It's Like Waiting For The Bullsh*t To Breach The Levees Of Reason
Empathy is a finite resource. Like food and patience and attention. We use it for the people we care about first, and only extend it to others if we have any left over. This used to work out fine.
After all, before the internet smushed us all together, we only really needed to be kind to people we knew in real life. We interacted, mostly face to face, within comparatively small communities. We knew people well enough to consider their “bad behaviour” with some context. And our response had consequences beyond getting blocked.
In my article, The Corrosive Cost Of Cancel Culture, I lamented how empathy seems in such short supply when we disagree lately. Especially online. And how the cruelty it inspires robs us of the opportunity to change people’s minds for the better. D wondered if something more proactive could be done.
D:
Isn't it also about cancelling with one's eyes on the virtue signalling trophy for their altar ego?
Like Jimmy Galligan, a black classmate of then 15- year old white cheerleader Mimi Groves, who used the n-word immediately after getting her driver's licence and her friend stupidly re-posted it.
(see site at end of response)
Jimmy held on to the video for some 2.5 years and then released it. Just in time for her to lose her full scholarship at U-Tennessee.
How brave and how noble.
His words? “I’m going to remind myself, you started something,” Galligan added. “You taught someone a lesson.”
Sure, there's plenty of blame to pass around but Jimmy Galligan, an erstwhile 'friend', feels entitled enough to punish a white friend for something she said when 15?
Have we learned nothing from the USSR's 'Young Pioneers', from Mao's 'Red Guard' or the 'Hitlerjugend', wherein children were encouraged to 'inform' on their parents?
As you allude, didn't Hawthorn try to warn us of this when he penned 'The Scarlet Letter'?
We are all on a continuum. People can learn. Become educated with compassion.
Even Mimi Groves can learn, who apologized for the post many times before she graduated from High School, but that wasn't good enough, was it?
And what does that say about U-Tennessee and those fanatically slathering around the digital guillotine?
This will divide us.
And the pious prefects preaching their puritanical path to redemption?
Witness what happened to San Francisco's School Board Recall, one reason being that "...the Board spent time deciding whether to rename a third of its schools last year instead of focusing on reopening them."
https://nypost.com/2020/12/29/white-teen-kicked-out-of-college-after-n-word-video-resurfaces/
Steve QJ:
Jimmy held on to the video for some 2.5 years and then released it. Just in time for her to lose her full scholarship at U-Tennessee.
Yep, I heard about this case. Absolutely sociopathic. And yes, an important piece of this, that was outside the scope of this article, is that corporations and schools need to stop pandering to this bullsh*t.
The lifeblood of cancel culture is the corporations who are willing to capitulate to the demands of a few crazies on Twitter.
D:
It would be so good if like minded people could somehow organize a ‘if you capitulate to the cancel culture cretins we won’t buy your product/donate to your university/ read your virtue signalling articles’ response.
Like #Push Back C.C. or #buynomore cancel culture…anything.
To do nothing is like wallowing in sickening bulls*t waiting for the levels to rise high enough to breach the levees of reason.
Steve QJ:
It would be so good if like minded people could somehow organize a ‘if you capitulate to the cancel culture cretins we won’t buy your product/donate to your university/ read your virtue signalling articles’ response.
Hmm, that's the problem though. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I'd personally love to see something like this.😅 But I'd love it precisely because, deep down, I don't mind seeing companies penalised for doing things I disagree with. That's the real problem.
We all have this urge, and we all have to stand on the principle that says "no, if I disagree with you I'll reason with you instead of trying to boycott you or otherwise penalise you."
We can all see how bad this is when we don't agree with the "cancellation", but we have to hold to it even when we agree.
D:
Well said.
The push back is necessary but using the weapons one abhors does indeed add fuel to the cancel bonfire, a conflagration which will burn us all…is burning us all.
Thanks for the pause.
Showing empathy towards people we agree with is easy. It’s when we disagree that it’s hard. And lest I come across as if I’m claiming some kind of moral superiority here, I really do share D’s desire to see companies punished for their cowardice.
I, too, see the bulls*t threatening to “breach the levees of reason.”
The only thing that gives me pause is the question of where the line is. If we created our consortium of “anti-cancellers”, at what point would we become the people intimidating companies into bending to our demands?
There’s no denying that strong-arm tactics work. Cancel culture is all the proof you could need of that. And they work especially well against companies that eagerly sacrifice principles for profit.
But those of us who hope to create a saner world, need to hold to our principles a little more tightly. Especially during those times when that empathy tank is running low…
I had not been in Vietnam long when the first morning after row of dead Viet Cong sappers were lined up in a row for local village officials to come identify. A grotesque sight of shattered bodies. Broken bones snapped by machinegun fire poking through skin and intestines in plain view. AND THEY WERE YOUNG. Child soldiers. Empathy came to me. "Their mothers are waiting for them." So was mine. It wasn't just a matter of them having come to kill me. It was empathy I could not have as a Marine. Most disturbing, over fifty years later empathy vanishes at times when inappropriate. My excuse for "fuck him/her/them anyway" when I lack the empathy that I think should accompany human goodness. I have no control over when it decides to visit or abandon me. Or so I like to think. Perhaps an excuse, perhaps an unhealed wound.
That was one of those life events burned into my memory, but how different is it from the empathy fatigue affecting us all in this time of tribal hatred. I see it in comments on the internet. An implicit "fuck them" that shouldn't be. The slow creep of empathy fatigue. I never hated my enemy, and we were truly trying to kill each other. Hate is an emotion like empathy. I turned that off too. At times. But I think I see it too often in matters as absurd as partisan politics. The internet can be a curse. It magnifies things beyond proportion and sometimes brings out the worst in us.
Sometimes it also manifests in a live and let live tolerance that is inappropriate or an inappropriate intolerance when emotion sets off our fight reflex. A mess of contradictions. Is the internet making all that worse? It is a tool, like a gun. It can be used for good or bad purpose. You are better at that than me (using the internet as a useful and constructive tool), and I commend you for it. Excuse my "French" in this comment, but those words belonged there because of their honesty.
Well, this is a tough one. On one hand, just as you say, this idea of a “counter-boycott” only contributes to the “cancelation” problem (only one “l” where I live) instead of countering it. We who oppose cancel culture should practice what we preach.
On the other hand, if the corporations are only feeling pressure from one direction, they will continue yielding to it. The idea is to create pushback in the other direction, to make them pay a price for that choice as well. Sometimes you have to fight back instead of turning the other cheek. The Ukrainians may deplore war, but they’re sure as hell going to fire back at the Russian guns. Without some kind of resistance, the “woke” cancel culture wins by default.
I honestly do not know what is the right answer here, but it’s not just an open-and-shut case either way.