Cancel culture's barbaric endpoint

The celebration of terrorist atrocities signifies a culture that has completely lost its moral compass

Photo by Justin Essah on Unsplash

This week I am in Australia, speaking at the Centre for Independent Studies’ Consilium. Here is the keynote speech I delivered on the theme of Cancellation and the culture of contempt: can we learn to disagree?

I had planned to kick off this speech with a joke about being the only person I know who has been canceled in both London, UK and London, Canada. Or I was going to point out the irony of people campaigning to stop me speaking about the limits of free speech. Or I was going to make reference to canceled comedians and the jokes we are not supposed to tell nowadays.

But events of the past fortnight, the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel and the sickening way in which these atrocities have been celebrated around the world, are too serious for any of this. We must talk about them here because in many ways they seem to me to represent the end point of cancel culture. They show us the sickening, violent conclusion of a culture of contempt. We need to take cancel culture seriously.

Let’s unpick this a little. By cancel culture I mean an approach to public life and debate that sees some beliefs, ideas and opinions - and, crucially, the people who espouse them - as being so objectionable, so offensive and potentially harmful - that they must be silenced by any means necessary. Common forms of cancel culture include online mobbing, a social media pile on, petitions, calls to no platform speakers, calls on publishers not to produce books or film companies not to make documentaries, or calls on employers to sack members of their staff.

This differs from just regular criticism in some crucial ways:

• Cancel culture is not a call for debate but a demand to shut up

• It is targetted at the man and not the ball. For example, J K Rowling is targetted at every turn. But it is rarely anything she has actually said that is held up as transphobic  - it is her, J K Rowling as a person cancelers want to silence.

• Cancel culture has real world consequences: it results in job losses and loss of income. We can look to the comic writer Graham Linehan or the young academic Laura Favarro as just two of the many people who have lost work after cancel campaigns. Then there are the people such as Harry Miller who have police visits ‘to check their thinking’.

• But it is not just about high profile individuals. Cancel culture sends a message to others that chills debate.

Cancel culture is distinct from even the most robust forms of criticism. It is a very contemporary phenomenon, rooted in what we might term woke thinking. It is premised upon assumptions about power, identity and victimhood.

According to today’s elite outlook, developed in and propagated by our universities but of far greater reach and impact, power operates not through the iron fist, not even through the iron fist in a velvet glove, but through the culture we inhabit and the social structures we live within. Racism has been redefined as the structural inequalities experienced by black and indigenous people in a society which was designed by white people for the benefit of white people. This is a claim that racism is inherent within the language we use, the social norms we live by and the institutions we have established. The same can be said for transphobia - we live in a society that assumes a binary, cis-gendered, heterosexual norm so it is society itself that is considered to be inherently transphobic. The assumptions that are built into our culture mean that some groups move through life easily, the world simply works for them, they are privileged. Meanwhile, other groups struggle to fit in. They experience barriers privileged groups do not even notice.

There are clearly many criticisms to make of this analysis. It takes no account of social class, for example, assuming all white people are inherently privileged irrespective of their socio-economic background. People are sorted and ranked not on the basis of their achievements, or on the content of their character, but on the colour of their skin, their gender identity, their sexuality and the nation of their birth. Each of these identity markers is assumed to come with an allocation of status - or power. White, cis-gendered, heterosexual men are the most powerful; black transgender lesbians are the least powerful. This is a gross generalization that overlooks the reality of individual experience and the potential for people to transform their lives and communities. Ironically, it also overlooks the way that individuals might be held responsible for racism or other forms of discrimination - when ‘structures’ and ‘the system’ are to blame then everyone is to blame and no one individual can be held to account. But the advantage of this separation and sorting is that hierarchies of victimhood and oppression can be created. 

With hierarchies established, the task of leveling the playing field and bringing about social justice is made that much more straightforward. Put simply: those at the top must shut up and give way, to allow those at the bottom to be heard. In a culture that is considered to be historically, systemically and even violently prejudiced against disadvantaged groups, this act of re-distributing power in order to bring about social justice takes on the force of a moral imperative.

Ironically, this moral imperative comes to justify some highly immoral acts. JK Rowling has received enough death threats to be able to paper her house. She is frequently threatened with rape by transgender women. Photos of her house have been posted online, along with instructions on how to make bombs. Punch a TERF has become a common meme, but it is also taken by some as an instruction. Women’s rights activist Kelly Jay Keen has been imperilled by violent mobs on numerous occasions, including here in Australia. 

These threats of violence, and acts of aggression and intimidation - often by men against women - are seemingly morally justified when advanced on behalf of an oppressed group against an apparently more privileged group. I’ve chosen my words carefully here - it is only rarely that transgender people themselves are at the forefront of committing violent acts - more often it tends to be others acting on their behalf. Likewise we see with response to The Voice referendum here in Australia, it is white academics and journalists who seem to be taking the result most personally. Victimhood can, it seems, be appropriated and used to empower the righteous elite. Forget the reality that biological males are likely to be taller, stronger and heavier than women. Intersectionality positions women above transgender people on the oppression pyramid - so women must shut up, or be made to shut up.

And so to current events. Under the lens of identity politics which I have just sketched out, Jewish people find they are placed at the top of the privilege hierarchy. Even though this bears little relation to reality, Jewish people are considered to be white, wealthy and powerful and - in Israel, colonizers. The flipside of this is that Palestinians are considered - again, whatever the reality - to be brown, muslims, colonized, lacking in power and at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Cancel culture demands that Israelis - for which we can understand Jews - must be silenced by any means necessary and that Palestinians are championed irrespective of anything they do. This process has long played out in universities in calls for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israeli academics and institutions. Universities also helped birth the decolonize movement. This assumes that colonialism lives on in knowledge, literature and scientific method - people’s language and ways of thinking - social justice demands these ways of thinking are rooted out and replaced.

As placards at recent pro-Hamas rallies have made clear, we now discover that decolonize is not a metaphor. Cancel culture has taken the most barbaric turn with the murderous acts carried out by Hamas that are being celebrated in the west. The protesters claim to be anti-Israeli, but are clearly anti-Jewish. We have seen “Gas the Jews” chanted in Sydney and Jewish owned businesses targeted in London with windows smashed. This shocking behaviour is justified on the grounds of defending an oppressed group. We saw the murderous reality of cancel culture - the ultimate silencing of a person - in the killing of a teacher in France last week at the hands of an Islamist terrorist. 

It’s both the acts of barbarism and the celebration of such acts that are the violent, horrific, extreme conclusion of cancel culture. They emerge out of and further contribute towards a breakdown of civilized norms. Barbarism and the celebration of barbarism signify a culture that has completely lost all sense of a moral compass. This is a fractured and broken society. This is the reality of a culture of contempt.

Post-lockdown, the fracturing of society has escalated. We see a breakdown in respect for law, intergenerational bonds and the intrinsic worth of human life. What is unleashed is random, brutal and barbaric. It is encapsulated in the stabbing of a 15 year old girl in London last month, on her way to school, by a boy just two years older. The girl ‘disrespected’ him and she paid with her life. 

Woke thinking provides the framework that facilitates the breakdown of traditional social conventions and norms. Indeed, this is often its express purpose. Let’s take one example. Grandpa’s Pride is a book that was read to children in some UK nurseries and infant schools. It is a brightly coloured picture book aimed at 4 year-olds. It tells the story of an old man ‘Grandpa’ who comes out as gay and attends his first Pride Parade, in fetish gear, and, while there, kisses another man. This is intended as a celebratory story - children are meant to be happy for grandpa, pleased he can now express his true identity and that he has found love. But promoting this message requires breaking down traditional social norms and boundaries. Central to transgender activism is breaking down the boundaries 

• Between male and female

• Between public and private

• Between child and adult

• Between parents and teachers

Challenge any of this and you will be told to #BeKind. This has to be the most duplicitous phrase in use today. People who tell you to #BeKind will proceed to call you a bigot and tell you that your words wound and so you need to shut up.

This equation of words with violence is widespread. It comes from a belief that people (particularly oppressed groups) are inherently fragile and vulnerable. And it comes from an understanding that words are all powerful in constructing not just perceptions of reality but reality itself. So successful have advocates for the view that words are violence - spirit murder according to the authors of Words That Wound - that we now have a relativism where people are seemingly unable to differentiate between the harm inflicted by punches and weapons and the harm of hearing an offensive word. When words are violence we are unable to recognise, let alone condemn, real violence.

So, where do we go from here? Can we learn to disagree? Unfortunately the events of the past fortnight have left me questioning the possibility of civilized dialogue. What is there to discuss with people who think killing babies is something to celebrate? A number of recent books have been written asking if there is a left way back from woke. Sadly, I’m no longer convinced there is. 

So what do we do? There have, understandably been calls to ban Palestinian flags, and pro-Hamas protests and social media posts. This is understandable but it must be resisted. We must not drive this sentiment underground but have it exposed to the disinfectant of sunlight. We need to expose disagreements, not enforce silence. This is not about ‘coming together’ in a hippy-ish ‘all friends together really’ sense - it is about drawing sharp dividing lines between reason and barbarism.

These are the things I think we should do to challenge the culture of contempt.

1. Affirm the importance of speaking the truth and not acquiescing to lies. 

Men cannot become women. To be a lesbian is to be same-sex attracted, not attracted to a gender identity. Not all racial disparities are caused by racial discrimination. Hurt feelings are not the same as broken bones.

2. Assert the  importance of maintaining boundaries.

There is a difference between men and women, between adults and children, between public and private.

3. Reclaim moral authority. Most people are not racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic bigots. It is a slur to suggest otherwise. We are in a fight for civilisation and for too long the proponents of cancel culture have been allowed to assume the moral high ground by claiming to act on behalf of victims. The events of the past fortnight have exposed the grotesque reality behind these claims. If anything good can come from this it is that moral authority is now there to be reclaimed and with it - tolerance, reason, rationality, objectivity - a society where people truly are judged by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin.