Cancel culture – the scourge of our time

There are many things that cause me some anguish at the moment, not least that Donald Trump could easily be re-elected POTUS in 2024, despite deliberately undermining and damaging the very institution he wants to lead, which is American democracy. It’s not an exaggeration to say that he’s attacked it at its core.

This may seem a mile away from the topic I’ve alluded to in the title of my post, but they both seem to be symptoms of a divisiveness I haven’t seen since the Vietnam war. 

 

The word, ‘scourge’, is defined as ‘a whip used as an instrument of punishment’; and that’s exactly how cancel culture works, with social media the perfect platform from which to wield it.

 

In this weekend’s Good Weekend magazine (Fairfax Group), the feature article is on this very topic. But I would like to go back to the previous weekend, when another media outlet, Murdoch’s Weekend Australian Magazine published an article on well known atheist, Richard Dawkins. It turns out that at the ripe old age of 80, Dawkins has been cancelled. To be precise, he had his 1996 Humanist of the Year award withdrawn by the American Humanist Association (AHA) earlier this year, because, in 2015, he tweeted a defence of Rachel Doleza (a white chapter president of NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) who had been vilified for identifying as Black.

 

Of course, I don’t know anything about Rachel Doleza or the context of that stoush, but I can identify with Dawkins, even though I’ve never suffered the same indignity. Dawkins and I are of a similar mould, though we live in different strata of society. In saying that, I don’t mean that I agree with all his arguments, because I obviously don’t, but we are both argumentative and are not shy in expressing our opinions. I really don’t possess the moral superiority to throw stones at Dawkins, even though I have.

 

I remember my father once telling me that if you admired an Australian fast bowler (he had someone in mind) then you also had to admire an English fast bowler (of the same generation), because they had the exact same temperament and wicket-taking abilities. Of course, that also applies to politicians. And it pretty much applies to me and Dawkins.

 

On the subject of identifying as ‘black’, I must tell a story related to me by a friend I knew when I worked in Princeton in 2001/2. She was a similar age to me and originally from Guyana. In fact, she was niece to West Indies champion cricketer, Lance Gibbs, and told me about attending his wedding when she was 8 years old (I promise no more cricketing references). But she told me how someone she knew (outside of work) told her that she ‘didn’t know what it was like to be black’. To which she replied, ‘Of course I know I’m black, I only have to look in the mirror every morning.’  Yes, it’s funny, but it goes to a deeper issue about identity. So a black person, who had lived their entire life in the USA, was telling another black person, who had come from outside of the US, that they didn’t know what it was like to be ‘black’. 

 

Dawkins said that, as a consequence, he’d started to self-censor, which is exactly what his detractors want. If Dawkins has started to self-censor, then none of us are safe or immune. What hurt him, of course, was being attacked by people on the Left, which he mostly identifies with. And, while this practice occurs on both sides, it’s on the Left where it has become most virulent. 

 

“I self-censor. More so in recent years. Why? It’s not a thing I’ve done throughout my life, I’ve always spoken my mind openly. But we’re now in a time when if you do speak your mind openly, you are at risk of being picked up and condemned.”

 

“Every time a lecturer is cancelled from an American university, that’s another God knows how many votes for Trump.”

 

And this is the thing: the Right loves nothing more than the Left turning on itself. It’s insidious, self-destructive and literally soul-destroying. In the Good Weekend article, they focus on a specific case, while also citing other cases, both in Australia and America. The specific case was actor, Hugh Sheridan, having a Sydney Festival show cancelled, which he’d really set his sights on, because he was playing a trans-gender person which created outrage in the LGBTQIA+ community. Like others cited in the article, he contemplated suicide which triggered close friends to monitor him. This is what it’s come to. It’s a very lengthy article, which I can’t do justice to on this post, but there is a perversion here: all the shows and people who are being targeted are actually bringing diversity of race and sexuality into the public arena and being crucified by the people they represent. The conservatives, wowsers and Bible-bashers must love it.

 

This is a phenomenon that is partly if not mostly, generational, and amplified by social media. People are being forced to grovel.

 

Emma Dawson, head of the Labor-aligned (Australian political party, for overseas readers) Per Capita think tank, told the Good Weekend, “[cancel culture is] more worrying to me than just about anything other than far-right extremism. It is pervasive among educated young people; very few are willing to question it.”

 

‘In 2019, Barack Obama warned a group of young people: “This idea of purity, and you’re never compromised and always politically woke... you should get over that quickly. The world is messy.”’

 

And this is the nub of the issue: cancel culture is all about silencing any debate, and, without debate, you have authoritarianism, even though it’s disguised as its opposite.

 

In the same article, the author, James Button, argues that the rise of Donald Trump is not a coincidence in the emergence of this phenomenon.

 

The election of Donald Trump horrified progressives. Here was a president – elected by ordinary Americans – who was racist, who winked at neo-Nazis and who told bare-faced lies in a brazen assertion of power while claiming that the liars were progressive media. His own strategy adviser, Stephen Bannon, said that the way to win the contest was to overwhelm the media with misinformation, to “flood the zone with shit”.

 

And they succeeded so well that America is more divided than it has been since its historical civil war.

To return to Hugh Sheridan, whom I think epitomises this situation, at least as it’s being played out in Australia, in that it’s the Arts that are coming under attack, and from the Left, it has to be said. Actors and writers (like myself) often portray characters who have different backgrounds to us. To give a recent example on ABC TV, which produces some outstanding free-to-air dramas with internationally renowned casts, when everything else is going into subscribed streaming services. Earlier this year, they produced and broadcast a series called The Newsreader, set in the 1980s when a lot of stuff was happening both locally and overseas. ‘At the 11th AACTA (Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts) awards, the show was nominated for more awards than any other program’ (Wikipedia).

 

A key plotline of the show was that the protagonist was gay but not openly so. The point is that I assume the actor was straight, although I don’t really know, but it’s what actors do. God knows, there have been enough gay actors who have played straight characters (Sir Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf, as well as Shakespearean roles). So why crucify someone who is part of the LGBTQIA+ community for playing a transgender role. He was even accused of being homophobic and transgenderphobic. He tweeted back, “you’re insane”, which only resulted in him being trolled for accusing his tormentors of being ‘insane’.

 

Someone recently asked me why I don’t publish what I write anymore. There is more than one reason, but one is fear of being cancelled. I doubt a publisher would publish what I write, anyway. But also, I suffer from impostor syndrome in that I genuinely feel like an impostor and I don’t need someone to tell me. The other thing is that I simply don’t care; I don’t feel the need to publish to validate my work.