Cancel culture isn't new, but it does feel different

I lurk on a lot of writers on Twitter, usually to my own great sadness. Writing-community-Twitter isn't any less stupid than the rest of Twitter, and it's maybe even sadder to see certain social pathologies you'd expect of dumber people being repeated by those I'd hope would know better. There are exceptions. I'm happy to say Danielle Evans, who has written two of my top five favorite short stories I've looked at on this blog, has never written a dumb tweet. But a lot of people whose writing I admire or who are icons post ignorant stuff all the time. 

The subject of cancel culture comes up a lot on Twitter. The consensus of the writing community is that it's neither new nor a violation of anyone's rights. It's just, as a friend of mine put it the other day, "voting with your wallet with better alliteration." And in a sense, she's right. There have been books banned and records burned and tea dumped for a very long time. 

Something does feel different, though, about some cycles of cancellation that go on, and I think it's related to a more fundamental change in our culture. We have less tolerance now, I believe, for what my law school (that I attended for three weeks before dropping out) referred to as "things reasonable people might disagree on." 

There are a lot of terms in law where the definition seems a bit circular, but with no word is this more prevalent than "reasonable." Essentially, the definition of "reasonable" in law comes down to "thoughts or actions that reasonable people might hold or do." Well, how do you know if someone is reasonable, then? Because other reasonable people hold them to be so. It's one of the most frustratingly tautological merry-go-rounds I've ever experienced. 

The difficulty of defining the word doesn't mean we don't have some practical sense of what we mean by it, though. A belief is reasonable if one can explain why one believes it with inferences from facts. I take a pretty broad interpretation of reasonableness, at least for issues that concern shared life with others in a democracy. Beliefs I'd call "reasonable" include a lot of beliefs I think are pretty obviously false, but for which one can at least construct some kind of string of logic. For example, a Christian who thinks Christ literally rose from the dead, and who uses some form of apologetics to defend that belief. A more fundamentalist Christian who thinks the universe is 7,000 years old strains reasonableness a good deal further, but even then, I'm not sure I'm willing to say the person who believes such a thing could never be reasonable. There are probably Young Earthers out there who could score higher than I have on cognitive tests. I'm sure there are Young Earthers who make good doctors or engineers or mechanics, things that take a good deal of logical deduction. 

What I'm getting at is that there is a difference between an unreasonable belief and a belief I happen to think is wrong, even if I think it's really obvious it's wrong. In a civil society, we probably need to maintain a fairly broad view of what is reasonable to believe. 

Alas, I think we're headed in the opposite direction. People are tired of arguing for their views and having others reject them, so we're now much less tolerant of even countenancing the existence of those who think differently from us. Their very existence is an affront to us: We've given our best argument, and still they aren't convinced! Clearly, something is wrong with them!  

The latest "cancel Netflix" flare-up is a good example. Some people thought the movie sexualized young girls, while some critics loved it. Clearly, if people who make a living evaluating the quality of movies, people who have earned financial support from the community for their ability to evaluate those movies, think something had merit, then it is at least a reasonable thing to think it has merit. That doesn't mean they're right, only that they are not insane to think so. For someone who disagrees, the proper action is to raise your own argument that the movie sexualizes girls, not to demand that others take action. Calls to action should be reserved for clear wrongs, when something is going on that defies reason. A movie that reasonable people disagree about is not a place for such a call to action. 

A lot of people were especially upset about this ad for the movie. I can understand that, although there are girls this age sexualizing themselves much more flagrantly on Instagram. 

I suppose one could say that by such a standard, nobody would ever act on anything. One problem in the Internet age is that every belief, no matter how cockamamie, has its defenders. You can find YouTube channels full of people arguing for a flat Earth. Does that mean those people are reasonable, since they are at least arguing from logic, albeit badly, for their position? Should we not work to enact environmental legislation because some people out there produce "evidence" for why climate change is a hoax? 

That's essentially just saying, though, that defining reasonableness is hard. The existence of an argument doesn't guarantee reasonableness. But just because something is hard to identify doesn't mean it doesn't exist. That's why serious analysis of art is so useful, because it's all about terms--beauty, insight, excellence, hell, even whether a movie or book is "good"--that are difficult to define but that we understand in some way. Analysis of art teaches us how to think about these kinds of concepts, but in a sandbox environment where nobody gets hurt. We can then use what we learn from analyzing art to deal with real-world problems. 

The way to deal with the difficulty of establishing reasonableness is to patiently keep explaining one's view. That's what the best arguers do. A sign of someone who really knows something is that they are confident enough in what they believe that the existence of doubters does not trouble them. They don't need to call to get rid of doubters. 

All of American society seems to me to be acting a lot like the church youth group I was in as a teenager. We see those who think differently from us primarily as opportunities to evangelize, but once they reject our evangelism, our attitude is that we shouldn't cast our pearls before swine, that we should come out and be separate from them. What we have, then, is a nation intellectually balkanized into camps that not only don't talk to each other, that just don't like each other. 

The stupidest comment I've seen on writing Twitter lately was this: "Do Republicans even write poetry?" As if a moderate Republican who generally thinks market-based solutions are preferable to government-directed ones is incapable of being dumbstruck by the sublime. If it's true that conservatives don't appear much in the poetry world now, that says more to me about problems with the poetry world than it does about Republicans. 

If we think those who disagree with us are so fundamentally broken they can't even understand and love poetry, how can we ever respect one another enough to run something as complicated as a democracy?