Canceling culture: Is it all just moral scaremongering by white, old, right-wing men?

I keep hearing that my asthma is psychosomatic, more or less imaginary. I just need to learn to breathe properly and change my diet and it will go away along with all my allergies. I have always been allergic to any kind of cancel culture. And what does the new study on cancellation culture by literature professor Adrian Daub suggest to me? That goes without saying: just keep breathing. Cancel culture is mainly imagination.

Daub, 42, who was born in Cologne, of California’s renowned Stanford University, says the whole hype about the cancellation culture is about moral panic currently gripping the world. Above all, white, old, right-wing men, let’s call them WAR men, would fear her and therefore, for attention-saving reasons, fan the cancel culture babble so that they would still be listened to in the first place.

Similarly, since the 1990s, the WAR men have imported the precursor concept of political correctness from the US to act as the last liberal defenders of free speech against the new “left police force”. Daub shows how the concrete allegations against Cancel Culture are often based on trivial ‘anecdotes’, as he calls them, from which far-reaching conclusions are drawn, as if the legacy of the Western Enlightenment is in danger.

The latest canceled culture debates in Switzerland confirm this. As such, they were trivial occasions: they involved unknown musicians who were not invited to Bern and Zurich because they wore dreadlocks and because the organizers saw it as an act of cultural appropriation. I also lamented the ridiculous cancellation of the performances, but I wasn’t really worried that these trifles would mean the downfall of liberal democracy. Nevertheless, every time a canceled cultural event takes place somewhere, a “resist the beginning” reflex emerges.

Does that already expose me as a WAR man? My anger is not that of a right-wing or left-wing man, but that of a cultural journalist. And I confess, I haven’t seen cancellation culture exclusively as a playground for WAR men until now. Of course there is a right-wing squad of anti-virtue terror old men, consisting of Thilo Sarrazin, Ulf Poschardt or Jan Fleischhauer and some Weltwoche and NZZ editors.

But journalists in left-wing and left-liberal media have also been critical of the cancellation culture. Two of the spiciest attacks I’ve read come from French author and feminist Caroline Fourest and not-quite-unfair Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Applebaum. Daub only contemptuously calls them “cancel culture cassandras”.

His book, however, opens my eyes to the extent to which more and more conservatives are actually accepting cancellation culture and controlling the issue. It was originally just an internet phenomenon, spreading to Tumblr and from 2016 to Twitter. Tweets saying “XYZ has been cancelled” came from fans berating a star who had misbehaved for once. It was a message often sent with a wink.

Cancel quickly lost this innocence. Since the summer of 2019, the conventional media in Europe have also been talking about “cancelling culture”, as an aftershock of MeToo. As Daub reconstructs, even Woody Allen or Roman Polanski, who have been charged with abuse cases, suddenly appear as victims of the new “sound terror”.

The knitting pattern of the Cancel Culture anecdotes is always the same: respectable professors or artists are confronted with absurd accusations by “Woken” (who hardly ever have a say in the media themselves) and fall victim to their censorship fury. Unlike most journalists, Adrian Daub takes the trouble to question some of these anecdotes. It turns out that many supposedly canceled professors weren’t so innocent after all or weren’t really muzzled by their university.

Daub mentions companies like TruthRevolt or Daily Caller (co-founded by Tucker Carlson) that like to launch cancellation campaigns. The anecdotes disseminated in this way also find their way into the European media, with the discourse in the German-language media clearly playing in the columns, while in the US it appears more in the political columns.

The recently made public case of Swiss writer Jürg Halter, who claimed to be the victim of a cancellation campaign, shows how easily cancellation culture slants into the fictional. His gallery even organized personal protection because Halter had been threatened by anonymous left-wing extremists. However, as the online magazine “Republik” investigated, there was no specific threat against his person.

Not only do cancel stories have a strong literary tendency, as Adrian Daub proves, they have also become material for great literature. Think of JM Coetzee’s novel Shame (1999), Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001) or Philip Roth’s masterpiece The Human Stain (2000), in which cancellation culture was played out before the term was even invented. This novel is about a professor who falls victim to a hunt after he makes an ironic but racist statement. A formative reading experience for many people with an affinity for culture, including myself.

Adrian Daub seems to have a problem with this very impact of Roth’s book, and this is where the problems I have with Daub’s book begin. He wonders why this fictional text is used over and over again to read a sharp diagnosis of real American conditions.

Why not take the reality of life today, which shows that the careers of non-white, non-male, non-old, non-advantaged people in the US, as in our country, are still disproportionately prevented from those of WAR men? Daub has a point there. On the other hand, I am surprised that a literature professor of all people does not believe that a novel can be a useful mirror of reality.

Daub is too polemical about dismissing cancellation culture as pure panic. For him, the fight against cancellation culture is not “the spearhead of defensive liberalism”, but rather “part of the resistance that threatens liberal democracy in the first place”. In some ways this is true. Both Trump and Putin have repeatedly accused their enemies of practicing cancellation culture. Despite all the clever and pointed analysis, Adrian Daub ultimately evades the question of whether the culture of cancellation is a threatening reality or just a media ghost.

There are good reasons to be afraid. But it’s not the fear of losing focus. It is the fear, ignored by Adrian Daub, that there is terror behind Culture Culture, certainly not from overzealous leftists or queers, no, but time-tested terror from zealots, fundamentalists, authoritarians who are forcibly silencing freedom of speech around the world in China , Russia, Qatar or months ago in New York State, when the writer Salman Rushdie was seriously injured after a knife attack.

Earlier, Rushdie had repeatedly complained that the comfortably correct camp was now so dominant that his “Devilish Verses” would hardly find a publisher these days. That’s the real danger of abolishing culture, which is why I’m somewhat allergic when it comes across as frivolously innocent media scaremongering. (bzbasel.ch)