Is Cancel Culture Toxic?

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INTELLIGENCE SQUARED U.S.

invites some of the world’s brightest thinkers to debate issues of the day. The organization was founded in New York in 2006 to promote intellectual diversity by fostering respect for differing opinions.

The debates are organized in the traditional Oxford style. The side that convinces more audience members to embrace its arguments wins.

The excerpts below come from a debate in November about the cancel culture’s benefits—or lack thereof.

FOR

KASPAROV: Schools and universities are where we most need to challenge and be challenged, but how can we learn what’s right if we’re afraid to ever be wrong? Well, increasingly you hear, “Oh, we’ll tell you what’s right and good,” but it reminds me too much of the ideological education I grew up with in the Soviet Union. If you disagreed, you were wrong. If you were wrong too loudly, you were silenced. The good news is that the United States is not Russia or the Soviet Union. No one is going to be sent to the gulag for failing to draw the line. But just because there’s no party with a capital “P” does not mean there’s no party line.

FOSTER: Love, hate, freedom and various other things are all somewhat difficult to define but nevertheless exist and have real and profound consequences. The fact that polling has consistently demonstrated that people believe cancel culture is there—whether one believes that is a result of the media sensationalizing it or because of realities that they experience in their everyday lives— actually illustrates our point. The reality is that the fact that people believe this suggests they will in fact curtail their behavior, which is another thing that they acknowledge doing. There’s a universe of people who stay silent because they fear cancelation, and that is the dynamic we are concerned about. MATTHES: You might say that cancel culture isn’t just about public shaming. It’s also about the loss of jobs or opportunities—the function of that public shaming. But it seems like cases where people do lose their jobs as a function of being canceled are vanishingly small, and indeed it seems like often it’s more likely that people acquire new opportunities as a function of being canceled: speaking opportunities, book deals, etc. So, it’s really hard to see how the claim that being canceled is harmful is supposed to be established.

ATTIAH: I do not see it as a coincidence that cancel culture is now being turned against marginalized communities as a way to stifle what is actually happening, which is actually the opening of space. We have more voices than ever before—Latinx voices, nonbinary voices, transgender voices—who are now speaking out against those systems and those who perpetuate the systems that have long participated in what I would say is erasure culture. That has led to generational wealth being disappeared. It has led to literal incarceration, and it has led to basically just a deep systemic continued erasure. And I would say this is the same for women and #MeToo, so it’s not an accident to me that this supposed boogeyman of cancel culture is really status anxiety and discomfort in the fact that there are more voices.

Garry Kasparov: Russian chess grandmaster Kmele Foster: Political commentator and co-founder of Freethink

68%

FOR

15%

AGAINST

17%

UNDECIDED

–AUDIENCE OPINION BEFORE THE DEBATE

THE “CANCEL”IN CANCEL CULTURE REPUTEDLY ORIGINATED FROM CHIC’S 1981 SONG YOUR LOVE IS CANCELLED

71% OF REGISTERED VOTERS SAID THEY STRONGLY OR SOMEWHAT BELIEVE CANCEL CULTURE HAS GONE TOO FAR –HILL HARRISX POLL

69% OF REGISTERED VOTERS SAID CANCEL CULTURE UNFAIRLY PUNISHES PEOPLE FOR THEIR PAST ACTIONS OR STATEMENTS –HILL-HARRISX POLL

AGAINST

Erich Hatala Matthes: Author of the book Drawing the Line: What to Do with the Work of Immoral Artists from Museums to the Movies Karen Attiah: Washington Post columnist