would be number three: Sometimes people deserve the social consequences for what they do. Not always, but sometimes. And the social consequences can vary. They aren’t irrevocable. In certain circumstances, forgiveness could be possible.

For example, in the normal world, you don’t have a duty as a business owner to hire or to have dinner with someone who shouts the N-word at children or who says that white people are colonizers and evil.

But in that normal world, it would be a bad thing to do to post that person’s address online so people can go to their house and harass them.

In the real world, you have every right to avoid buying a Bud Light because the company claimed that men can be women. Or you don’t want to engage with a company that says the police are systemically racist.

But you also shouldn’t go to the home of the CEO and threaten to burn down his house.

The informal standards of the social fabric used to work well because most issues remained personal. But social media has made everything worse because now there’s always a mob waiting to form.

That’s all social media is: a mob waiting to form around an issue, just like white blood cells in your immune system waiting for something to attack.

Mobs form to destroy people. And so we are all forced to decide on the spot whether we think a person is bad or good, hero or villain, deserving of shame or support.

The biggest issue is that we have lost the boundaries of what is informal or acceptable debate. We’re descending into a world of either total cancellation for everyone with whom we disagree or total support for bad behavior in order to fight total cancellation.

Here’s the point: these two perspectives are mutually reinforcing. The moral relativism of “There should be no social consequences or criticism for anything” leads people who don’t like the stuff that’s being said to call for more social consequences, which leads to more reactionary moral relativism, which leads to more social consequences, and back and forth until the end of time.

We should totally oppose obviously inappropriate cancellation; we should allow forgiveness where appropriate. People should ask for forgiveness and we should give it to them.

The bottom line is that if we are going to share a society together, a social fabric does require a more nuanced view of how we treat the things that we don’t like. And that nuanced view can’t just be “cancel everyone” or “cancel no one.”

As our common moral standards degrade, our society is going to continue to fall apart through a sort of reactionary cycling between the “cancel everyone” side and the “cancel no one” side.

Unless we find a better way to communicate.