Episode 28 - Cancel Culture

Transcript

David: 0:07

Hi, I'm David Peña-Guzmán,

Ellie: 0:09

and I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:11

The podcast where two friends,

Ellie: 0:13

who are also professors,

David: 0:15

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

Ellie: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. I feel like recently, cancel culture has just sort of blown up. It previously was this charged that people on the right were making towards those on the left, like woke leftist cancel culture has gone too far. And now suddenly what I'm seeing is that people on the right are canceling people and people on the left are like, cancel culture has gone too far. What's going on here?

David: 0:54

Well, I definitely have heard about people on the right suddenly claiming the power of cancel culture, but I'm not super familiar with the leftist critique of cancel culture, but the other way around, I think for example, about Piers Morgan, who recently called for the cancellation of Chrissy Tiegen, whom-

Ellie: 1:13

My God.

David: 1:14

The canceler in chief. So this notion that just as this leftist woman called for the cancellation of other people, when it came out that she had sent some troubling text to another person, he said-

Ellie: 1:27

Yeah, was like an online bully.

David: 1:29

Yes. Yeah. And so he says, if the left is going to be consistent, the left needs to devour its own through the logic of cancellation.

Ellie: 1:38

Totally. And Candace Owens also talked about how we need to cancel Chrissy Tiegen and then was like, no, it's not cancel culture, it's consequence culture, which I definitely want to talk about as well. And I mean, of course it's a total myth that people on the right haven't been canceling people since forever, right? Like think about blacklisting during the McCarthy era. That's a great example of canceling people because they had suspected ties to communism.

David: 2:03

Think about book burning, it's like the ultimate cancellation, right? Which is still happened a couple of years ago if you remember that case of a Latina professor's book that was burned by students on campus, because it was-

Ellie: 2:15

Oh, wow.

David: 2:16

liberal and too left leaning. And a group of students organized a book burning just three years ago.

Ellie: 2:24

Oh my God. And there's a kind of ironic full circle example that's coming to mind as well, which is that there were also book burnings by I think Christians or Christian conservatives of the Harry Potter books back in the day, because they were like leading the witchcraft. But then now, you know, in the intervening decades, JK Rowling has basically canceled herself by being like the epitome of a trans-exclusionary radical feminist or right? Yeah. And so people are like, oh, Harry Potter's canceled.

David: 2:52

Now we are on board with burning Harry Potter books. It's like, ah, we can't believe in book burning, but Harry Potter has got to go.

Ellie: 3:00

Although I have thoughts about how an author doesn't necessarily equate to her books, right. And there's some of slippage there. So I'm not, I'm not prepared to set aside my Harry Potter books permanently, but that's a different

David: 3:09

story. No. And there's a lot of Harry Potter fans who have been fighting to wrestle the legacy of Harry Potter away from the name JK Rowling. And so the point here is that cancel culture is folding upon itself in really weird ways to the point that the concept is losing its specificity. So I'm thinking here about very recently, uh, the Kentucky Derby took place and the horse that won failed the horse version of a steroids test. So basically it was like doped up and the guy who owned the horse then came out and said, Oh my gosh, it's the left coming after me. They are canceling my horse. And so he accused the left of being responsible for the fact that his horse failed a drug test after winning the Kentucky Derby.

Ellie: 4:03

My God. Animals are getting canceled left and right. What is happening? Today, we're talking about cancel culture.

David: 4:13

What is cancel culture and is it even a thing?

Ellie: 4:17

Is it naming an effective strategy to advance social justice or is it perhaps itself a tool of neo-liberalism?

David: 4:23

And what role do redemption and forgiveness play in contemporary controversies over cancellation?

Ellie: 4:35

So, what are we talking about when we talk about cancel culture? Well, the idea of canceling originates in the Black community starting really in the 1990s, but then emerging on Black Twitter in the early 2010s, the concept of canceling has antecedents in the drag notion of reading someone, which also originates in the Black community. Yes, isn't that wild. And then it moves.

David: 5:00

As a form of canceling or cancellation becomes like the next stage of reading.

Ellie: 5:05

No so reading is basically this way of sort of cutting at the core of somebody by seeing through their bullshit, right. Would you, would you assent to that definition of it, David? It's kind of an ad hoc.

David: 5:15

Like telling somebody a truth to their face that they cannot see on their own.

Ellie: 5:21

Exactly. And so that has origins in the queer community and in the Black community and intersections of the queer Black community, and then kind of moves through this phenomenon of calling people out, right? So call out culture is an antecedent to cancel culture. And then we get the notion of canceling. And it was really meant to be a sort of way of holding people accountable through fucked up things they did, right, in the public sphere. And the scholar Meredith Clark talks about canceling as being a really promising way for historically marginalized communities who don't have a lot of power to hold those who are in power accountable, like celebrities and politicians.

David: 6:00

Especially if you think about vulnerable communities that don't really have control over social institutions, like the police or the court system or the education system, um, and they cannot rely on administrative channels of accountability, it seems like something like call-out culture or canceling culture or earlier, reading culture, would be a way of inserting non administrative forms of social pressure on those that they perceive as again, doing something that harms them.

Ellie: 6:29

Yeah. And the way that you're describing it, David, you know, suggests that there is an act of canceling, right, but then there's also, I think something really different, which is this notion of cancel culture. And some people have said cancel culture is not even a thing. It's this sort of dog whistle from the right. It'd be like, cancel culture has gone too far, but then actual people on the left, including those in the Black community of Black Twitter that sort of made canceling popular, have never said, we're just going to sort of relegate the people who are canceled to the dustbin and, um, disappear them, right. So is cancel culture a thing?

David: 7:06

So I think it depends on what you mean by that, right? Because in the kind of short genealogy of cancel culture that you've given us, you've told us that it grows out of certain social practices from the drag world and Black Twitter. And so in that way, we can speak about there being a cancel culture, a set of practices that turn on the notion of canceling, but when the far right, or even the middle right, which these days is the same thing as the far right. When they talk about a cancel culture, what they mean is that we now live in a culture that is permeated by the act of canceling. And it's that conception that I don't think makes sense. I don't think we live in a cancel culture at all. And I do think it is a myth that is propagated by the right, as a way of making it seem as if the left has a lot more power over modes of cultural and social production than is the case.

Ellie: 8:01

No, that's so true because you know, the people who are mostly getting canceled, quote canceled, are celebrities and obviously celebrities have a lot of power, but the kind of power they have is partly symbolic, right? Um, not entirely, but partly. And it's not like the CEO of Exxon Mobile who's getting canceled. It's not the actual judges who are making really fucked up decisions who are getting canceled, right? The mechanisms of power stay in place, regardless of who's canceled because to be canceled means to no longer have attention on you, right. And so it requires having attention on you to begin with. And I think part of the worry for me is that it's precisely those who don't receive a ton of public attention who are often behind the scenes in really nefarious ways working to perpetuate the powers that be, or to, you know, create sort of big power grabs. Like I wish Jeff Bezos were canceled. He's certainly not behind the scenes, but he's, you know, the most public of these like evil figures, many of whom are behind the scenes doing all of this awful work of ruining American society. I wish he would be canceled, but that's not going to apply to him.

David: 9:09

Yeah, no, I think you're right. And I do interpret debates about cancellation and cancel culture as anchored in celebrity culture even though, of course, recently there have been a number of developments like calling for the cancellation of Karen's who are not celebrities, but who become celebrities through their Karenhood. Um, I do think the connection there is essential and it really informs my interpretation of cancel culture and why I don't really share a lot of the concerns about cancel culture that some people do. And it's because I just have almost no empathy for the people who fall into that category, which are like rich celebrities. So to begin with I'm already-

Ellie: 9:47

Care that Chrissy Tiegen is getting canceled.

David: 9:49

Yeah, no. And especially when people make arguments like, oh, their livelihoods are being threatened and I'm like, people live in poverty, people are struggling. She is not one of them and never will be. Period. That's the end of my position on how bad I feel about celebrities getting canceled.

Ellie: 10:11

I mean, I do want to say though that I think the concept of canceling is a highly problematic one once it starts to get wielded in the ways that it has. And so I'm not talking, you know, about this sort of tongue in cheek way that it was originally wielded in some corners of Black Twitter, or even in the way that it has been used by folks on Black Twitter to sort of create what the scholar Meredith Clark calls a last ditch appeal for justice. But I think the concept of canceling, as people have been starting to note lately, is rooted in the very same logic of punishment that we see in the prison industrial complex. And so David, you mentioned before that you weren't really sure what the sort of critiques of cancel culture from the left were. And I take it that's one of the most important ones is that basically the idea of canceling someone means that you are sort of willfully moving them away from the public sphere and sequestering or hiding them for something that they did. You're punishing them and perhaps it's like used as a deterrent, perhaps it's used as a form of retribution, but you are punishing them for an act that they've done and not leaving room for change. And that is precisely a carceral logic. Kimberly Foster of the black feminist collective For Harriet did a really amazing YouTube video on this called "We Can't Cancel Everyone" where she basically says, we shouldn't accept this logic, um, of canceling because of its carceral roots.

David: 11:40

You see, and my position is almost the exact opposite. It boils down to cancel everyone now. That's my official political stance on cancel culture. But so in connection to this concern about the carceral logic that is potentially animating moves towards cancellation and de platforming, I have to say that I- I can see why there is a connection here in so far as you're calling for a kind of punishment. But to me it seems like a false equivalence because the kind of punishment that is meted out by the prison industrial complex does not in any way compared to the kinds of effects that are brought about by appeals to deplatforming, right? So somebody like Louis C. K. losing a few gigs as a comedian as a result of having sexually harassed and sexually violated women comedians, it just doesn't compare to somebody getting life without parole. So to me, not only is it a false equivalence, but it's also just an inaccurate claim, because as you mentioned, most of the people that get canceled, they don't truly get canceled. They just switch platforms most of the time. So I'll use Louis C. K. as an example, he's still making appearances. And so I agree with that feminist critique of carcerality intellectually, I just don't see the value of applying it to something like the cancellation of celebrities.

Ellie: 13:11

But I have to say that I think your point David reveals that actually if canceling isn't doing the work that we think it's doing, then all the more reason to move away from the discussion of canceling people and to talk instead about something else, right. Because what do we cancel? We cancel subscriptions. We cancel plans, right? We cancel commitments to things that are in the future. I think it's very weird to think that like, we suddenly have to cancel our subscription to Louis C.K. K.

David: 13:41

But you see, I actually kind of see that as a good comparison. So I have a subscription to Netflix and Netflix is, you know, perfectly entitled to try to get my business, but they are not entitled to get my business. So there might be a difference here between an entitlement and a privilege. I don't own Netflix staying with them as a customer. If I decide that their content is kind of crappy, I move to a different platform that I want to lend an ear to, or in this case, an eye to. And I see celebrities in the same way. I see it as their duty to persuade me to give them the privilege of lending them my eyes and ears, and the moment that they violate my trust by wearing blackface or saying transphobic comments, I feel like they've lost that. And I don't think that I am taking anything away from them that they are entitled to in no longer wanting to provide them a platform. So I do kind of see it as similar to that kind of subscription.

Ellie: 14:44

Yeah, this worries me a lot though, in terms of the conflation of celebrity with artist. And I- I don't want to say that I'm like defendingLouis C.K. here, I'm sort of agnostic about that.

David: 15:00

Whoa, what do you mean you're agnostic about that?

Ellie: 15:03

Oh, I mean, I think what he did is extraordinarily fucked up, but I don't know that we should cancel him. So I'm agnostic about the canceling of Louis CK. I'm not agnostic about the fact that he harmed women.

David: 15:13

Okay. Okay. Um, but can I ask you a follow-up question here? So let's stay with the Louis C.K. example. So he fucks up majorly. He, I mean, just destroys people's careers. Aside from literally going to the criminal justice system, which I think should also happen, do you believe that there should be no collective attempt to de platform him, to get him, for example, disinvited to a comedy special or to no longer be invited to a fancy event like the correspondence dinner or things like that?

Ellie: 15:52

Yeah. So this is where I think things get difficult because somebody like Louis C.K. is both a celebrity and an artist. And as a celebrity, he is a sort of whole package commodity whose personality, whose personal experiences, whose life in general is something to sort of value positively and negatively, right? However, as an artist, I think there's a very different set of value judgments that come into play. There are lots of cases where people's art expresses their fucked up personal views. And then we judge the art for expressing fucked up personal views, right. But I also think that there are cases where a person's art does not actually have very much to do with their personal behaviors, opinions, and life experience. For instance, there are a ton of philosophers whom I still read, teach, and value who had very problematic personal opinions, right. I'm not- I'm not ready to cancel Heidegger or Nietzsche or Schopenhauer. Um, and I actually think it's valuable to hold separate in some cases, actually in a lot of cases, although not in all, people's work from their personal life. Celebrities have always had really problematic political opinions behind the scenes. Celebrities aren't generally a particularly well-informed group, right. And so that just means to me that I don't think we should really care in some cases what their political views are or what their personal experiences have been. There is a place for restorative justice with Louis C.K. and the things that he did to women. I'm not sure that the place for that is canceling his comedy career, because he is a very talented comic.

David: 17:39

Again, it's not that you're canceling his comedy career. It's that you're taking away a platform that he uses to shape social discourse and to give form to public opinion. And so here I have two thoughts about this distinction that you're making between a celebrity and an artist and the separation, for example, between the artist and the work. The first one is that I'm not sure that that separation is tenable. And we see that in particular in the case of Louis C.K., because his comedy, his craft, is very left leaning, right? Like-

Ellie: 18:16

He might be a bad example.

David: 18:17

Yeah. Yeah, precisely. And then after he got called out, he suddenly starts veering to the right in his comedy. And so it's a case in which there is no real, principled commitment to values. He'll actually just go wherever the spotlight is. So that's the first thought. The second thought is that I draw an- an important distinction between artists who are still alive and those who are dead. So Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schopenhauer, they're dead, and they don't benefit personally from the fact that you continue to read them. Louis C.K., J.K. Rowling continue to benefit from our continued defense of their craft, right. They continue to sell books, they continue to sell tickets. And so my view is that for those that are still living, cancellation really is much more important than perhaps for those who are dead, because there's a kind of complicity that kicks in the moment that we still sort of send dollars their way, directly or indirectly.

Ellie: 19:22

Yeah. Okay. Well, let me throw another example here in the mix. And then I want to talk a little bit later about neo-liberalism and how I see it playing in here. So think about Erykah Badu, the singer-songwriter. Erykah Badu was canceled because of some comments she made about R Kelly, who, as we know, after the documentary came out, Surviving R Kelly, was a serial child molester and rapist. Now Erykah Badu said at one of her concerts that she hoped R Kelly would see the light of day and come forward and that everybody involved has been hurt and victimized in some way. So she was basically alluding to the fact that R Kelly was perpetuating a cycle of abuse and himself was, um, you know, sort of victim in some way. Now, understandably, those comments received ire. And at the same time, one might argue that, well, what Erykah Badu is doing is not necessarily defending R Kelly, but saying like, we need to contextualize his behavior as a sexual assaulter in a broader context. Now, regardless of whether Erykah Badu's comments about R Kelly were or were not harmful to people, her views on R Kelly have nothing to do with her music, right. She is a talented singer-songwriter, regardless of what her views are on particular people. And I think a lot of the problem here is just that, like, suddenly we have exposure to people's personal views due to social media right? Like people are tweeting about what Erykah Badu said at her concert. People maybe recorded it, right. Do we really think that people who are in the public eye have good opinions about everything? No, they probably have bad opinions about most things.

David: 21:00

About everything.

Ellie: 21:00

But does-

David: 21:01

Everyone now.

Ellie: 21:03

well, but does that mean that we shouldn't listen to Erykah Badu's music because of this thing that to me, frankly, seems pretty tangentially related, if not entirely unrelated to her music.

David: 21:12

It seems to me that you come out of a philosophical and literary tradition that really draws a very sharp line between the artist and the work of art. And it's a tradition that I myself don't buy into. And for me, calls for de-platforming do not equate with assertions that the work of art has lost its value. Calls for de-platforming really are about minimizing harm, because one can say her music is great and I believe she should be de-platformed. To me, those two are not the same argument.

Ellie: 21:51

Yeah. I just think it depends on what kind of de-platforming we're doing. Like, can we deep platform her views of- of R Kelly without de-platforming her music and yes, you're right, I do think it's really important to separate art from the artist in some cases, not in all, but like, that's what I do all the time when I'm grading student essays, right. I'm grading an essay based on what I see on the page. I'm not grading a student essay based on what I know about the student in other contexts.

David: 22:38

Ellie, you've made it very clear that you have some beef with cancel culture. So I think we need to just jump into it. So what's your beef with cancel culture?

Ellie: 22:47

Okay. So I mentioned before left wing critique of cancel culture as a carceral logic, a sort of form of punishment that seeks to disappear people. I actually think that while I agree with that critique, my problem with cancel culture is primarily that I think it's a form of neo-liberalism. The concept of canceling, as it's really been articulated in recent years, has to do with not wanting to financially support somebody who has said or done harmful and sensitive things, right. So it's like, I don't want to separate the art from the artist because it's the artist who's getting the residuals of the songs. And this I think is catering in a way to the logic of neo-liberalism.

So here's the idea: 23:29

neo-liberalism is a sort of economic, social, and to some extent political policy that is premised on the idea of the free market. According to neo-liberalism, markets will regulate themselves and it's the government's job to sort of get out of the way as much as possible, but a crucial component of neo-liberalism is the expectation that everybody become an entrepreneur of themselves. No longer are we allowed to have a distinction between private life and public life. No longer are we allowed to have a distinction between our social spheres and our political spheres. No longer are we allowed to be different people in different contexts. And so Wendy Brown talks about this in her book, Undoing the Demos, where she basically says that neo-liberalism turns us all into homo economicus, or economic man. We are encouraged, in all areas of our lives, to economize ourselves, to be entrepreneurs of ourselves, right? And so my Instagram is not just a mode of self-expression, it's a way of building a brand. My teaching is a way of building a brand. My Twitter is a way of building a brand, right. And so it's only on the basis of that kind of brand building, economistic notion of the self that cancel culture really gets off the ground. And I think that is so dangerous because as Brown argues, thinking about everything in neoliberal economic terms undercuts the possibility for genuine political dialogue.

David: 25:01

So it's interesting that in so many of our episodes, we support each other's views and typically agree on so many things and I here come to the exact opposite conclusion, Ellie, which- which is interesting, right? Because I agree with Wendy Brown's concerns about everything becoming economic under a neoliberal framework. But to me, it's not cancel culture that does that, it's actually the opposition to cancel culture that does that. So I agree with you that cancel culture has an economic component, right? Not financially supporting people that we deem suddenly despicable or unlikable or harmful. So the economic dimension is there and it is an essential part of de-platforming strategies, but just because it has that economic dimension doesn't mean that the act of canceling somebody is primarily economic. For me, cancellations are primarily political acts. They are expressions of protests. They are expressions of moral anger. Uh, they are articulations of something akin to a righteous ire at the fact that somebody would so much power decides to wield it in this particular way. And typically when people respond or criticize those appeals to cancellation, what they do, and this is very typical of the right, is they invoke precisely that metaphor of the market and in particular, the marketplace of ideas. And this is something that appears over and over again, for example, in constitutional debates about free speech, right? Whether or not the government should ban certain forms of speech or whether they violate constitutional principles. And what conservative commentators will say is, no, you can't limit free speech at all first of all, because of this fear about a chilling effect, but secondarily, because we should respect the marketplace of ideas. Everybody should have the right to put their idea in the public market. And so if you don't want to buy it, you just don't buy it, but you don't get to cancel it. And so for me, the opposition to cancel culture is the highest expression of that neo-liberal model that somebody like Wendy Brown has very legitimate concerns about. So I'm just curious here about how you see the connection to cancel culture.

Ellie: 27:25

So I reject the logic of the so-called marketplace of ideas as much as you do, David. I think we're very much on the same page that like that is a total fiction. That is a huge part of the reason that we find our society falling to shambles. Um, that said, I think that we need to draw a careful distinction between things that people put out into the public sphere, for which they may legitimately be critiqued, and things that people do within their private lives. Now, there are plenty of cases, sure, where these lines are blurred, but I want to think about the following. So there were claims that Nick Cannon was canceled because he- um, he's an actor, singer, rapper, famously married to Mariah Carey for some time.

David: 28:16

Ah, okay. I barely know Mariah Carey, so I definitely not know her husband.

Ellie: 28:21

He was actually famous in his own right before marrying Mariah Carey, um, he's been famous for decades. He's been in a lot of movies, what was that one about the marching band and stuff like that, um, hold on.

David: 28:32

For somebody who is so gung ho about cancel culture, I definitely don't even know a lot of celebrities to cancel in the first place.

Ellie: 28:39

I know, right. Um, he started his career as a comedian on All That, but you probably didn't watch All That because you were, well, you were a teenager in the US.

David: 28:46

No. I was, I came to the US when I was already 15, uh, I'm- I'm a post 9/11 baby, politically speaking.

Ellie: 28:54

Oh my God, you missed Nick Cannon and all that. Um, anyway, he's been a celebrity since he was a teenager and he has this podcast called Cannons Class and he was basically spewing antisemitic conspiracy theories on the podcast. Um, and then he was canceled because of that. Now that is referring to things that Nick Cannon put out into the public and should rightfully be de platformed for saying, but I think that would be very different from somebody publicizing texts that Nick Cannon had written years and years ago in a private context. I guess I just don't think that we should always be put on a public trial for everything we've ever said and done. Like if we did that, and I find myself finding, I find myself overly-

David: 29:40

What did you do? What did you do, Ellie?

Ellie: 29:43

Oh, I've- I've- I've held a ton of abhorring opinions. Like haven't we all, you know? I could definitely be canceled for stuff in my past, um.

David: 29:51

Not me. I am clean. I am pure.

Ellie: 29:57

Um, but I think, you know, I'm not thinking about like anything- it's not, it's not like I ever wore a black face to a party, but I grew up as a pretty privileged, white, upper middle class, suburban girl who definitely was really unaware of my own class and racial privilege and probably perpetuated a lot of harms. I guess I just don't think that everything we have ever said or done needs to be publicized in a court of Twitter opinions. I just think it really minimizes the complexities that are involved here. People can be held accountable in all kinds of ways without being canceled, because I think that's my other problem with it, David is that, and maybe I even want to hold onto that more than this public private distinction. I think that's what, what I want to say is that there is a difference between holding somebody accountable and canceling them, right. And I think the word that we use here is really important. I just don't think that the word cancel is really capturing what we want to do when we're holding somebody accountable.

David: 30:59

I mean, when we're talking about canceling, we're not using that word literally, right? It's not-

Ellie: 31:03

Yeah.

David: 31:04

going to like, cease to exist. Like you've been canceled from being.

Ellie: 31:08

Yeah, no, on Black Twitter, it originates as a tongue in cheek type of thing, but it has, I think, started to get taken very seriously.

David: So two things here: 31:15

I just don't see how to make that distinction that you are making between the public and the private feasible in a world in which we've learned from the history of the feminist movement that the personal is political. So if somebody texts, for example, reveal that they are using the N word and they are a celebrity in a position of power, I don't feel comfortable separating that from the role as a public figure. So I would have more questions about where the line there is, which is not to say that I don't believe there are difficult cases, right. There might be cases where I'm like, Ooh, this feels a little bit weird. I might have to think a little bit more about what those are for me, but in general, I think that the personal is fair game, especially when it's harmful to others. That for me is the threshold. And the second thing is that when thinking about accountability, I don't see the platforming and accountability as opposites, I see de-platforming as one form of accountability, uh, as holding accountable, because if you think about some of the cases of cancellation that are very public and very scandalous, typically somebody will call somebody out. So they begin as call-outs like you said something racist or sexist, or you've been a bully online, insert, whatever the claim is. Then the person responds and most people respond in shitty ways, by justifying their behavior or minimizing it. And it's usually after that that appeals to cancellation really escalate more and more because it becomes clear that the person under the microscope is not taking accountability and is only trying to save face. And so by the time we get to a full-blown appeal to de platforming, I think we've passed the point of expecting the person to really make us believe that they truly want to change their ways.

Ellie: 33:17

So I agree with you that de platforming is a form of accountability. I would just say that it's not exactly canceling, right. And to deep platform implies that somebody said something on a platform to begin with. And I think that is what I want to hold to, is I think I've been fetishizing the public private distinction a little bit, and I don't want to make it seem as if I think those are always hard and fast distinctions, but I think what I'm trying to get at there is this idea that there are certain things we say and do on given platforms and we shouldn't presume that there's a single platform where everything is circulating in a marketplace of ideas. That is the neo-liberal move. This expectation that we be consistent across all platforms at all times, whether that platform is a private text between a friend and yourself, or, you know, a classroom or a lecture hall or Twitter.

David: 34:10

I

Ellie: 34:10

I

David: 34:10

Don't see how we got there. So let's back up just one step, because what exactly is the neoliberal move? You explain it in terms so far and expectation of consistency. And so I just need to get a sense of that, because when I think about neoliberalism and just, you know, like late stage capitalism, it's the notion that the self need not be consistent. You just sort of follow the ebb and flow of the market and you're one role now, another one later.

Ellie: 34:38

Yeah. So I think what you're referring to is what the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called liquid life, which is this idea that in late stage capitalism, the self becomes sort of inchoate and fluid. But I actually think that that has always been a bit of an illusion. What late stage capitalism in its neoliberal form actually expects of us is consistency across all times and places because it turns a self into a commodity. The important thing about a commodity is that it is a single thing with a given exchange value. What neo-liberalism does is compares individuals as discreet entities to each other, right? Somebody's exchange value is higher or lower than another's by virtue of their Twitter follower count or the things for which they may be canceled, um, and that is totally antithetical to the idea of transformation over time, right? When we commodify people, we fail to account for transformation and we don't have any room for it. And so the idea is that you're the same person now as you were when you wrote that messed up my space status when you were 14 years old and therefore you need to be held accountable for that.

David: 35:50

Yeah. And so I definitely have concerns about any kind of philosophical theory of the self that imputes substance to the self, especially a static substance. So there, we definitely, um, hold hands together and, you know, kind of like-

Ellie: 36:07

I love holding hands with you.

David: 36:09

Um, with cancel culture specifically, so I'm going to leave behind the- the more general point about neo-liberalism because I share that concern. With cancel culture, I don't think that people get canceled because they change who they are, um, in fact, they get canceled because they don't change who they are. So it's the canceled people who are abiding by this notion that they have to defend who they are and refusing to evolve with the times, right? Like the- the refusal to really reinterpret the past in a new way, or to say, look, this is who I was, but I'm doing work to try to change it in the present. And in the end to me, all of these concerns are still secondary to the fundamental point, which is that de platforming doesn't actually violate any fundamental rights that a celebrity has, because having access to our eyes and ears is just a privilege. And taking that away is not actually harming them in a comparable way to the way in which they, through their tweets or through their blackface or through their racist rhetoric harm that people that then have to listen to that.

Ellie: 37:21

Yeah, for sure. And I definitely am on the same page with you about the idea that there's no given right to somebody's attention, right? Like you lose Twitter followers because of something that you said that was crappy, okay, so you lose Twitter followers. Yeah. And so, so that kind of de platforming or also, we saw that a lot, a few years ago in the case of academia, right, as these speakers getting invited to give talks who held really abhorrent and often really illegitimate scholarly views that were actually poorly researched, right. And there was this narrative around, well, we need to give voice to both sides. I don't think, I mean, first off the myth of both sides as if there are sort of two separate sides and somewhere in the middle is where the truth lies is I think really naive, especially in this day and age, but also, yeah, I mean, there's no right to give a talk in a lecture hall. So I'm- I'm on the same page with you there, but I just think like some of the most robust critiques of the static substantive self have come precisely from feminist philosophy. In fact, I co-authored with our former dissertation advisor, Cindy Willet, the Stanford encyclopedia- I know- um, the Stanford encyclopedia article on feminist perspectives on the self. And basically what I take to be some of the most important insights of feminist perspectives on the self or precisely that the self is multiplicitous, it's filled with all sorts of inconsistencies, and that is a condition for the possibility not only of its existence, but also of its growth. And so, although I hear you going back to something you said earlier, David, that there is a feminist insight on the one hand that the personal is political, I think we also need to hold onto the feminist insight that the self is not simply some unchanging substance over time. And while you're right that there are some cases where celebrities are getting canceled because of views that they still hold, there also have been other cases where it's like you said, this one thing 15 years ago, you're a canceled and I'm just like, come on, we need a more nuanced approach to this.

David: 39:16

Yes. And this. is exactly where my pull my guns out and just like, cancel everybody meets its limit. And I think that is one of them, uh, cases where you dig a text message that like a 13 year old sent and now they're a 25 year old celebrity, there I need to pause and think a little bit more. I guess I just don't see what follows from the multiplicity of the self. And the reason that I say I don't see what follows is because I worry that just leaving that comment hanging there about the fact that the self is many, that the self is legion, then translates into an implicit defense of those aspects of the self that the self does need to hold in check in order to be a member of a community, right? So like, I could almost imagine Louis C.K. Being like, Yeah, I'm a liberal, but I'm also a sexual abuser. The self is multiplicitous.

Ellie: 40:13

Yeah. Yeah.

David: 40:14

Normative question there gets a little bit tangled up with the metaphysical question or the ontological question, rather, of the status of the self.

Ellie: 40:21

Mm. Mm. So as somebody who works a lot on multiplicity of the self, this is a criticism that I think about a lot. You know, we don't want to use it as justification for a lack of accountability. It's like, you know, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

David: 40:35

We're all-

Ellie: 40:35

That there are. But I think a lot of alternatives in between on the one hand saying you are the same person as you have always been. And on the other hand saying, I'm just a kind of de-centered subject. I don't have any responsibility over what I do. I think one of the thinkers who has offered a really interesting account of this is Patricia Hill Collins in her work on Black feminist epistemology. And one of the things that Collins says is the self is instead a patchwork who's always existing in relation to the community. And so we can hold an ethic of personal accountability in tandem with this ethic of the multiplicity of the self. And we do that by recognizing that there is a symbiosis between acts and character, but that that symbiosis doesn't mean that there's just a one-to-one correlation between acts and characters such that you are entirely determined by the collection of your acts in this sort of neoliberal commodified way.

David: 41:36

So that's interesting to me. What I don't see is how this becomes a problem for cancel culture, because one could argue, following this line of thinking from a Patricia Hill Collins, that cancel culture says, look, I don't know if you're a good person or a bad person. You are fucking up in a public forum. So you need to recede back into your life, step out of the limelight and work on the relationship between your acts and your character on your own time.

Ellie: 42:10

I love the idea of some celebrities kind of like removing themselves from the limelight and going into the shadows. What you articulated is very appealing.

David: 42:19

Yeah, no, I- I'm not content with them removing themselves. I want people to yank them out of the limelight. That's where I get my pleasure from. I don't want to see people fall. I want to see people be thrown.

Ellie: 42:33

So we're moving from cancel culture to yanking culture.

David: 42:46

Enjoying overthink? Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. One of the arguments that has recently been made about cancel culture is that by relying on a mix of public shaming and group think, acts of canceling get in the way of forgiveness. What do you think about the role of forgiveness here?

Ellie: 43:20

Yeah. So I think that there have been some really interesting criticisms of so-called cancel culture from the perspective of Black thinkers that are really relevant here. So, one I mentioned earlier and that is the YouTube video by Kimberly Foster, who talks about the carceral logic of cancel culture. And one of the things that she says there is that we need to move instead towards a view of restorative justice, right. In order for justice to be achieved, something like the punishment of canceling needs to be eliminated because it's not really going to get us very far. And so restorative justice might instead involve something like a public taking of accountability, right, through an apology, through, um, you know, some other method of healing. And so that is only possible on the basis of a continued dialogue. And I will say that I generally agree with this, although I do see a potential danger, which is that suddenly, in moving from canceling to the kind of dialogue that we find in restorative justice, we might end up putting people whose positions are marginalized on trial and presuming a false equivalency between their positions of power and the positions of power of those who are canceled. So one way of putting that is we don't want to find ourselves in a position where a white Karen has harmed a Black woman and suddenly that Black woman has to like explain to the white Karen what she did wrong and why it harmed her, right.

David: 44:48

Yeah, so something like a public working through of a harm can put that person in a vulnerable position in a situation where they then have to do all this epistemic work of having to explain how they have been harmed. Now, especially when we think about forgiveness, I think we have to be really careful about that primarily because we live in a Christian culture, and by the way is my Nietzscheanism sort of coming to the fore, where we're already primed to assume that forgiveness is an automatic good. It's the highest Christian virtue, right? You just turn the other cheek. And if you get to that point of being able to forgive those who harm you, then you somehow buy a one-way ticket, you know, to like the metaphysical upstairs lounge. And- and because we live in that culture-

Ellie: 45:38

Like a wonderful place to be.

David: 45:40

Oh my God, it sounds horrible. Um-

Ellie: 45:42

Metaphysical upstairs lounge.

David: 45:45

And the reason that I worry about that is because we're already primed in this way to think that forgiveness is a fundamental, unquestionable, good. And the problem with that is that it makes us demand forgiveness, even in cases where we don't have the standing to make that demand, right. And so in the case of cancel culture, I want to be very clear that a lot of the people, not everybody, so I don't want to include the people that you've referenced in this critique, but I've seen a number of journalists who say, cancel culture prevents us from getting to a place of forgiveness. And it's like, they're all older white men with semi-conservative views. And my- my position is like, you don't have the standing to make that demand because you're not the victim here.

Ellie: 46:30

Yeah, there's this kind of expectation that because I was automatically given a platform, by virtue of my privilege, I should get that back if I say sorry.

David: 46:38

Well, exactly. I think moving too quickly to apologies and forgiveness actually can be harmful for the people who have been victimized because they're not given the time or the place to properly process the emotional landscape around the injury, right. And we- and we see this a lot, for example, in cases where police officer kills Black man or woman. Family of the victim is put on a podium at a press conference and pressured to like express forgiveness to the white cop. And those situations just make me cringe so badly because it's an apology and a forgiveness that are entirely oriented to serve the needs and uphold the psychic integrity of the perpetrator, right. Like they don't actually heal. They don't actually restore.

Ellie: 47:33

Well, and some have said too, that because of the kind of history of that type of violence, not to mention the violence of slavery, the Black community in the US tends to be an extremely forgiving group of folks, right. And some Black folks have said we've even been too forgiving. And so I think there's an interesting connection here to the origins of quote unquote cancel culture on Black Twitter and these historic acts of forgiveness, or even a forgiveness culture within Black America.

David: 48:01

I'll go back in this case to Aristotle, because we talked about virtue ethics, and character. And one thing that I've always agreed with Aristotle about is his claim that moving away from anger where anger is appropriate is itself a vice. Anger and ire are not always vices and we need to learn to inhabit them. I, you know, it kind of sounds incoherent to a Judeo Christian audience, but I think that instead of forgiveness, we need more anger. Um, and that's why I really want to dig my heels in the sand and come to the defense of cancel culture even though of course there are cases where I might not be particularly comfortable with this or that act of cancellation.

Ellie: 48:47

So I want to close by thinking about one really interesting example of canceling and forgiveness, um, that happened recently. As fans of the pod will know, I'm really into The Bachelor. And actually after the episode when we talked about the bachelor, was it monogamy? Right?

David: 49:06

Yeah, I think it was the monogamy episode.

Ellie: 49:08

Yeah, for sure. So basically after that episode came out, there was a controversy over the most recent season of The Bachelor where Matt James, who's the first ever Black bachelor chose a white woman, Rachel Kirkconnell, as his fiance at the end. And then it came out that Rachel had done some pretty cancelable things in the past. She had apparently made fun of a girl in like middle school or high school for being into Black guys. And she went to the University of Georgia and attended an antebellum era ball where she wore basically like a plantation dress and this then generated a debate where the host of The Bachelor, Chris Harrison, sort of defended her to Rachel Lindsay on Rachel Lindsey's podcast. And Rachel Lindsay is the first Black Bachelorette. And so basically Chris Harrison- sorry, I know that there's a lot of Bachelor lore, so we've got the host of the Bachelor, Chris Harrison defending the winner of The Bachelor's former racist act. And so there was this really difficult episode of After the Final Rose where the Bachelor, Matt James, expressed his extreme hurt over the stuff that Rachel Kirkconnell had done in the past and was like, look, I don't think we can be engaged anymore after these things that I found out about you and Rachel Kirkconnell apologized and was like, I'm learning all the things that like white ladies like me say when caught in racist acts. And, um, then, meanwhile, Chris Harrison the host, ended up totally doubling down on his defense of Rachel Kirkconnell. So Rachel apologized. Yes. So she's apologized. She apologized. She says what I did was messed up and Chris Harrison's like, oh, I'm going to defend her to the death. And so basically what's happened since is that Matt and Rachel Kirkconnell are back together. And this has received a lot of media attention, right? Matt James forgave his fiance for her racist past and the way that he described it was as follows. He says that he thinks it's unfair to leave people without the ability to unlearn and be better. So he's basically giving Rachel a second chance. And trying to engage her in some critical conversations while also recognizing that a lot of the work of unlearning she has to do herself and it's not his job to teach her. And so we have that happening. That is, I think, a really interesting moment of reconciliation and forgiveness that has happened recently in so-called cancel culture. And then on the other hand, Chris Harrison was fired from The Bachelor, right. And I totally get that. It makes a lot of sense. Um, and I also think it makes sense, and it's not my position to judge Matt and Rachel's relationship, especially Matt's motivations, but like this moment of at least a second chance, I think can be really instructive.

David: 51:57

Yeah. So as you know, I know nothing about The Bachelor have never seen it, don't really care about it.

Ellie: 52:02

You need to watch an episode of After the Final Rose. It is so interesting.

David: 52:06

It seems like on the one hand, the Black Bachelor first of all, had standing for forgiveness, right? He was harmed by it directly, it was a personal relationship. So it is up to him to sort of express that forgiveness. And this highlights a point that is essential for me, which is that forgiveness needs to grow organically from the person who is eventually going to express it rather than being imposed on them from the outside, which is where I think a lot of critiques of cancel culture go wrong. On the other hand, I think in this particular case, we need to keep in mind that something like forgiveness is certainly a morally laudable act, but it is what ethicists call a supererogatory act, which means that it might be morally good and laudable, but it's not mandated, right. You're not obliged to forgive. And so we need to keep in mind that forgiveness can be extended when the person who's a perpetrator has made the amends that the victim deems appropriate. But even in those cases, it cannot be expected. And so forgiveness is something akin to a gift that nobody is entitled to.

Ellie: 53:23

Definitely. And I think your points about forgiveness are very well taken. And I just want to say one last thing on that point is that Matt suggested that he felt some kind of pressure to break up with Rachel because of this, because there was so much public attention drawn to it, right. And they were like, how can you as a Black man be with this white woman who has done these things. And he, at the end of the day, it was just kind of like, look, I know it's rough. Like he wasn't trying to explicitly defend her. And at the same time, I think there's some recognition that our relationship is our relationship and that that doesn't necessarily need to be determined by the kind of judgment of the public sphere. That's something for us to work out together or for her to work out and reconcile herself to me.

David: 54:05

Yeah. And when it comes to romantic relationships, I am of the view that especially if you're a public person or an influential person, or even a person that other people respect, if you date a shitty person, then it kind of reflects on you, because it's a decision that you're making. And in this particular case, there has been an argument that has been made by Black women that Black men sometimes bend over backwards to make excuses for the white women that they date, because there is a historical fetishization of white femininity. And this is something that came out, for example, in the movie Get Out, where this white family does all these horrible things to the Black character, the Black character ultimately kills all of them, but he just can't actually kill the pretty white girl, um, and so part of me is like, yikes.

Ellie: 55:02

No. I know. And it was- it was honestly pretty yikes, especially because the cast of his season of the bachelor was the most diverse and there were so many multi-racial women, Black women. And then he ended up with the white woman and then everybody was obsessed, um, in her hometown date with whether or not her dad was white because he wasn't white passing. So they were like maybe she's actually not white. Anyway.

David: 55:23

Um.

Ellie: 55:24

You're all for canceling Matt and Rachel.

David: 55:26

Yeah. Yeah. It's just like, I, at some point, uh, the cancel culture snake will eat its own tail and I will call for my own cancellation. It's inevitable.

Ellie: 55:36

Haha.

David: 55:40

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 55:48

You can find us at overthinkpodcast.com where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice.

David: 55:54

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter @overthink_pod. We want to thank our audio editor, Ross Harris, and our production assistants Sam Hernandez and Lokyi Ho.

Ellie: 56:05

Thanks to Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music and Trevor Ames for our logo. Thanks so much for joining us today.