Author Topic: The tyranny of cancel culture  (Read 356 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Ptarmigan

  • Bunny Slayer
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 23532
  • Reputation: +924/-225
  • God Hates Bunnies
The tyranny of cancel culture
« on: July 07, 2020, 07:31:09 PM »
The tyranny of cancel culture
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/07/06/the-tyranny-of-cancel-culture/

Quote
Trump is right. Cancel culture is the key weapon in the armoury of the intolerant. In his 4 July speech at Mount Rushmore, Trump talked about the ‘political weapon’ of ‘cancel culture’ – the totalitarian thirst for ‘driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees’.

On the cult of wokeness, the ideology of PC that says there is only one way to think about history, race, gender and myriad other issues, Trump declared: ‘If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted and punished.’

Anyone who has been awake at any time over the past four weeks will know that Trump is right. They will have witnessed the furious, misogynistic rage against JK Rowling for refusing to ‘speak the language’ of the new woke elites – in this case the eccentric, science-denying language of ‘genderfluidity’. They will have seen Britain’s foreign secretary Dominic Raab being mauled for days for refusing to ‘perform the rituals’ of the correct-think mob – in this case by taking the knee (that is, bowing down) to the slogan of Black Lives Matter and all the identitarian nonsense that lurks behind it.

And they will have seen black actor and TV host Terry Crews being denounced as a race traitor for refusing to ‘recite the mantras’ of the new identitarianism – in Crews’ case by expressing concern that the cry of ‘black lives matter’ might morph into a belief that ‘black lives are better’. In short, Crews was flirting with the great blasphemy of our time – the idea that ‘all lives matter’.

Long read, but very eye opening.

Quote
The most striking thing is the cognitive dissonance. Even as statues continue to fall, these people claim there is no culture war against the values of the past. Even as likenesses of George Washington are burnt and abused and monuments to Christopher Columbus are decapitated and daubed with slurs, they insist there’s no culture war – except from those who say ‘Leave the statues alone’, of course. Even as JK Rowling continues to be subjected to a slurry of misogynistic insults – telling her to ‘suck a lady dick’ or ‘**** off and die’ – they claim there is no serious culture of intolerance. Even as people literally lose their jobs for criticising BLM, they say PC cancellation is a myth dreamt up by right-wingers.

It’s remarkable. And revealing. Such levels of self-deception, such a Kafkaesque ability to be simultaneously engaged in a war against history and wrongthink while publicly insisting that these things only exist in the fevered imaginations of the likes of Trump and the people who vote for him, speaks to the dangers of life in the echo chamber.

For when you inhabit a ‘safe space’, when you inoculate yourself against what you consider to be difficult, challenging or simply divergent points of view, a number of bad things happen to you. You become dogmatic, since you increasingly cling to your beliefs not because you have tested them in the public sphere (that’s too scary) but because you just know they are right. You become less adept at critical thought and critical self-reflection. After all, as Cardinal John Henry Newman put it, ‘The human intellect does from opposition grow’. Force-fielding oneself against opposition stunts one’s capacity to reason and change.

And you become unworldly. Divorced from reality. So blindly convinced of your own righteousness that you do not even recognise your censorship, your fury and your hatred for what they are. To you, they’re good, normal things. To you, it’s bizarre when someone accuses you of being engaged in vicious crusades of intolerance against people who merely disagree with you, because you believe that cancel culture is a decent thing, the right response to those who are morally fallen and who refuse to speak the language, perform the rituals and recite the mantras of political communities like yours. Life in the self-reinforcing chamber of correct opinion warps the human intellect to such a degree that the chamber’s inhabitants come to mistake their dogma for truth, their censorship for a public good, and their extraordinary cruelty against dissenters for essential moral correction.

In a sense we should sympathise with those who say cancel culture is a myth. Some of them are just lying, sure, desperately trying to deflect criticism of their immoral behaviour. But others say this because they are so lost in the increasingly unstable cult of hyper-fragility, and in the self-protecting campaigns of intolerance that go along with it, that they cannot see the wrongness of what they are doing. That’s bad for those of us who want to understand and challenge the new politics of unfreedom, and it’s bad for the deniers, too, who live in a fantasy world in which they are the decent, progressive ones on the right side of history, when nothing could be further from the truth. Such self-delusion is not healthy.

It is a madness.

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

Allow enemies their space to hate; they will destroy themselves in the process.
-Lisa Du