Do You Want Cancel Culture to Exist?

So apparently Louis CK played Madison Square Garden again. People had a lot of thoughts to share about it. I post this tweet simply as an example of a broad genre.

Marisa Kabas @MarisaKabas

louis ck played madison square garden last night. cancel culture is not real.

I see this thought expressed fairly often, and I think the essential logic is a little weird. The argument is that, because someone has enjoyed personal or professional success after a public shaming, therefore “cancel culture” does not exist. This is all somewhat confused by the vague boundaries of cancel culture - boundaries that are vague, I think, for the benefit of both the cancelers and the anti-cancelers. I think “a culture where social norms are enforced with repeated and vociferous public shaming” is the most useful way to define the term. Regardless, there’s a couple different kinds of weirdness here.

The first is a point that many people have made: the fact that someone has endured or recovered from the repercussions of public shaming does not mean that there are no repercussions or that those repercussions are fair. Additionally, we could add that the survival of any particular public figure after a public shaming does not necessarily mean that there isn’t a prevalent culture of public shaming. You might think that Louis CK suffered too much even if he’s now suffering less, or you might think that whether he suffered too much or not, individual examples can’t tell us much about the overall status of public behavior and public repercussions for it. The bones of these points have been picked clean by others already.

What I find more interesting is that this argument requires the very thing that it laments. That is, in order to make this argument, you need to have figures like Louis CK who escape/survive the consequences of public shaming, but simultaneously to assert that this is a bad thing. The immediate question for someone who expresses this point of view should be, “so you would prefer cancel culture exist, yes?” Because if it did, by their own contention, then Louis CK would not be playing Madison Square Garden, nor would other publicly-shamed individuals escape the consequences. (An implied consequence of this tweet, and arguments like it, is that public shaming should be permanently career-ending, which many people would take as a decent gloss on cancel culture.) And once you’ve established that the argument suggests that cancel culture would be a good thing, we’re free to debate it as a preferred state of affairs if not a current reality - at which point the whole “cancel culture doesn’t exist” complaint becomes moot. By wishing for it you’re making it arguable.

I do think that things like Louis CK getting back some of his career are indicative of a loosening of the strict social culture that flourished in the past half-decade or so. People do seem to get away with things now that they once wouldn’t. I’m really not hung up on CK’s case in particular, and I have no real argument with people who feel that his transgressions should have resulted in more durable consequences. But I am on record, obviously, as saying that we live in a public culture that is too retributive and insufficiently forgiving. To the extent that that’s changing, I view it as a positive thing. But the devil is always in the details - everyone believes that some public figures deserve some social sanction some of the time, including me. We all simply disagree on who should be sanctioned, for what, and to what degree. The right is coded as anti-cancel culture, but efforts like trying to deny Nikole Hannah-Jones tenure (whatever you think of the quality of her work) are not fundamentally different from other attempted cancellations. This breaks down into the simple reality of broad political disagreement and who has the power to inflict which consequences. And it appears that the people who once worked to cancel Louis CK have lost the power to keep him out of MSG.

Arguing about cancel culture, as I think everyone knows, gets us very little, beyond grinding out culture war. All any of us can do is be for more or less forgiveness towards public figures in individual practice.

Yes, our culture appears to have gotten a little less punitive. I can’t say that I see this as a sign of a philosophical or explicitly moral shift, though. I suspect that it’s simply a facet of public exhaustion with the constant demand to be outraged and the inevitable diminishing returns of this sort of approach - the more times you ring the bell demanding public shaming, the harder and harder it will be to generate the kind of forceful backlash you want. It’s just human nature. And I wish the crowd that constantly calls for shaming would think about this as a real weakness of their model even if they don’t have any sympathy for the accused. I think they should ask themselves if the fact that people are getting away with things they once wouldn’t is a sign of a lack of durability in public shaming - of “cancel culture” - that can’t be chased away by complaining on social media.