In Defense of Cancel Culture

“Cancel culture” is really a tautology. All cultures involve the “cancellation” of certain behaviors and viewpoints, the public enactment or profession of which results in the social ostracization of the perpetrator. Without these taboos, there can be no social regulation of behavior and mores and hence no real culture at all. In the modern West, for instance, we cancel people who insist on being naked in public spaces. We also cancel racists and men who beat their wives, and our culture is all the better for it.

The recent public furor over cancel culture has not been about whether or not we will cancel people or ideas, but about which people or ideas we will cancel. The denouncement of “cancel culture” writ large is a characteristically small-“l” liberal way of trying to avoid this fact by drawing a curtain of false neutrality over social censure per se, as if the process or procedure of cancellation itself is what we really object to.