- Position‹2 of 4›
- Cancel culture is a myth
Cancel culture has given rise to forms of positive social progress.
The argument
Cancel culture has given rise to forms of positive social progress. In turn, this establishes new, powerful behavioural norms. The claim is that what critics describe as a destructive mob is better understood as accountability reaching people it had previously been unable to reach. Advocates point to the #MeToo movement, which toppled the movie mogul and serial sexual abuser Harvey Weinstein after twenty years at the top. Those twenty years are the point of the example: the conduct was not unknown for two decades, yet the ordinary channels had failed to act on it, and without social media, it is likely Weinstein would still be in power today. What changed was not the evidence but the existence of a route by which it could be made public. The impact of this single incident however is where progress has really been seen. As Weinstein's demise went viral, it also created a platform for women to stand together and open up about sexual violence they had suffered — individual accounts that would each have been deniable in isolation became, together, a pattern that could not be dismissed. The results were institutional rather than merely reputational, which is what distinguishes accountability from punishment. On the back of this, several US states including California and New York outlawed workplace NDAs in cases of sexual violence, removing the legal instrument that had kept such conduct unreported. And greater provision was made to create a wider cultural shift, such as the "Time's Up" fund helping women seek justice against harassment, which raised over $24m. A change that removes long-protected abusers and then writes new rules into state law is, on this argument, a shift in public accountability rather than a culture of cancellation. Proponents include left-wing talking heads New York Times Culture Editor Maya Salam and author and New Republic reporter Melissa Gira Grant.
Premises
Counter-arguments
The reforms cited are real and the case chosen is the strongest available, which is the difficulty. Harvey Weinstein was removed through criminal prosecution and convicted in court — accountability of an entirely conventional kind, and not what critics mean when they object to cancellation. The disputed cases are the ones involving no legal process, sanction disproportionate to the conduct, or accusations about behaviour that is itself contested. Establishing that a movement produced legislative reform and a legal-defence fund does not address those cases; it changes the subject to the ones nobody disputes. The two claims are also compatible in a way the argument treats as exclusive. That public accountability has produced genuine social progress and that informal mass sanction sometimes falls on the wrong people, or falls too heavily, can both be true — showing the first does not make the second a myth. Generalising from the best case is the mirror image of the error critics make when they generalise from the worst. The legislative evidence in fact cuts slightly against the position. Outlawing non-disclosure agreements in sexual-violence cases and funding legal action are formal, procedural remedies operating through law and institutions — which is an argument that these harms are addressed by due process rather than that informal sanction is benign. The closing identification of proponents by political alignment also does no argumentative work.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Weinstein was removed through criminal prosecution and convicted in court, which is conventional legal accountability rather than the informal sanction critics object to. [Rejecting C] That accountability movements have produced real progress is compatible with informal sanction sometimes being disproportionate or misdirected; establishing the first does not show the second to be a myth.