Welcome to the Playground | the cultish laziness of cancel culture
Gretchen Weiners: Regina, you’re wearing sweatpants. It’s Monday.
Regina George: So?
Karen Smith: So that’s against the rules and you can’t sit with us.
Excerpt from the film Mean Girls (2004)
On Boxing Day 2019, the British lawyer ‘campaigner’ Jolyon Maugham tweeted, “Already this morning I have killed a fox with a baseball bat. How’s your Boxing Day going?”
There was justified disgust and outrage not merely at the act itself, but the tone and subsequent explanation that he “didn’t especially enjoy killing (the fox)” and that he was “in a kimono”, Maugham went on to say it was upsetting the chickens he keeps in his London residence, and didn’t know what else to do.
An habitual tweeter, Maugham momentarily stepped away from Twitter amid the furore, before coming back to continue his crusades. He was perhaps worried about being ‘cancelled’ for what, to many, was an act of cruelty towards an animal and vile hubris to boot. He sort of apologised, no charges were brought because an RSPCA investigation determined the fox was ‘killed quickly’ and there wasn’t enough evidence to take it to prosecution.
Maugham’s apology and seamless rehabilitation spoke volumes. His words felt mealy-mouthed at best, and one of those apologies you get from people like, ‘I’m sorry IF what I did upset YOU’ which is largely designed to make you think you might really be the one at fault here.
Now, apart from a few wags pointing out that ‘But, you murdered a fox’ and ‘gender critical’ people who found him obnoxious anyway, he’s continued un-cancelled.
Why are some immune and some not? Why can some issue an apology and move on, and others not?
JK Rowling, and Graham Linehan have recently been targeted by Trans Rights Activists for their alleged ‘transphobic views’. For Linehan it resulted in him ultimately being banned from Twitter, for JK Rowling it was an endless stream of abuse, threats and insults. The most personal, cruel and vile insults which, if they had been aimed at another person, perhaps of one from a ‘protected group’ (of which women certainly no longer appear to be) would possibly have be deemed hate speech, and at least have elicited more outrage across the board.
When The Day, a newspaper for students, agreed to apologise and pay a settlement for suggesting its readers boycott Rowling, Maugham, who also mounted a legal challenge to the Brexit referendum result, suggested that you can’t cancel people like JK Rowling because she’s too rich. Obviously, he couldn’t quite find it in himself to consider what would have occurred if she hadn’t had financial security and also, the hurt this and many other comments may have caused her. But then, he killed a fox.
The inconsistencies are there for all to see. BBC entertainer Graham Norton can have a ‘light-hearted’ segment on his show called ‘men who look like old lesbians’, and somehow slip past the mob seemingly unharmed. Why’s that?
Then there’s siding with allegedly tax avoiding corporations while calling out someone like a Linda Bellos as a bigot and putting pressure on organisations to ban her.
Bellos, a black, lesbian, Jewish, radical feminist, and mother, who has campaigned for decades on issues relating to race, gay rights, equality and diversity, has had appearances to speak withdrawn, been disinvited (hmm, what’s another word for that?) several times, including most recently when she was due to speak to a Jewish Community group about being a black Jewish woman.
She explained on her Facebook, ‘I am told that this disinvitation arose after a Trans person or someone speaking on behalf of Trans people approached the Rabbi pointing out my criticism of the new Trans politics.”
If left wing feminists and LGBT activists like Linda Bellos and Julie Bindel are targeted by certain ‘progressive’ activists and have their platform to speak removed, surely it’s time to at least wonder that this brand of politics is broken.
One wonders at what point someone might realise this. So very keen as they are of pointing out to people that they are ‘on the right side of history, it instead feels like they need even the tiniest moment of self-reflection. Perhaps one akin to the Mitchell and Webb sketch where two Nazi soldiers observe the skulls on their uniforms and hats and one asks, “Hans, are we the baddies?”
Frankie Boyle, a British panel show comedian who in his act ridiculed a biracial disabled boy and suggested the boy would rape his mother (Katie Price), and on Mock the Week joked that the sportswoman Rebecca Adlington was “weird’ looking and “like someone who’s looking at themselves in the back of a spoon” and so must be “very dirty” to have such a good looking boyfriend, somehow eased himself into being a self-appointed champion of the ‘vulnerable’ in society. Unless they’re women. Or disabled.
Boyle said at the time, after being rebuked by the BBC, that it was an example of the political correctness ruining BBC comedy. But perhaps because he’s been identified (rightly or wrongly) as a ‘Trans ally’, he appears to have been rinsed clean in the Woke Laundry.
Meanwhile in June of this year, the LA Galaxy football team sacked their Siberian winger Aleksandar Katai following Instagram posts by his wife described as “racist and violent” where she mocked protesters over George Floyd’s death and referred to them as “disgusting cattle”. Katai apologised and distanced himself from the posts, saying the “views are not ones that I share and are not tolerated in my family”
Perter Tatchell, the gay rights campaigner and activist, has come under fire for comments attributed to him online. It partly stems from a video clip of an interview he gave. In the clip he recalls a conversation with the late filmmaker Derek Jarman, in which he says that Jarman told him that at the age of 9 he had “had sex with a young man” and wasn’t “pressured or manipulated” and had “no regrets about that sexual experience.”
Tatchell goes to say that “if he says that, who am I, or you, to dispute it? Now I accept that most sex involving young people is abusive and wrong. His view is perhaps exceptional. But it’s not a view that should dismissed and denied.”
He has also been accused of ‘excusing’ or even ‘defending paedophiles’ in other instances, including in letters to the Guardian defending the book Dares to Speak, a collection of articles from the Paidka, a magazine openly for paedophiles, by paedophiles.
Tatchell has clarified that he believes he has been misrepresented in these claims, and that all child sex abuse “is monstrous and should be punished.”
And yet it’s surprising in this climate that his remarks seemed to garner far less press coverage than say, the tweets and backlash of JK Rowling tweeting around biological sex or the definition of a woman. We’ve yet to see a slew of celebrities like Daniel Radcliffe, Eddy Redmayne and Emma Watson come out to condemn Tatchell, or news sites encourage a boycott of him and his work.
It seems cancelling ‘s lack of self-awareness or irony knows no bounds, when the event, ‘An Evening with Cancelled Women’ at the New York Public Library was itself, cancelled.
There was frantic scrabbling done by a ‘notable’ trans activists when a ‘historical tweet’ was found in which they used a word for transgender people that is no longer deemed acceptable. It might have provided some irresistible schadenfreude at first, but ultimately, they were permitted to say sorry, go dark for a few days, move on and get back in their saddle.
We all make mistakes and many of us will have regretted things we have said, or tweeted. Do we really want to live in such a harsh, unforgiving and inevitably dreary world? A world where risks are not taken, and speech is severely curtailed.
Wandering around with a nasty little ego of virtuous spite and one-upmanship can’t be a happy place to be, and it must be so boring.
The binary and relentlessly fast-moving nature of cancel culture is reminiscent of the playground in many ways. The gangs exist, their rivals exist and if they don’t, they’ll invent them.
From time to time, the gang will jettison one of its members for failing to conform to some new rule or custom they weren’t in on. Then they’ll have a choice, throw themselves at their feet and beg for forgiveness, try and attach themselves to another gang, or more likely, wander off in tears to be alone until another gang picks them up.
#BeKind indeed.
As with the playground, some people carry more weight than others. These days it’s perhaps a blue tick or a follower count that determines your safety at the hands of the mob, but not always.
Appearances can be deceptive, at the centre of most gangs is an insecure, bitter bully, full of resentment and malice. They might look like they’re all about social justice and ‘being kind’, but inevitably these ideas are reserved for you only as long as you stick to their creed like Spider-Man to a wall.
If you find yourself in one of these marauding groups, there’s another parallel you might want to consider. If you have owned a cute little lady hamster that has given birth to little baby hamsters, there’s every chance you will recall a horrifying realisation one morning. You go to look in on cute Mrs Fluffy and expect to see her as usual running like a lunatic on her wheel while the babies sleep, only to discover that this cute, twitchy-nosed pet, who you thought couldn’t hurt a fly, has devoured her young.
Yes, Mrs Fluffy was probably fearful of a lack of food, or competition, or noticed a different scent on one of her babies, and has eaten them all. Alive. Mrs Fluffy was a potential murderer all along and couldn’t be trusted.
#BadMrsFluffy
Debate is often ‘no longer required’ or at least viewed by many on social media as ‘denying’ someone else’s reality. Therefore, neither is the chance to learn from one’s mistakes, have ideas, or evolve your views in any meaningful way. And so ironically, or perhaps by design, we are all expected to burrow deeper into our existing attitudes, or simply renounce our previous views and shut up.
We’re lazy in our politics. Maybe because it wasn’t the concern it was before. For many, pre-internet, politics was a chat down the pub or a tut at the news, now we are commanded to have an opinion. “What do you think about it? Well? (too long a pause….their eyes narrow) Hang on, which gang are you in….?”
This is underlined by people’s desire to have arguments on a social media platform which seems anathema to healthy debate and is more a venue for drive by insults.
‘But Twitter isn’t the country!’ No it’s absolutely not thank the universe. But unfortunately for us, our politicians and workplaces are so ravenous for virtue and currency, they often behave like it is.
Who wants nuanced debate when you devote mere seconds to reviewing world events or cultural trends, let alone the time to actually consider, think, and form an opinion? No, it’s far easier to look around, pick your side, and start calling people bigots. That’s way easier and, ahem, that’s where the likes are.
The historian Niall Ferguson has suggested people stop comparing our time to the 1930s. He proposes a more accurate analogy would be after the end of the 15th Century, the Reformation, and the advent of the printing press, which he says is the most historically similar event to that of the dawn of the internet.
It initially seemed so positive and hopeful, with people able to read and consume information and wisdom like never before in human history. But it also led to publications like the Malleus Maleficarum, also known as The Hammer of Witches, which was a bestseller at that time, and advocated how to detect and then ‘deal with’ witches.
A culture war of ‘You’re a heretic!” “No! You’re a heretic!” will not end well.
We are already censored and monitored (if not surveilled too) by our own governments, other governments, and the big tech companies. And be under no illusions, tech companies do it for one reason and one reason alone, revenue. Not for some altruistic ambition to make the world a better place. How quickly we forget about corporate crimes when they plaster the right hashtag on their social media platform.
Now it seems we’re doing their work for those that want to ‘manage’ our free expression. At best, trying to silence or dismiss someone who has a differing view, and worst of all, changing the nature of discourse and debate to one that is febrile, babyish, and merely an exercise in scoring points through insults or ‘shut downs’.
Particular favourites like ‘Whataboutery’ or the dismissive, ‘Read more!’ are used. ‘Whataboutery’ is often used by people who find a comparison or view that challenges their point too challenging to consider. Something that makes them feel uncomfortable or might require them to step down from their high horse and say those words you seldom hear now, ‘Hmm, that’s an interesting take. Let me think about it’.
‘Read more’ is simply ‘Shut up’ with a healthy dollop of patronising cream plonked on top, and which seems to come largely from people who appear to have ignored their own ‘advice’.
If we behave as though we are the righteous arbiters on every view, devoid of any wrongdoing in our past or even present, not only does it demonstrate a lack of kindness and humility, but it will undoubtedly be untrue.
“Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently”
Rosa Luxemburg
We live in a time where it sometimes feels that everyone is in deep in some kind of ‘process’, a process of self-improvement, of coming to terms with something, of understanding, or (tiny wretch here) ‘getting to know yourself’.
But there seems little or no patience to enable anyone’s process when it comes to debate. In order for people to work out what they think, they have to have their beliefs challenged or discussed. Even Frankie Boyle or that footballer’s wife deserve that.
Despite the claims that ‘cancel culture’ is just entitled babies disliking their views being challenged, it is quite clear to even the most intellectually dishonest, that this is not what is happening. ‘Being challenged’ is not contacting someone’s employers to tell them they have a bigot working for them, it’s not simply calling them a ‘phobe’, a racist, or stating that their view is invalid because X, Y, Z. That is likely to lead to more echo chambers, and more entrenched views.
We should want organisations and charities to be freely challenged for their nonsense, governments to be called out, leaders to be examined, how can we do that if everyone is scared witless to do so?
Before you wish it on someone to be banned, or cancelled, try hitting the mute button on the army of new puritans in your pocket. Even if you’re in it, the gang may well turn on its own at some point, or come for you one day. They’re bound to run out of true enemies, and start to look within. History keeps telling us this is what happens.
And if you think it doesn’t matter or you have ‘no dog in this fight’, don’t be so sure, eventually it’ll affect something you do care about, a person, a topic, anything.
That’s the thing about freedom of speech, if you’re already debating who should and shouldn’t decide what is and isn’t acceptable to say, you’ve merely proved the point that it needs protection as a right.
Tom James
Buy Tom James’ new book Your Children Are Boring here on paperback and kindle in the UK, US and worldwide.
