How do we think about cancel culture?

Cancel culture represents a crisis where free speech is silenced

Question: How do we think about cancel culture?
Position‹3 of 4›: Cancel culture must be cancelled
Argument‹4 of 8›: Cancel culture represents a crisis where free speech is silenced

Cancel culture targets people who express contrary opinions. This directly opposes the ideal that everyone is entitled to freedom of expression, and turns those with unpopular opinions into outcasts.

The argument

Modern society relies on freedom of expression. The diversity of opinions informs our politics, culture, and society, since a society that hears only one view is confirming rather than deliberating. Unfortunately, proponents of this position argue, cancel culture threatens to stifle this freedom, and the fear it creates stifles people's freedom to express themselves. The mechanism they describe is indirect: what silences people is not a prohibition but an expectation of what will happen to them if they speak. The growth of cancel culture goes hand in hand with the shrinking of free expression. Where it once existed to shut down extremism or ideas that incited dangerous behaviors, it now exists in the mainstream. That shift is what changes its character on this account, because a practice aimed at a narrow and identifiable category has become a general one. It has become a form of "viewpoint discrimination" in which those who really suffer at its hands are ordinary people — those without a platform, a following, or the resources to withstand a campaign. As a result, the general population fears to express themselves, and they stay silent in order to protect themselves. The research backs this up. A 2018 McLaughlin and Associates poll revealed that 54% of American undergraduates felt too intimidated to share their opinions, for fear of being cancelled. This was a 9% increase from the year before, which proponents take to be the important part of the figure: a majority that is still growing, fast enough to register year on year, describes a trend rather than a settled state of affairs. The consequence reaches past what is said out loud. It is transforming the way that the individual perceives and expresses agency within a society, and encouraging a monoculture of opinion — one in which the range of views on offer narrows because those holding the others have concluded it is safer to say nothing.

Premises

[P1]A free society depends on a diversity of opinions to inform its politics and culture, but cancel culture creates a fear that stifles free expression. [P2] Once reserved for extremism, it has moved into the mainstream as a form of "viewpoint discrimination" in which ordinary people suffer and stay silent to protect themselves. [P3] A 2018 McLaughlin poll found 54% of American undergraduates felt too intimidated to share their opinions, a 9% jump in a single year, pushing society toward a monoculture of opinion. [C] Therefore, because cancel culture represents a crisis where free speech is silenced, cancel culture must be cancelled.

Counter-arguments

Do half of American undergraduates exhibit some kind of hatred toward minorities, or have buried histories of sexual offenses? Because that's the only reason they need to be afraid to speak their minds. If they don't, they ought to feel free to participate in society. But if they do, they need to be called out. They need to be held accountable for holding and propagating hateful views.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The premise moves from a value almost everyone accepts to an empirical claim that is not established. Whether expression has contracted overall is contested, and the same period saw a very large expansion in who can publish and be heard. The mechanism — fear — is asserted rather than shown to have changed what people actually do. [Rejecting P2] The terms carry the argument and none are defined. "Cancel culture" covers boycotts, criticism, employer discipline, contract termination and online abuse, which raise different questions and call for different responses; "viewpoint discrimination" is a term from constitutional law about government action, applied here to private and social responses the doctrine does not reach. The claim that it once existed only to shut down extremism describes no identifiable earlier practice. [Rejecting P3] The poll cannot bear the weight placed on it. It asked undergraduates about speaking on campus, a narrow population that cannot ground a claim about the general public; it was commissioned by an advocacy organisation; and a nine-point movement in a single year is more consistent with a change in wording, sample or salience than with a transformation of society. Reluctance to speak up in a seminar is also a different thing from being silenced. The conclusion is in tension with the premise besides: an argument built on protecting expression ends by demanding that a form of expression be cancelled, and the tension is never addressed.