Religion is a Mental Illness

Intolerance leads to McDonald’s of the mind

Tyrannical minorities force decisions like the closure of the Wellcome show and must be resisted

www.thetimes.co.uk|James Marriott

I was perturbed to learn that the Wellcome Collection is “racist, sexist and ableist” (its own words) as I’d been vaguely meaning to go at some point. Evidently, my plans to enliven the melancholy damp of an early December weekend by inspecting such artefacts as Napoleon’s toothbrush and Florence Nightingale’s moccasins concealed more sinister subconscious motives.

Anyway, as we have all now heard, the museum has closed its Medicine Man exhibition so I will not be able to potter around some of the minor curiosities of medical history — sorry, collude in the exclusion, marginalisation and exoticisation of indigenous peoples.

To anyone unfamiliar with the censorious jargon that is threatening to become the lingua franca of modern academia, the grounds on which Medicine Man was shut down must seem either incomprehensible or bleakly hilarious. The public was piously informed that the exhibition was “very much a product of its time”. That time being . . . 2007. Ah, 2007. A cruel and bitter age.

This is strange, isn’t it? A great many people will be prevented from seeing Medicine Man on the basis of views so esoteric and so far outside mainstream discourse that I’m willing to bet that many of the Wellcome Collection’s ordinary visitors have never even heard of them. How many of the families wandering around on the average Saturday afternoon could say what it means to “other” someone or explain what was wrong with prevailing morality in the year 2007

The exhibition has disappeared because, although a very large number of people would have quite liked it to stay, a very small number of people vehemently wanted it to go. We should get used to that equation. The case of the Wellcome is a small but characteristic tragedy of the modern age — the tyranny of the intolerant minority. We are used to the “tyranny of the majority” but in liberal societies a motivated minority with strong opinions can easily override the preferences of the majority of people, especially if those preferences are only mildly held.

Indeed, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out in his book Skin in the Game, there are many situations in which we rightly allow a strong minority preference to shape our behaviour. For instance, on a plane on which three people have nut allergies, a few hundred other passengers will refrain from eating Snickers bars during the flight.

Taleb suggests that some of the prevalence of fast-food chains such as Pizza Hut and McDonald’s may be attributed to the power of minority opinion. In any group deciding where to go for dinner there will be one or two people with strong objections — they won’t eat fish, for instance, or spicy food. The solution is bland compromise. Nobody hates pizza.

This may be merely unfortunate from a culinary perspective but when the same dynamic is at work in intellectual life, catastrophe looms. The academic Jonathan Haidt has described how his fear that one student’s complaint or infuriated tweet might ruin his career led him to the principle of teaching to “the most sensitive person in class”. Difficult, controversial ideas are out. Bland, universally palatable pap is in. Intellectually, everyone goes to McDonald’s. But shouldn’t a university be offering gourmet intellectual fare? The stinkiest cheeses, the weirdest fish?

Tolerant institutions are inherently vulnerable. The philosopher Karl Popper referred to the “paradox of tolerance” — a tolerant society must tolerate even those who wish to destroy tolerance itself. The blogger Scott Alexander describes the way the Quakers of 17th-century Pennsylvania “tolerated themselves out of existence”. By welcoming other sects, they faded into political irrelevance as more activist, intolerant faiths took over. Because humans like to join groups with powerful signifiers of identity (tattoos, flags, unusual beliefs), intolerant institutions are better at attracting followers than woolly, tolerant ones. The fading Anglican church may be another institution tolerating itself out of existence.

The intolerant are motivated and fanatical whereas the tolerant, by their very nature, tend to be uncertain, and cautious about their convictions. The belief that the Wellcome should close an exhibition because it is racist is vastly more potent than the belief that the exhibition should stay open because it would be nice if some people got to see Napoleon’s toothbrush.

Convinced of its moral superiority and certain that the urgent righteousness of the ends justifies the means, an intolerant minority is able to magnify its power with underhand tactics (public denunciation, hyperbolic accusations of racism on social media). The tolerant tend to view such methods as rather extreme.

Tolerance is hard, unrewarding work: repeatedly confronting objectionable views and deciding to put up with them on the grounds of an abstract principle is tedious. Intolerance, meanwhile, rejects thought and replaces it with jargon and slogans which have all the glamorous atmosphere of intellectual distinction while requiring none of the effort. It is an unfortunate truth that in every institution there are a great many people who do not particularly like thinking and who would much rather repeat a slogan than interrogate an idea, particularly if repeating that slogan means nobody will call them names on Twitter.

This is how intolerant minorities exert their power. It is how exhibitions disappear and curriculums narrow. It is how you end up condemned to live for ever in the McDonald’s of the mind. It is a blander, sadder and less nourishing place.

Most students are great. But when you're lecturing, it doesn't matter the averages, you have to teach to the most sensitive student. Because if you say anything or show a video that has one word that offends any student, you can be reported. So what do you do if you can't trust your class?

In an article published last year by Inside Higher Ed, seven humanities professors wrote that the trigger-warning movement was “already having a chilling effect on [their] teaching and pedagogy.” They reported their colleagues’ receiving “phone calls from deans and other administrators investigating student complaints that they have included ‘triggering’ material in their courses, with or without warnings.” A trigger warning, they wrote, “serves as a guarantee that students will not experience unexpected discomfort and implies that if they do, a contract has been broken.” When students come to expect trigger warnings for any material that makes them uncomfortable, the easiest way for faculty to stay out of trouble is to avoid material that might upset the most sensitive student in the class.

“One of the things that is a classic trope of the religious bigot, is while they’re denying people their rights, they claim that their rights are being denied. While they are persecuting people, they claim to be persecuted. While they are behaving colossally offensively, they claim to be the offended party. It’s upside down world.“

– Salman Rushdie

A culture of fear has taken over academia and the arts

www.spectator.co.uk|Nick Cohen

At the end of the second world war, George Orwell went to an event organised by PEN, a campaign dedicated to defending freedom of expression. He walked into a scene we encounter everywhere in 2022.

The meeting was meant to celebrate the tercentenary of John Milton’s Areopagitica, one of the earliest and still one of the best defences of freedom of thought in the English language.

Journalists, novelists and poets depend on that right. They should know that, if they lose it, they lose their soul. Milton’s cry from the 1640s should be their cry: ‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for.’

For many jobbing writers, alas, talk of souls and racing for immortal garlands is, well, a little too high-flown to move them. You might expect that the more down-to-earth need to put bread on the table would motivate them instead. Freedom of expression allows writers to sell their ideas in a marketplace. If one publisher does not approve of their views, they can shrug their shoulders and take their work to other publishers. Censorship creates backlists that take away their chance of paid work anywhere. Economic necessity should turn them into idealists.

But Orwell found that neither the speakers on the platform nor the audience would offer a wholehearted defence of liberty.

‘Out of this concourse of several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade, there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticise and oppose.’

The intellectuals of the 1940s were concerned about the British empire’s repression of the rights of conquered peoples. But they left the subject of free political speech in the UK alone. The left fanatics at the meeting believed that true freedom of speech could only exist under communism, when to use modern language, the privileges of the wealthy no longer ensured that their ideologies dominated the culture. They admired Stalin’s Soviet Union, even though it was cancelling writers in the most thorough manner imaginable by killing them.

Professional associations are amoral. I mean that as a compliment. Their officers defend members regardless of what they think of them. Officers at a writers’ organisation do not have to agree with the ideas of a novelist or think that a novelist is any good. They have a duty to defend freedom of expression and to combat rapacious publishers, just as trade unionists have a duty to stand up to the bosses on a worker’s behalf, regardless of whether they privately believe the worker is a shirker.

In moments of cultural revolution that commitment to a basic level of solidarity feels thin. Surely, there must be more to the job of leading a trade association or cultural organisation than defending the rights of the men and women you represent.

In these heady circumstances the job turns into a mission to fight racism, misogyny, transphobia, just as it was once a mission to defend communism and fight the bourgeoisie. That the intellectuals of the 1940s were overwhelmingly bourgeois no more matters than the fact that the men and women at the top of the arts are overwhelmingly white (and indeed bourgeois). Guilt drives them on, as does the fear that their advantages make them easy targets if they fail to display the required fervour.

The transition from professional organisations defending all members to only defending right-thinking ones is already underway, and I expect it to accelerate as the cultural revolution gains momentum.

Just before she resigned in 2021, I interviewed Kathleen Stock. I could hear the fear and the exhaustion in the philosophy professor’s voice. She was a gender-critical feminist, and her belief in the material reality of biological sex made her a target for vicious trolls. The abuse did not stay online. Her enemies protested on the Sussex University campus, near her office, saying her ideas endangered trans people. Posters on campus demanded her dismissal.

The police had advised Stock to install CCTV at her home. Security guards protected her. But far from defending her, or making a wider case about the need to uphold the academic freedom to argue and think, the University and College Union’s Sussex chapter said, ‘In light of recent events on campus and ensuing public response on social media, we extend our solidarity to all trans and non-binary members of our community who, now more than ever, should receive the unequivocal support of the university and its management.’

The union ‘has just effectively ended my career,’ Stock said, and resigned.

‘The right looks for converts, and the left looks for traitors,’ goes the old political wisdom. The Conservative government sensed a division on the left it could exploit. It duly awarded the radical, lesbian feminist an OBE. But no other philosophy faculty employed her. She was too dangerous to touch. As far as her career as an academic philosopher was concerned, Stock was on a blacklist.

In an echo of the PEN meeting from the 1940s, the Society of Authors recently voted down an attempt to criticise its chair. She was accused of not defending JK Rowling after her support for gender critical feminism earned her thousands of death and rape threats on Twitter. Nor had she stood up for Kate Clanchy, who was reviled for tiny linguistic faults in her book Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me (which won the Orwell Prize, incidentally). Her former students did not believe for a moment that she was racist. Why would Clanchy teach the children of asylum seekers if she were? Her critics called her a ‘colonialist’ for describing the ‘almond eyes’ of one pupil. Shukria Rezaei, the pupil in question, wrote in the Times that she did indeed have almond-shaped eyers and ‘Kate helped me find scholarships and helped me with my university applications. I owe all of it to Kate, and I am sure she has done the same for many of her students. I feel very privileged to have met her.’

No matter. Clanchy’s publishers dropped her and blacklisted her too.

The state is not censoring. The climate of opinion in the arts and academia is imposing a censorship of its own, and it is no less effective for that.

The position of our jobbing hack in the arts or academia no longer seems perverse. Ideally, she ought to defend free expression. But she can look around and see what happens to those who do. If she speaks up, she suspects that charges of guilt by association will endanger her chances of putting bread on the table. Milton and Orwell have become treacherous guides in the culture wars of the 2020s.

Last week James Marriott of the Times warned how a ‘motivated minority with strong opinions can easily override the preferences of the majority of people, especially if those preferences are only mildly held’. He did not realise that all ideas for change begin among small groups of people. John Milton was fighting the Presbyterians in Parliament, who wanted to reintroduce censorship after it collapsed during the English civil war. They were convinced they had the right to impose their views because they were the elect, God’s chosen. The Leninist-influenced leftists George Orwell fought saw themselves as an elect too, the vanguard of the working class who needed dictatorial power to bring a better world.

They were authoritarians. But democratic reformers seeking change by creating a new consensus also begin as minorities, who believe they know better than everyone else.

Maybe we will look back on the Terf wars of the early 2020s and conclude that gender-critical feminism was just bigotry. Or we may look back and see one of the great medical scandals of our lifetime. No one knows. Equally, it may be that the hounding of writers for minor linguistic slips heralds a better world where new, diverse voices finally receive the cultural prominence they deserve.

But here the concessions must stop. No one knowing how the trans debate will end is the best reason imaginable for allowing it to rage freely. And what is the point of having new voices if they are not allowed to say what they think?

In any case, institutions are not censoring because they are true believers but because they are frightened. But when idealism fails to inspire your supporters, fear works just as well. Outsiders will fail to understand the convulsions in progressive institutions if they fail to notice the atmosphere of barely suppressed panic. Kathleen Stock’s colleagues in the Sussex philosophy department did not dare come to her defence. True Picador’s publishing director, Philip Gwyn Jones, told the Daily Telegraph he regretted not being braver in his defence of Clanchy. His words triggered such an internal backlash at the publisher that he was forced to apologise. Like a character from The Crucible, he promised that in future he would ‘use my privileged position as a white middle-class gatekeeper with more awareness.’

A little fear goes a long way. And cultural fear is dangerously stultifying. Artists and academics cannot challenge a consensus if they fear they will lose their incomes.

George Orwell left the PEN meeting worrying about the intellectual consequences. ‘At present we know only that the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity,’ he wrote.  You need only inspect the cages of today’s cultural zoo to know he was right.

The new Inquisition must never win

There is more at stake in the case of Batley Grammar than the fate of one teacher

unherd.com|Andrew Doyle

Picture the scene: an idyllic summer landscape populated by those much-loved icons of goodwill, the Care Bears. These instantly recognisable figures, fluffy and colourful and surrounded by butterflies and tiny floating hearts, are indulging in a rare bout of mischief.

One is smashing up a laptop with a hobnailed club. One is dangling on a swing between two freshly hanged corpses. Another is idly reclining on a bed of skulls, while a pair are greeting each other by shaking the hands of two amputated arms. Nearby, one of their friends is having sex with a decapitated head. All are grinning in that cute little Care Bear way.

The Care Bears Movie was one of the first films I ever saw at the cinema, so you can imagine how traumatic it is for me to contemplate my childhood heroes engaged in such wanton depravity. Still, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo isn’t known for going easy on its targets, and if I’m offended by their Care Bears cartoon I can always choose not to subscribe.

This particular image appeared in an issue last September, and was satirising the practitioners of what has become known as “cancel culture”. The censors of our time, the artist reminded us, are acting au nom du “bien”. People are harassed and threatened, livelihoods and reputations obliterated, and all by those who believe themselves to be allied with the angels. Their language is that of “inclusivity” and “compassion”, even though their ruthlessness and intolerance betray the insincerity of their stated goals — or, at the very least, the way in which self-righteousness can blind people to the evil they commit in the name of a noble cause.

The furore at Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire is the most recent example of how the lexicon of “social justice” has been weaponised in the name of progress. A teacher who had shown a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed — either from Charlie Hebdo or the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten (reports differ) — has been suspended for causing offence, and has now gone into hiding. Protesters outside the school have stated that they will not disperse until he is sacked.

Given that blasphemy laws no longer exist in the UK, these protestors have largely couched their complaints in terms of “safety and wellbeing”. On Friday, a man arrogantly claiming to speak on behalf of “the Muslim community” read out a statement in which the school authorities were accused of failing in their “duty of safeguarding”, and the teacher himself was charged with “threatening and provocative” behaviour. The Muslim Council of Britain has deployed similar tactics, suggesting that the teacher “created a hostile atmosphere”.

As much as I prefer to take people at their word, it seems unlikely to me that the protestors or the MCB seriously believe that the children’s safety has been compromised by a Religious Studies lesson about free speech. Certainly the pupils don’t appear to agree with those who are speaking on their behalf, which is why some of them have created an online petition to have their teacher reinstated.

What’s striking, though, is that despite all their talk of “safeguarding”, the protestors seem to be oblivious to a far more dangerous trend: that as a result of the various Islamist terrorist attacks in France in recent years — from the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices in January 2015 to the beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty last October — the right to criticise and ridicule religion has been increasingly under threat.

It isn’t simply the prospect of violent retaliation; it is the climate of intimidation that is fomented by the kind of protests we have seen in recent days. Cancel culture is sustained predominately by self-censorship, by those who see the consequences to others when they step out of line. After the events at Batley Grammar, how many teachers are likely to include the Charlie Hebdo cartoons in their lessons now?

Yet there has never been a more pressing time to engage with these issues in the classroom. If I were a teacher of Religious Studies, I would find it difficult to justify ignoring the question of the perceived conflict between religious faith and free speech, or not to discuss the murders of Samuel Paty and the satirists of Charlie Hebdo. While there is nothing wrong with acknowledging the potential offence that depictions of the Prophet Mohammed might cause, it is not a sufficient reason to avoid the topic altogether. I am sure that many pupils are disturbed by the anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda cartoons that are routinely included in history textbooks, but they serve an important function in the learning process. We know very little about the context in which the images of Mohammed were shown at Batley Grammar, but it is implausible that the teacher’s motives were anything other than educational.

Still, the protest itself is not all that surprising. As someone who attended a convent school as a child, I am all too aware that religious conservatives are often displeased at the contents of school curricula. When I became a teacher, there were often complaints from parents who disapproved of certain books or plays, either on grounds of religious belief or sheer prudishness. Angela Carter’s novel Wise Children was a particular bugbear for some parents, although at no point was the possibility of substituting texts or withdrawing pupils from class ever entertained. They had a right to be offended, but their offence was their own problem. I even taught briefly at a school run by an evangelical Christian who attempted to prohibit the teaching of novels that featured gay characters. It’s the reason I resigned from my post.

Teachers cannot be in the business of tailoring their pedagogic practices in order to appease the most intolerant elements of society. Nor should we be indulging those who feel that their particular worldview should be imposed on society at large. That is why there is more at stake in the case of Batley Grammar than the fate of this one teacher. With the immense publicity this event has generated, the outcome — whatever it is — will no doubt set an important precedent. If the school continues to capitulate to the demands of protesters, it will have a chilling effect on teachers in other schools who might wish to explore tendentious subjects.

But in the coming days, that won’t prevent the usual politicians, commentators and activists from emerging from their dens in Care-a-Lot, thirsting for the blood they can smell in the air. They will be saying things like “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences”, and other mantras that act as surrogates for thought. They will assert that the teacher is “Islamophobic” and “hateful”, because they are invariably convinced of their own telepathic capabilities. They will accuse the teacher of “bullying” as they sidle up to theocrats calling for his ruination.

Already the protestors have demanded that he face criminal prosecution for “stirring up hatred”, a favoured formulation of today’s “progressives”. Cancel culture is the Inquisition of the digital age; it is how blasphemers are subdued, whether religious or secular. We mustn’t let the Care Bears win.

They will never be convinced that cancel culture exists

Let's not waste our breath

sarahhaider.substack.com|Sarah Haider

In some parts of the landscape, it seems we are still debating this question.

A few days ago, journalist Adam Davidson, asked on Twitter:

“Can one of you believers in cancel culture just write one piece that gives evidence and doesn't just speak to a feeling you have? Maybe some data that helps your readers know the size and scale of this problem? Also, some examples of people actually fired?”

It seems absurd to me that anyone could still deny the existence of the phenomenon - in fact, so absurd that I literally don’t believe it.

However, others are not as cynical as me, and supplied Mr. Davidson with countless stories - occasionally their own. One man said he was suspended from the British Labour Party for saying “only women experience menopause”. Multiple women claimed similar losses, firings and suspensions over gender issues.

Others shared the dataset by FIRE cataloging 426 cases in the recent past of scholars targeted for ideological reasons. They noted that the scholars were ten times more likely to be targeted by those on the left. Another user shared a catalog of events that bubbled up in public discourse - nearly 300 incidents.

Most significantly, some pointed out that for every case that makes the news, there are likely scores more that don’t. Most of us cannot afford to make a stink about a traumatic incident, we cope and try to move on as best we can. The incidents that do rise to public consciousness do so usually because the person targetted is already in the public eye - and privileged enough to have a stage.

I was unlucky enough to once debate Billy Bragg on BBC about this issue, and I learned very quickly that my carefully prepared arguments were less than worthless. No amount of reasoning, anecdotes, or even data was going to convince him. I began to see what I see clearly now: that they aren’t denying the existence of cancel culture because they don’t see it - they are denying it because they still want to keep this weapon and don’t want to feel like bad people for using it. It is easier to just pretend a harm isn’t happening than to try and justify it (but of course, when cornered by reality, they will try that too).

The arguments usually progress down the steps of clown-world politics.

First, they will deny. Then, they will minimize (either the relevance or impact or both). Finally, they will outright justify.

Just yesterday, Greg Lukianoff and Komi German of FIRE wrote a piece in the Daily Beast with evidence of the existence of this culture. “And despite the denialism surrounding its very existence, we will demonstrate through empirical data and polling that cancel culture is not only a real problem, it is one that continues to expand in scope and size.”

A worthy pursuit by two earnest and thoughtful people. Too bad it won’t work.

* * *

At this point, it is profoundly naive to imagine that evidence will result in anything but a shift in goalposts. Not because they are fundamentalists on the issue - but because they are anything but.

I have directly engaged with literal Islamic fundamentalists in my work for years. The fundamentalists might be unhinged, moralistic zealots - but they are fairly straightforward debaters. And that is because they are grounded in principle - they actually believe what they say. And over the years, I have successfully changed the minds of fervently religious people through debate. My most frustrating encounters were instead with very liberal believers.

These were the Western-born-and-raised individuals who grew up with a variant of the faith most believers would consider utter heresy. And yet, despite their liberal upbringings and carefree enjoyment of the freedoms of the secular West, they would sputter indignantly when asked to even acknowledge the religious abuse and persecution faced by those who did not have such privileges. At first I thought the problem was simple ignorance - they had difficulty accepting what they themselves had not experienced. But the mountains of data, polls, historical and judicial analysis I presented made no difference either - to them Islam would always be a good and tolerant religion, and Muslims beleaguered, but model, minorities.

The reason was simple: as members of a religious group which was often considered marginalized, they could benefit from victim status among the general population. Meanwhile, as beneficiaries of a uniquely liberal upbringing within Islam, they were spared from the worst elements of the practice and community. They had both the freedoms of the West, and freedom from the worst of Islam - while appropriating and minimizing the suffering of others. They could have their cake and eat it too.

I learned a valuable lesson in dealing with these types. When someone sincerely holds a position, they will debate in earnest. When someone holds a position because it is in their favor to hold it, they will not. You must respond to the self-serving man by taking away the benefit he derives from an act - by turning the incentives around. Then, the same selfishness that keeps him in will lead him out.

The “what cancel culture?” guys are not like the fundamentalists - they are not sincere doctrinaires, but the beneficiaries of a brutally unjust system. The merits of the position they hold are irrelevant.

I’ll go further. They know that cancel culture exists. They like it, and want to keep using it. The only way to get them to stop is to turn that weapon against them.

* * *

I’m sure I’ve lost at least half my readers there, who probably didn’t expect such a militant position from me.

But frankly, I’m sick of this. I’m sick of seeing good people destroyed by this madness, and of watching others cower in fear because of it.

It has been years and years of life-ruining mobbings wreaking havoc on our discourse. The result is a suffocating atmosphere of self-censorship - which allows the most extreme to rule the day. Empowered in their role as the only actors who can openly advocate for their values, our culture appears to leap to their bidding. Meanwhile, the resentment of the disempowered grows. In the reprieve provided by the anonymity of the ballot box, they reveal their disgust at the ruling class and a rejection of their ideology. But the ruling class is incentivized to interpret this rejection in only one way: as a sign of hate and bigotry.

The denial of cancel culture is an attempt to maintain the semblance of victimhood, while behaving as a bully. This pretense of disempowerment is vital to their claims of moral authority - as I’ve noted before: wokeism (the religion of the elite) is a Will to Power, an anti-ideology. Their language and demands shift with the wind - what is woke one day will be contemptible bigotry the next, the only constant being the stupefying rate of change. The only thing that can arguably be called a “principle” is their approach to power. In their faith, power doesn’t belong to the people - it belongs to the powerless. And as it happens, the only legitimate arbiter of who is or isn’t powerless is the elite, woke class. As the self-defined electors and self-declared champions of the marginalized, they demand and then preside over the transfer of power, guiding it into place in a gesture we are assured is self-denying and altruistic.

But if it is the case that indeed the powerless are not so powerless, that they can strip “The Privileged” of their livelihoods for mere speech - then the moral justification underlying their ideology is exposed as plainly false.

Denial of cancel culture is not a matter of ignorance - it is a matter of political expediency.

* * *

Would you be incentivized to hold that fire was a bad thing if it had never burned you or anyone you knew - but disfigured those you happened to hate? What if you had the power to start these fires - but your enemies had comparatively little?

Maybe you enjoy the attacks or can justify them as worthwhile in service of some greater good, so you fan the flames. But you also don’t want to seem like the kind of person who would do such a horrible thing. So you pretend there is no harm done. And in the rare instances a blackened enemy corpse lands squarely in front of you and you can no longer deny its existence, it is too easy to simply shrug and say “well, what did she expect? She was playing with fire”.

The thing about empathy is that it is against our nature to apply it universally. It is a provincial emotion - one that grants grace to our friends and delivers fury to our enemies. The more humanistic emotion - compassion - is a difficult one to hold, and does not relay nearly the same kind of emotional satisfaction. So long as cancel culture strikes so unevenly, it will never go away. So long as the harms fall far more heavily on one side, it is in the interest of the other to continue weaponizing it.

The only way Good White Men like Mr. Davidson will recognize the harms of cancel culture is when it is them and their friends and loved ones, who suffer.

“But Sarah… Does this mean you are asking for more cancellations?”

This is indeed one of the conclusions that one can draw. But no, I don’t believe we must to stoop to cruelty to end it.

More importantly, I do not trust anyone who claims to be able to know when to put aside principle without losing their sense of right and wrong altogether. I cannot, now or ever, try to destroy an innocent person’s livelihood, nor will I advocate for others to do the same. This may be the doomed logic of the pacifist - and perhaps proof that I’m not cut out for cultural warrior status.

Nevertheless, a strategy that relies on the nobility of its enemy is not a strategy at all - it is a prayer.

And while it is dishonorable to cancel innocent bystanders of any political affiliation for any reason - what we can do is treat hypocrites with the same compassion and kindness they would mete out on others who find themselves on the wrong side of the mob.

When a canceller gets canceled, it is fairly common to see anti-woke liberals defend them - as if on a mission to prove their own magnanimity and integrity. But this is a misguided tact, and in practice more self-serving than morally justified.

There must be a cost to injustice - otherwise there is no hope of change.

Meanwhile, those of us who oppose the changes demanded by the woke must not waste our efforts on lost causes - like convincing disingenuous actors of the existence of the damage. Instead, our focus should be aimed at more fruitful pursuits, like understanding the roots of the decay, investigating why we are shifting into a culture of honor vs. a culture of dignity, why the administrative state and the environment of institutions are amenable to the demands of the woke, how changes brought upon by technology shift incentives, and most importantly what interventions can meaningfully address the problem.

• FIRE: The Targeting of Scholars for Ideological Reasons from 2015 to Present
• Twitter thread of over 400 cancelations

There’s something I can respect about a fundamentalist or an extremist. They’re all-in. They know what they believe, they know why they believe it, and they’ll tell you to your face. They’re honest about the fact that I, as a non-believer, deserve to burn in hell. I can actually work with this, because I know where I stand.

Modern moderate believers are frustrating because they’re trying to straddle the divide between their primitive superstitious beliefs and a modern, secular, diverse society. They’ll vacillate, equivocate, try to make it my fault their religion says I should burn in hell, and so on.

“If the Bible condones slavery, then I condone slavery. Because the Bible’s always right about every subject...”

-- Pastor Steven Anderson

Freud relates the story of a man who was accused by his neighbour of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition and the three arguments he offers.

    1. That he had returned the kettle undamaged     2. That it was already damaged when he borrowed it     3. That he had never borrowed it in the first place