Cancel Culture

Josh Landy
Has cancel culture gotten out of control?

Ray Briggs
Or are we just better at holding each other accountable?

Josh Landy
Is cancelling even a thing?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where Ray teaches philosophy And I direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Ray Briggs
Today, we’re thinking about Cancel Culture.

Josh Landy
You know, Ray, I think cancel culture is a real problem these days. People are losing their jobs, they’re being harassed online, their home addresses are being shared—and all because they said something that came out the wrong way.

Ray Briggs
Oh come on, I don’t know what you’re talking about. When I see people who say or do terrible things, they get some pushback and then they just go and whine about how they’ve been victimized on their next Netflix comedy special.

Josh Landy
Okay, but you’re talking about famous people, right? I’m talking about regular folks who are getting into trouble over innocent mistakes.

Ray Briggs
Okay, but regular folks can also say some pretty messed up things, and they deserve to be called out for it. That’s not cancel culture, Josh—it’s consequence culture,

Josh Landy
But who decides the consequences? I mean, we’re talking about trial by social media here. And those trials, you know, they don’t go like trials in courtrooms. They’re not fair. There’s no presumption of innocence. The punishments aren’t proportional. I think about that guy who made one off-color joke about dongles at a tech conference. Someone overhears him, they take a picture, they tweet it out, his employer fires him.

Ray Briggs
Well, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Josh Landy
Okay, it was a stupid joke. But did he deserve to be fired?

Ray Briggs
Okay, maybe not in this case. But you know, a lot of stupid jokes that people tell at work really are a problem. These kinds of remarks can create a hostile environment for women or people of color or gays and lesbians. It’s good that employers are finally starting to take that stuff seriously.

Josh Landy
Well, I totally see why people need to be careful that work but someone can lose their job over something they posted on social media when they’re off the clock. I mean, think about that professor who tweeted some stuff about the Israel-Palestine conflict and then had his job offer suddenly disappear.

Ray Briggs
Okay, it’s messed up that people can be fired for one offhand remark, sure. But the problem still isn’t cancel culture. It’s that employers have way too much power. You know, Josh, a lot of people can get fired anytime for any reason from jobs they need to survive.

Josh Landy
But that just IS cancel culture. Employers can cancel people now—can cancel their employees. And employers aren’t the only ones. Lawmakers in Florida are making it illegal for school libraries to carry books I haven’t specifically approved, people are getting their speeches and events cancelled if they’re defending unpopular points of view, ffriends and family can shun you for having the wrong political opinion.

Ray Briggs
Okay, those are all things, but they’re a bunch of different things, and none of them are new. People have been boycotting stuff they don’t approve of since the 19th century, and people have been shunning their family members since Cain and Abel.

Josh Landy
Okay, that’s a good comparison. But still, I feel like some things really have changed in the, whatever it is, 6000 years since Cain and Abel. I mean, the internet’s made a big difference like nowadays. Any offhand comment on social media that sort of comes out the wrong way—that can potentially reach a massive audience of anonymous, cranky people who get to react immediately. And by the time you notice what’s happening, you’ve already lost your reputation.

Ray Briggs
Well, that only matters if you have a sense of shame in the first place. A lot of people don’t—they seem to be thriving in your so-called age of cancel culture. I remember a day when if you got caught telling hundreds of lies, you’d have to resign. Not anymore.

Josh Landy
Okay, but you’re still talking about a tiny slice of the population—those powerful people who think there’s no such thing as bad publicity. And yeah, okay, I agree with you, for someone like that scandal isn’t a problem. It just makes them more popular with their fans. But again, I’m talking about regular folks, people like you and me,

Ray Briggs
I still really don’t think that cancel culture is a thing or that it’s anything new. And I bet our guest will agree with me. It’s our old friend Adrian Daub, who’s got a new book called “Cancel Culture Transfer.”

Josh Landy
It’s so brilliant to have him back, but I’m gonna guess he’s gonna agree with me. The digital age really has made a difference in the way that we relate to each other.

Ray Briggs
That is a big debate right now. So we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to trace some of the history of cancel culture—the term and its appearances in popular culture. She files this report.

Holly McDede
One of the earliest examples of the idea of “cancelling” in popular culture is the 1981 song, “Your Love Is Cancelled.”

Eve Ng
I’ve been interested in digital culture from like a more activist perspective.

Holly McDede
Eve Ng traces the lineage of cancel culture in her book, “Cancel Culture: A Critical Analysis.”

Eve Ng
Like many other people, you know, I watched with a lot of interest Black Lives Matter, the MeToo movement, and the impact that had on prominent figures,

Holly McDede
Ng is professor in the School of Media Arts and Studies at Ohio University. She says that a decade after that song came out, a screenwriter named Barry Michael Cooper was working on a script for the crime drama “New Jack City,” when the song was playing on the radio. When the movie premiered in 1991, the idea of cancelling people made its film debut,

Eve Ng
We have like, recognizable stars, right—like Wesley Snipes is the lead character. And so he’s breaking up with a girlfriend in a horrible way.

New Jack City
You’re a murderer, Nino! I’ve seen you kill too many people! Cancel that bit%#$@, I’ll buy another one..

Holly McDede
But Twitter really gave this idea of cancelling new life. In 2009 Twitter formally adopted hashtags.

Eve Ng
So that’s when, like, people started using hashtags on Twitter saying “you’re cancelled.”

Holly McDede
For a while the phrase was used in a kind of playful way. But then people started using it to call people out for problematic or inappropriate behavior.

Stephen Colbert
This is “Who’s Attacking Me Now?”

Holly McDede
One of the earlier examples took place in 2014.

Stephen Colbert
The dark forces trying to silence my message of core conservative principles, mixed with youth friendly product placement, have been thwarted.

Holly McDede
Stephen Colbert had riffed on a new foundation started by the owner of Washington’s NFL team, the Redskins Original Americans Foundation. Colbert was trying to point out the ridiculousness of the owner of a team called the Redskins starting a group to help Native Americans.

Stephen Colbert
I was so inspired by Dan Snyder’s charitable outreach that I formed my own charity, the Ching Chong Ding Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.

Holly McDede
The Colbert Report twitter account sent out a tweet about his new make-believe charity, prompting an activist to tweet back “#CancelColbert—trend it.” Rhe activist behind the CancelColbert tweet soon started getting harassed and doxxed, her address and contact details posted publicly. Fast forward to 2017…

Eve Ng
We see figures like Harvey Weinstein being called out, you know, having to face the consequences. For him it was actual sort of legal problems, for others, you know like James Franco, Louis C. K, it was more what we think of as cancelling, social media canceling—like I’m not following anymore.

Kevin McCarthy
First they outlaw Dr. Seuss. And now they want to tell us what to say.

Ted Cruz
Jerry Seinfeld doesn’t tell comedy anymore because any joke that’s funny is cancelled!

Holly McDede
Ng says 2020 was the watershed year of cancel culture’s conservative backlash.

Eve Ng
2020 was the year of Black Lives Matter sort of re-emerging in the light of the George Floyd protests. And those protests, as we know, weren’t just about police violence—it really expanded into a more significant critique of race and inequality in the US.

Holly McDede
Some shows about police, like COPS, were literally cancelled by their networks… temporarily. HBO temporarily pulled “Gone With the Wind.” Conservatives were angry. And people are still talking about cancel culture. In her book, Ng doesn’t say whether the phenomenon is good or bad.

Eve Ng
The take-home point for me is always not everything that looks like a cancel event is the same. We have to look at the contex, like who is being cancelled? Who’s doing the canceling? What are the reasons for the canceling? And what are the power dynamics involved?

Holly McDede
That nuanced way of thinking may not fit with the often knee-jerk mob ethos of the internet. But no one is going to cancel someone for their thoughtful critical analysis, right? For Philosophy Talk. I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks so much for that great report, Holly. I’m Josh Landy. With me in my Stanford colleague Ray Briggs and today we’re thinking about cancel culture.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Adrian Daub. He’s professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford University, and author most recently of “Cancel Culture Transfer. Adrian, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Adrian Daub
Thanks for having me.

Josh Landy
So Adrian, you’ve written about James Bond songs and tech bro philosophy. How did you get interested in cancel culture?

Adrian Daub
I’m always really fascinated with narratives about places I know well, coming from people who don’t know those places very well. So I was very fascinated with the kind of myths around tech that I was sort of living cheek to jowl with every day. And I got interested in all these experts for campus culture, and what they’ve been saying for 40 years.

Ray Briggs
So Adrian, you’ll be well placed to answer this. Josh and I have been arguing about whether cancel culture is really a thing. So is it a thing?

Adrian Daub
So I think I agree with both of you. And it’s driving me a little crazy to be honest.

Ray Briggs
Wait, how is Josh right?

Adrian Daub
So Josh is right that I think that there are new phenomena here that we need to kind of reflect on and take account of in our politics and in our public discourse. Social media have changed the way we communicate, our employers are pushing us to be on social media to be more public than we were in in previous generations. At the same time, notice that a lot of the examples that Josh gave, would not really show up in a classic canceled culture article, that is to say, the canceled culture schema, right, that we sort of overlay over these perfectly real problems and incidents, tends to distort it in ways that I think are usually unhelpful and that are politically motivated.

Ray Briggs
So this sounds a lot like what I was saying, which is the cancel culture isn’t all one thing.

Adrian Daub
That is true, it is not A thing, yes. It’s definitely a it’s a way of making dissimilar things look similar and also making very similar things look dissimilar right? The barista who gets fired from Starbucks is unlikely to have a big Atlantic piece written about them. But you know, a tenured professor might.

Josh Landy
So that’s a joke. So let’s try to get clear here because it seems like a lot of things could potentially get folded into Kancil culture. First of all different kinds of people. So professors, performers, politicians, ordinary folks, and secondly, different kinds of reactions so you could lose your job. You could get boycotted, you can get banned from social media, mobbed on social media ostracize, disinvited, de published shouted down. Which are those kinds of people in which of those kinds of sort of sanction or reaction or should we be thinking about?

Adrian Daub
So I don’t know about should I actually think it’s not a particularly helpful label to use? I think what we do think about is not so much to technique. I mean, you forgot statues, right? Statues are supposed to be cancel culture, getting rid of those. What they have in common is who’s doing it Kancil culture in the sort of the way it seeped into the American vernacular between 2018 and 2022. is about it emanates from, you know, Black Lives Matter protesters, me to protesters, it comes from young people, it comes from college students, it does not come from Ron DeSantis, it does not come from you know, right wing groups. So it’s really about who’s doing it. And in, in what intent with what intention, it’s usually a social justice phenomenon.

Ray Briggs
So that’s really weird, because it seems like a lot of like canceling is anti social justice. So all of these don’t say gay bills. Were like, you’re not supposed to even acknowledge the existence of gay people in schools. Why doesn’t that get called cancel?

Adrian Daub
Oh well, that’s that’s the really scary thing, right that, in the end, we end up spending time yelling about what how, you know how trans students were mad at this one professor. And we don’t talk about the fact that in Florida, teachers are having to remove books from their classrooms, right? And canceled culture, panic, at its worst teaches us that those two things are dissimilar. And we should worry about only one of those. And that that can be really deleterious, I think

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about cancel culture with Adrienne Daub from Stanford University.

Ray Briggs
Have you ever been ostracized for expressing an unpopular opinion? Are you worried that cancel culture is having a chilling effect? Or are you glad that offensive comedians are finally getting some pushback?

Josh Landy
Censorship, self censorship and plain old politeness—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continrlehrarlesshar

Ray Charles
Hot the road, jack, and don’t you come back no more, no more, no more, no more.

Josh Landy
Can someone acts so insensitively really should be told to hit the road? I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about cancel culture with Adrian Daub from Stanford University, author of “Cancel Culture Transfer.”

Josh Landy
Got questions about speech and its consequences. Email us comments@philosophytalko.org, or comment on our website. And while you’re there, you could also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Adrian, can you tell us more about the things that people aren’t mentioning when they talk about cancel culture?

Adrian Daub
Yeah, I mean, I think that when we frame these anecdotes, when that’s usually what they are in this cancel culture through this cancel culture lens, we end up leaving a whole bunch of stuff aside, we leave aside you know, power dynamics in the workplace, right? Very frequently, these famous cancel victims sort of are at the very top of the food chain and really, you know, either face no consequences are really only in very extreme cases, right. The famous me two cases, such as Harvey Weinstein. And the other thing we don’t talk about is employment law. Right? When you will both mentioning that that, of course, it’s a problem that our employers can throw us out quite so easily. And but we very rarely talk about those. It’s a really interesting kind of throughline in this complaint in this complaint is decades old, right? Before we had cancel culture, we had the conversation about political correctness, etc, etc. What you often get is like this absolute apocalyptic description of what’s happening, especially on college campuses, and where this is going to lead, and it’s going to be neutral totalitarianism, and no one’s gonna be able to say anything anymore. And when you get to those sort of suggestions, like what what should we do about this is just like, don’t do that, right. Don’t don’t cancel, right? They never say maybe it’d be hard to fire people, right, which we have a perfectly reasonable consequence out of all this, but they’re not interested in that they’re interested in shaming our students more than they are interested in actually addressing whether people are being unfairly fired.

Ray Briggs
So I can, I can see kind of two ways of grouping phenomena together that would suggest different ways of responding. So one thing to think is that just like, speech is an important domain. And it should be a protected domain, and we’re just ignoring some cases of speech suppression, we should be paying attention to a lot more of them. And another thing you could think which is different is that what’s really bad is like, the unfair exercise of power, so like, making your employees not be able to speak their mind is unfair, and kind of the same way as making them like not be able to decide when they can go to the bathroom or when they can sit down is unfair. And that suggests that we should just group different speech problems differently.

Adrian Daub
Exactly. I do think the question of how, how much is this demand, no matter how inane we may think it is, backed up by actual power, is, is the central one, right? I mean, if the governor of a state says you can’t say that, well, even if they eventually lose in court, that’s a scarier proposition than the people who I grade say, I can’t say something right? Like, what over whom? I mean, they have some power in this relationship. Thank God. But I have a lot, right. So I do think that like thinking through the power of relationships that the very simplistic framing often wants us to ignore is one way to exactly group these kinds of incidents. The thing is, if you look for the ones where the power imbalance goes, along with speech prohibitions, those are almost to a tee, never the ones that get mentioned as the big examples of cancel culture.

Josh Landy
What do you mean by that, which are the ones that don’t get mentioned?

Adrian Daub
The ones where someone didn’t have any power, and their speech was regulated? I mean, for example, I’ve never seen an article read 1000s of these articles by now for my book, never seen an article mentioned this weird phenomenon where Starbucks employees get fired for allegedly writing something against cops on like a cop’s coffee mug? Of course, it would be it seems tailor made for them. But it’s not because it’s actually the point of the story would be to question the corporate power of Starbucks coffee. Right? But no, we want to be we want to be mad at the social justice warriors and what and their demands. Right. And so I do think that that’s, that’s an example of, of how there’s almost an allergy for cases where it’s pretty clear that what’s called for us institutional reform, not that, you know, Twitter not be mad—Twitter’s always mad, right?

Josh Landy
But there are cases, right where I mean, we’re talking about regular folks who don’t have power, or very little power, right, who lose their job. So there’s, you know, this guy, Manuel Cafferty, a Mexican American guy, who was basically cracking his knuckles out the window of his truck, and someone took a photo that made it look like he was making a white power sign. And he lost his job. Right. And so that’s surely a case where, I mean, I don’t know how much power the person had who took his photo. But clearly, you know, Cafferty is just a regular guy, and I needed that job to survive. And you know, he loses reputation loses his job. Aren’t there a lot of cases like that?

Adrian Daub
So I mean, right. I mean, the other case we could think of is Justine Sacco who gets on an airplane tweets a truly dumb tweet. turns off, her phone is fired by the time she turns it back on. But again, what is the point of that question? Is it that we are too easily agitated around social justice issues, such as white power sign white power movements in the United States are a real problem, right? People shouldn’t be made this guy wasn’t wasn’t. Exactly. So then the question would be, Why was his employer able to fire him so easily? And the question would be, you know, again, if we say employers have to, in fact provide protection for employees who through no fault of their own end up in one of these imbroglios in social media, this is going to be a thing that we’re all going to be part of at some point, we’re all going to be 15 minutes of shame is a shame, right? We’re gonna be shamed for 15 minutes in the future. It might make sense to think through what what is income upon our employers in that kind of an environment.

Josh Landy
I mean, I totally agree. It’s just it’s not only it’s not I don’t want to get fired for not making a website. I also don’t want to get trashed on social media, right? I don’t want to get doxxed people are coming to my door because they have something I didn’t do. So it’s not just employment law, right?

Adrian Daub
Right. I guess even though what’s, how is that characteristic of cancer culture? In most of the cancel culture anecdotes, we think of both sides agree on what has transpired they disagree in their interpretation of it, right. This was this was a malicious misrepresentation of what this person did you could have probably photoshopped that in an older age. That’s a different question then. We both agree that Louie CK had this habit we appealed it for some reasons agree on how to handle that.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so I kind of want to hear more about social media trashing which like and Louie CK case I’m, I kind of think like, I can’t feel too bad for a guy who consistently like assaults and harasses women. And it in the case, the cases that Josh was citing, it seems like the social media response was both really important to what happened and also out of proportion, right. And so like, that does seem like a cause for concern to me. People don’t like being ostracized by their peers that hurts them.

Adrian Daub
Yeah, that’s absolutely true. But let’s be clear, the worry about cancel culture not only doesn’t take that very seriously participates in the same thing. Your your roving reporter piece mentioned the case of cancel Colbert called bear of course, later that year got the Late Show, which he still has, so it wasn’t bad for his career. And as you mentioned in the piece, the the suppose a canceller had to move, got death threats, right. A cancel culture story may act like it’s horrified at the Internet culture. It participates in internet culture. It participates in public mobbing it participates in all the things it claims to critique. And very often, the people who end up on the receiving end of those kind of internet hubs have a lot less power than Louie CK.

Josh Landy
That’s a really good point. You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about cancel culture with Adrian down from Stanford University. And Adrian, we’ve got an email from Joseph. Joseph says “free speech really means inquiry with standards in review. He thinks this needs to go along with people taking charge of their words, rather than hiding behind anonymity.” What do you think about that?

Adrian Daub
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s an interesting question. I mean, it also raises the question of whether the centrality of the campus and the cancel culture story is really that justified, right? There is a lot that we feel licensed to say and do to each other behind the mask of anonymity or even relative anonymity on social media. But of course, we see a lot of these stories are about people who do put their name to it. So I do think there is a there’s a, you know, anonymity is a part of this, but it’s not the only part.

Ray Briggs
I want to hear more about campuses, which you’ve mentioned a couple of times, and why you think they’re such a central focus of these conversations.

Adrian Daub
So, that’s a big part of my book. And my answer is basically this. Over seven years, Americans have learned to really enjoy campus stories, and they’ve learned not to care whether they’re true, right? We always have these morality plays about aging professors, young students, right? They’re often very good novels, they’re sometimes mediocre novels. They’re sometimes good, who done it’s there sometimes bad who done it’s, we haven’t we have lost the ability to really ask, Does that ring true to me? And that’s kind of that was the beginning of my free song with which I started this book, there was like, how could you possibly think this was true of a campus? What? What do you think is true of my university that you think that is what my employer is able to do? Or, you know, that this is what my students are able to do? You know, so I think that we’ve learned to live with campus fictions. And there’s a there’s been also a really big right wing cottage industry that’s exploited that fact that has been telling us exaggerated stories about campuses. And again, we’ve been living with those since Alan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” in 1987.

Ray Briggs
So the people who write these things, like, didn’t they go to college? How does this happen?

Adrian Daub
Well, I think that’s the important thing. Everyone’s gone, like everyone who’s excited about this stuff goes to college. Right, but they haven’t been for a while. And I think that gives you this kind of nice Manichaean, you know, picture of campus where it’s, you know, the evil counselors and the upright professor who would have had no intention of doing anything wrong, but one day without having, you know, you know, having been haven’t been cancelled, right. Like, it’s just, it’s this extremely powerful morality play that we put on. And it lives from the fact that we have a semi familiarity we all think we understand college a lot better than we really do.

Josh Landy
Okay, but I mean, I totally take that point. And by the way, I love some of those campus novels, too. Maybe I’m guilty of that. But so there are there are some cases right that we mention actually a fairly recent case at a university called Hamline University, right, where a professor, you know, her basically a contract was not renewed. And all she had done was basically, in the context of a very serious, very respectful, reverential lecture about Islamic art, displayed an image from the 14th century. And there was one student, I think, who complained, and while giving a trigger warning, and she gave warning, she allowed people not to be there and so on in the Muslim Public Affairs Council issued a statement of support for her. So this seems like a not a great case. And that is at a university.

Adrian Daub
Yeah. So you know, there are two questions here. One is, do these sorts of cases exist? And yes, very clearly. And I think, you know, they happen with some frequency. The question is, do they happen with increasing frequency. And the thing is, if you go through the the books that were bemoaning the predecessor panics to the council culture panic, right, or the bemoaning the predecessor to Castle culture, I should say, they have, they’re full of the same ideas. And if you look at if anyone who’s tried to sort of put this in numbers finds that like, it appears to be, if it’s increasing, it’s increasing at an extremely low rate. And if anything, it might be a constant of the fact that on campuses, we’re just all kind of packed together, we’re all hyper verbal, we’re all extremely thin skinned about just about anything. We spent 40 years getting old together and getting kind of weird together. And then we get into these weird skirmishes.

Ray Briggs
So I’m kind of curious about how I would go about measuring whether the incidence of these these kinds of things was increasing or decreasing or staying the same.

Adrian Daub
It’s very, it’s very tricky. So I must admit, I just went through went by what people who are warning about this are doing so fire, which is an organization that looks at free speech issues on campus, kind of, you know, they help out academics that have gotten into this kind of hot water. So I took them to be a pretty good proxy for, you know, if they get involved, they think there’s something here. And if you look at their list, it you know, you realize that if you were to just graph it, it’s it’s, it does go up. But a lot of that is recency bias. It’s just that they weren’t as involved before, right? You know, we get, but even then we get something like 1520 cases a year, which was 6000 universities in the United States. Like there are a lot of things that happen 20 times in 6000 universities that we don’t talk about.

Ray Briggs
So one thing that people who complain about cancel culture complain about and I’m curious if you think it’s an issue is not sort of cases where somebody is fired, but cases where somebody doesn’t say something self censorship, right? Do you think that’s a problem? And do you think that if it’s a problem, it would be harder to measure? How do we how do we get a handle on that? Yeah,

Adrian Daub
I mean, that’s that’s always the sort of next claim that the reason we’re not seeing more of these incidents is that people are just mercilessly self censoring. Again, all we can say is that complaint is old, it’s about 40 years old people have claimed not to be able to say the thing they then say, for about 40 years. We can also say with some certainty, that the studies that claim to measure this are designed to find that this is a hugely widespread problem. And they have a tendency as a lot of the cancel culture discourse does to pathologize everyday interactions. That is to say, yes, a college dorm brings together or a college classroom brings together students from vastly different walks of life, many of whom have lived in far more homogeneous communities before in that environment, might one be less likely to proselytize might one be less likely to express one’s support for a particular cause? Yes, one might write these a lot of these studies. As far as I can tell, the ones I’ve read, tend to try to pathologize this fact. And they don’t sort of go beyond that. And the other thing, of course, that they look for is that they look for very specific things. They look for the sort of conservative nostrums, right.

Josh Landy
Which brings me actually to something wanted to talk to you about which is, why aren’t they talking more about other forms of speech suppression on caps? Because you think about there’s an organization called Turning Point USA, which has a professor watch list. Yes. Right. That sort of names and shames left wing professors that seems like it could risk suppressing speech or causing left wing professors to self censor, there’s, there’s, you know, some things that happen at religious university like press are called lorisha Hawkins, who basically got suspended for saying the Christians and Muslims worship the same God religious University and of course, the the laws we were talking about being passed, in some states restricting what universities can and cannot teach. So these seem like cases where we want to say, Hey, I feel like some speeches getting suppressed here. And yet it’s doesn’t seem to be talked about in these conversations.

Adrian Daub
Yeah, the question of of free speech on campus is to me apps The baffling right, we all there is this kind of narrative that there was free speech on campus college campuses. And then the 60s happened in the 70s happened and identity politics happened and no black students showed up and LGBT students showed up. And now we can’t say anything anymore. Well, you mentioned religious universities. Do you know that California has a law that political speech that doesn’t infringe on the First Amendment cannot be regulated by private universities? Right? There is a lot Leonard law. We can’t We can’t do that. It doesn’t exist, funnily enough for religious universities, they’re allowed to do it. Right. That tells you a story about how where we see campus free speech, also, right. You know, we think a lot about you know, this, this alleged golden age of, you know, where you could say anything on campus as well, until what is it 1963 64 We had in loco parentis, where universities could could throw you out for all kinds of stuff. I believe it was in the early 1960s, that the Supreme Court decided that no, you couldn’t throw out a student for participating in a civil rights march. Right. So when exactly was this golden age of campus free speech, it’s really baffling. And I think it’s really a historical. What we really got here are complex systems that clearly want to put some rules on their students. And those rules are subject to some wrangling and some disagreements. But again, this narrative that used to be able to say this thing, and now you can’t, is a very, very distorted picture of that.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about cancel culture with Adrian Daub from Stanford University, author of “Cancel Culture Transfer.”

Ray Briggs
Why is it so hard to have a public conversation these days? What’s the right balance between sensitivity and straightforwardness? How can we get better at handling disagreement?

Josh Landy
Finding common ground—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Garbage
Walk away ’cause you’re breakin up the girl.

Josh Landy
In the age of online shaming, a mistake is often all it takes for your life to come undone. I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Adrian Daub from Stanford University, and we’re thinking about cancel culture.

Josh Landy
So Adrian, we’ve mentioned a bunch of different kinds of interactions that haven’t gone so great. So what do you think we can all do to help things go better in the future?

Adrian Daub
So I think one very important move is to refuse the meta level at some time, they there’s a there’s a reason to ask, what kind of a debate are we having here? But very often these days, you know, the question becomes about the see ability, and not whether or not it’s worth saying, right? Like, it’s not like, is this kind of opinion? expressible? But it’s like, is it defensible? Is it a good opinion? Is it a is it does it support it by research, right? We get all these calls to you know, you know, to not the platform transphobia because people don’t want to actually have to debate on the merits. And I think that’s, that’s an important thing to develop a BS detector for. And so you keep going there, right? Once or twice, it’s fine. But like the third strike, let’s have the actual debate. The other thing I would think about is, be careful about these myths that distort power structures. If a story seems to suggest that the people that on first glance would appear to have no power and particular interaction, suddenly are all powerful. Well, that’s a conspiracy theory. Right? That’s, that’s, that’s weird. All right, that’s, that’s when you’re going to be told that they have gold under the polar ice caps or something like that. Right. And then the other thing is, be careful with anecdotes, right? We’re never gonna get to the bottom of all these stories. You both know how complex campus interactions especially can be. I’m guessing media is no different. It doesn’t mean you can’t sort of form a judgment and say, I think this is what happened on the preponderance of the evidence. But still, be careful if someone sells you a story that is too good to be true. It often isn’t.

Ray Briggs
I’m thinking about something you mentioned earlier about how college campuses these days are places where students get to interact with others who are different than them and no conversations like that. And I’m wondering if you have any kind of thoughts about the special value of that and also how to manage it?

Adrian Daub
Yeah, I mean, I think what we’re seeing is kind of just the friction of that endeavor, and that it never feels good. And that it involves self censorship, for lack of a better word, that there are things there kind of questions that we learn not to ask that there are terms that we learn not to use, and we often learn it kind of painfully through shame, right? I think, to me, it’s a little strange that we’ve pathologized that. It that’s that is what tolerance and mutual tolerance is all about.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I can think of lots of times when something comes in To my brain, and I shouldn’t say it for various reasons. So I probably shouldn’t say to people, oh, the food you’re cooking, it looks bad to me. Like, even if it happens to it’s not relevant information. And I maybe shouldn’t talk, if I’ve been the one talking in the room for like, five minutes already, you know,

Adrian Daub
I mean, think of the fact that we that certain people on college campuses have been self censoring for ever, right? African Americans talk about code switching, what is that that is self censorship, it’s to it’s to change the way you talk in order to accommodate yourself Self to a particular environment, right? You know, I wouldn’t, you know, say that I’m gay in every part of the United States. And that’s a form of self censorship, I have a strong suspicion that that’s not the kind of self censorship that these surveys are after. They’re after someone who doesn’t get to say something homophobic to me.

Josh Landy
But that actually brings me to a thought that I have about you know, how to move forward. I wonder if we can, this might sound a little utopian. But I wonder if we can sort of join forces people on the left people on the right, what if we could actually have some empathy, and understand that, in fact, you know, we’re all in this social media environment, in which, you know, sometimes we’re biting our tongue. And sometimes we fail to and something comes out the wrong way. And maybe we could all be a little empathetic. And you know, of course, if the if something egregious happens, then it’s egregious. But in the cases where someone makes a small mistake, maybe we can be a little bit more forgiving a little bit more mutually understanding that we’re kind of in a way, I mean, not quite the same boat. But in a similar boat. We’re all a little bit self censoring. We’re all vulnerable to potential mobbing on the internet and someone could could that be a way forward?

Adrian Daub
I think a certain forbearance and not leaping to condemnation is definitely something that we all can we can do more of. It’s also of course, something it’s noticeable that a lot of our worries about cancel culture are about 19 year olds, people who are not known for reflecting always right. And that will happen, right? I are some of these people who participate in online debates going to regret some of the things they said at age 19. Of course they will, we have to, you know, we have to be there, we also have to understand that we likely were just as strident at 19, just we didn’t have Twitter in front of us/

Josh Landy
Thank goodness. Oh my gosh!

Adrian Daub
On the other hand, I would say that we have to be careful not to confuse honest mistakes, and kind of a refusal to be respectful. I’ll give you an example. My grandmother, may she rest in peace was an inveterate user of the lesser N word throughout her life. And she would always use it and and say, or whatever they want to be called these days. This happened for 40 years. And I said, Grandma, it’s one word. You know, you learn the word microwave, you learn the word computer, you learn the word computer mouse, how is this word, creating such difficulty for you? I don’t credit it. I don’t believe it. I think you enjoy saying it or you you think you don’t, these people do not deserve your respect. And that’s a problem. So I do think that like, you know, a certain forbearance is important. But it’s also important to note that that often enough. Whether or not we feel like we need to adjust to our fellow human beings, is and is perceived by activists not unjustly as a form of respect or disrespect of someone. We all change our language all the time for people we respect. If we don’t, well, probably people are not wrong to read into that certain sign of disrespect.

Ray Briggs
So I also wonder about audiences here. So Josh was expressing relief that the stuff that he said at 19 was not shared with a wide audience. I feel really similar about myself, Oh, God. And this sort of makes me worried about a thing that social media does, it makes it really easy to publish thoughts that you probably meant for your friends, and send them to the entire world, or the entire world can yell about that.

Adrian Daub
Yeah, and let’s be very careful. It’s not social media. It’s specific social media. It’s noticeable that the freakout over cancel culture and the young people who allegedly perpetrated started around Tumblr and are on Twitter, those are both forms where I can’t really get what I say. Meanwhile, Uncle, you know, John, and his friends are happily like, you know, rabbit self radicalizing on their Facebook group and storming the Capitol, but you can’t see it because you have to be friends with them on you have to join the Facebook group. Right so it’s not even it really stratifies by which social media you use. Our our young people are currently having to have these debates in spaces that we can all see. And as you point out, Ray and as you pointed out, Josh, that’s that’s not a very merciful position. That’s a really actually problematic. Meanwhile, some of our elders are just going just wild on Facebook, but we’ll never get to see because I’m not on Facebook anymore. I just use it to like, you know, buy baby clothes basically right? Like, I won’t see it, and I’m not gonna be part of that Facebook group, right? I’m not on telegram. I’m not on parler I’m not on truth, social, they can go just wild and no one’s gonna be able to see that.

Ray Briggs
I this is actually making me think maybe it’s it’s kind of good to have a forum where everybody can read and critique your thoughts because then you at least get corrected when you’ve made an error. Maybe you get corrected too harshly. But there’s also something horrible about nobody telling you, you’re wrong when you’re wrong.

Josh Landy
That seems right. So I agree with that. But at the same time, I also think that the concept of mercy that Adrienne brought up a moment ago is also important. Yes. I mean, you have people like Loretta Ross and Brock Brock Obama sort of saying, you know, maybe this strategy of shaming isn’t always the most effective policy. And I’d add in some cases, if somebody actually apologizes again, leaving aside the horrible inveterate dig on trolls. But let’s say someone makes a mistake, and then they apologize, I’d like to see a world where people are a little more willing to accept a genuine apology.

Adrian Daub
Well, in a funny way, that’s that our discussion has come full circle, because of course, that’s how the idea of cancel culture first came into broader usage. It was within fan communities, who said, this was a form of self policing, they said, look, I think that you’re right to disagree with this. But this is getting a little cancel culture, right? Like you’re being you’re being a little too judgmental here. But it was in these very small spaces. That was for fans of this very particular thing. They were principally open to anyone but like, unless you really cared about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you weren’t going to be part of it.

Ray Briggs
This actually is very similar to the concept of political correctness, which also arose as kind of an in joke, and then co opted to attack anybody who thought that it was like, wrong to say racist or sexist things in any forum.

Adrian Daub
Exactly. I mean, this is this is sort of the same operation, right? You you take a marginal phenomenon that is very context bound at very specific people use under very specific circumstances with very often with sort of satirical or self and raw ionizing intent. And you claim this is their official position. Right. And this is, this is now this totalitarian program that’s taking over our public discourse.

Josh Landy
So Adrian, if there were one short piece of advice you want to leave our listeners with, as to how to how to be in this age of sort of difficulty. Whatever your place in the political spectrum, what would that be? What would your advice be?

Adrian Daub
I think it would be extremely sort of common sense. advice, it would be to always remain cognizant of who did what to whom, why and how, right. And once the rhetoric seems to leave that ground behind to be very, very careful, sometimes it’s good to to generalize, and to sort of say, right, like, when we talk about microaggressions, we can say, well, the specific instance was minimal. But it’s indicative of this bigger problem, but then the person making that claim has to be able to justify why they’re leaving the this is what actually happened, right? And so much of the hyperbole around this just is about people wanting you to forget what really happened here.

Josh Landy
So get the facts, get the details, really understand what happened before.

Adrian Daub
Especially before you generalize about a huge group of people that you may not have interacted with very much.

Josh Landy
That’s very sensible advice. On that excellent note, Adrian, thank you so much for joining us today.

Adrian Daub
Thank you so much for having me. This was great.

Josh Landy
Our guests has been Adrian Dub, Professor of Comparative Literature in German Studies at Stanford University, and author most recently of “Cancel Culture Transfer.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, one of the things I’m thinking is that I really love the way that humanity is, enables us to kind of really listen to genuinely different perspectives. And I think that’s a great thing that we have to offer. And the other thing I’m thinking is, I can’t wait till Adrian’s book comes out in English because I can’t read German.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I’ve been able, you know, with my rudimentary German to make my way through some of that it’s really fantastic. And such a such a timely and vital intervention is very complicated and important question. We’re going to put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophy talked about o r g, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comment@philosophytalk.org and we might feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now… a man too fast to cancel: it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… While thinking about cancel culture, which gets people het up, depending on whose culture is on the block, I noticed that Tucker Carlson had a congressman on his program to talk about smoking on federal property. So many straw men in their discussion I am amazed they didn’t catch fire. Tucker said, “[I]f you were smoking weed or meth no one would say anything. What is it about tobacco — which was a religious sacrament for the American Indians… – what is it about tobacco that triggers them so profoundly….” So I learned that cheap stogies were sacred to the Navajo, and that Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t mind if you smoked crack on CSPAN. Finally, Tucker’s guest lamped a stogie and Tucker called it the smell of freedom. Smelled more like my grandfather’s den, I’ll bet, which was a good place to find men’s adventure magazines. Which went away around 1970 or so. So you don’t need cancel culture if the thing dies peacefully in its sleep. Media has to be present for true cancel culture. Controversy! A teacher introduces controversial material causing woke student to faint. Nex thing you know, lawsuits. We get resignations, political correctness, triggering, Al Franken. Louis CK was the poster child of what happens when you do whatever it is he did back in 2017 — but he’s back again, doing shows. Most cancel culture is just sitting in the penalty box until the bell rings. And public shaming is difficult to do in diversity. Can’t get a consensus. It’s targeted. So you get kicked out of Glee Club for mumbling during the fight song. Or forced to resign your commission because you forget where the submarine is. Acting out Lord of the Dance at Thanksgiving Dinner. The list goes on. Blackmailers and extortionists can make a dent in post modern shunning. And who knows? Meghan and Harry are running right now neck and neck for either Beatles level superstardom or oblivion. But most of the cancel culture is contingent upon the cultural attention span. It used to be okay to make racist jokes, for example. As long as we said, “you people can’t take a joke,” after the punch line. And if cancel culture led to rocky roads for the well known, conservatives felt left out. Which led to a shift in cancel culture, and Trump. See, if anybody should be shunned conservatives should do the shunning, but they can’t because shunning such a WOKE thing to do. It’s complicated like the kids say. So rather than cancel culturing culture conservatives are culture shaming culture for not canceling itself. Of late, brown female MMs for example, a limited sales promotion I believe, are viewed by conservatives as a cancellation culturally of former M&Ms who were male working class nebbishes eager to be eaten. This is similar to the Ms. Potato Head flap of last year. All the boy potatoes needed counselling, remember? There is performative Twittery anger at regulating, at mandates, at confiscating gas ovens. The governor of Florida yells at Disney, because it gave support to gay people, which Florida is not against, mind you, but is sick of you talking about it, so now Florida is trying to cancel Disney’s status by changing its tax status to Woke. Meanwhile on Fox News, Fox tried to gin up outrage over brown female M&Ms. The female newscaster told her viewers: “If this is what you need for validation, an M&M that is the color that you think is associated with feminism, then I’m worried about you. I think that makes China say, ‘Oh, good, keep focusing on that. Keep focusing on giving people their own color M&M’S while we take over all of the mineral deposits in the entire world.’” This is what keeps conservatives awake at night. Worrying that China is gloating about gendered chocolate drops in America. Cancel, or China will have all the coal. Hunter Biden’s laptop? Sure, cancel it, Congress, But where’s the real threat? I’ll tell you. It melts in your mouth, America. Not in your hands. Your cold dead hands holding an M&M instead of a gun. Speaking of guns, Kyle Rittenhouse, come to think of it, could be an M&M. Look at his head! You could shrink that, coat it with chocolate! There’s a culture package ripe for the cancel. Teen Sniper M&M’s. Except, knowing Mars Candies and how Woke they are, it would be Transgender Teen Sniper M&M’s. And China would laugh, all the way to the bank. The world bank. Of coal. Then they’ll corner the market on cacao. And Mars will have to make their candies with carob. Once again, hippies win. Wake up America! Get Unwoke. Cancel cancel cancel. Boycott. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2023.

Ray Briggs
Our executive producer is Ben Trefny. The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy
thanks also to Jaime Lee, Elizabeth Zhu, Emily Wang, Merle Kessler, and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, and from the partners at our online Community of Thinkers.

Josh Landy
And from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Desi Lydic
If the liberal left wants to cancel something, why don’t they start by cancelling my membership to Planet Fitness? I tried—but it’s really hard!