Cancel Culture & Mutually Assured Destruction
The tension betwen principle and empirical reality
The attacks of October 7 elicted a wave of leftists saying the quiet part out loud, in response to which the right eagerly applied the rules of "Cancel Culture": use social media to create unwelcome attention for the employers of said leftists, and leverage the pre-existing social compact that an employee's political activities bringing such attention to an employer is grounds for dismissal.
Some have pointed out the unprincipled nature of former advocates of free speech pivoting to "cancelling" others for political, constitutionally-protected speech; most prominently Yascha Mounk, in his Atlantic article Cancel Culture Cuts Both Ways.
Yet he undercuts his own argument therein: he chronicles the misfortunes of Michael Eisen, "a genetics professor at UC Berkeley and the editor of eLife, an influential open-access journal for the life sciences" who was terminated from that role as a result of his political Tweets (Xites?) in support of Gazans.
When it comes to cancel culture, "Eisen has had a change of heart. When I asked whether those who, like me, have warned about the ways in which our culture stifles controversial views may have had a point, he conceded that 'you were completely right to be concerned about it, and we were wrong to dismiss that.'"
In other words, now that the mob has come for him, he has a newfound appreciation for the principles of freedom of conscience & speech.
I fear that unless the consequences of their behavior are visited upon them, those on the left who have succumbed to the belief that they are on the side of the angels in some Manichean struggle will remain unswayed by principles such as Mounk's.
Matt Shapiro argues along similar lines: "Play by the rules. Help everyone understand how much the rules suck. Then change them. Change them in your own company, change them in your school or university. But every move in the game is valid until the rules change."
11/22/23 08:59