Can Sell, Won't Buy

Shrug?

I am not necessarily entirely clear on why Novak Djokovic got me thinking about cancel culture. My first reaction, when I heard that Djokovic had walked off the court without giving a post-match interview in protest at Jones’s comments, was “good for him”. Firstly because I think those post-match interviews are a giant wank, and secondly because I assumed this was the usual case of an Australian sporting commentator being a tiresome loudmouth to get attention, and that Jones probably had been insulting. I imagined it was one of those down-the-barrel rants that self-righteous pundits like to deliver on the subject of whoever they have most recently found too uncouth for words.

But then I found out that actually Jones had made what was very very obviously just a silly joke, and you’d have to have a jaw of finest, most delicate crystal to feel even mildly insulted, let alone demand an apology and make a public show of protesting against it. Novak Djokovic is reportedly a grown man, and his signal failure to put on his big boy pants on this occasion is extremely embarrassing for him, though I’m sure he’ll never feel it - embarrassment seems to be outside his experience.

And THEN I found out that it wasn’t just the Djoker being a big fat crybaby: the Serbian Council of Australia had waded in, denounced Jones, called for him to be sacked, and actually, for real, lodged a complaint with the Human Rights Commission.

I mean for God’s sake, get your freaking hand off it, SCOA. Come ON.

And when I saw an official body demanding serious concrete action to punish someone who’d said something they didn’t like, that’s when my mind turned to cancel culture.

(Oh my GOD, Ben, how can you POSSIBLY be talking about CANCEL CULTURE at a time like this? When the future of the world itself is in doubt due to the rise of fascism etc etc etc? Well, yeah, cancel culture isn’t the most important thing in the world right now, but frankly neither is whatever you’ve been banging on about this week - especially if that’s Elon’s salute. Today cancel culture is what I want to talk about: suck it up)

Because of course the howls of outrage from Djokovic and his Serbian posse are a perfect example of cancel culture, which is the term I’m going to use to describe this familiar phenomenon even though it’s an annoying term and I wish I didn’t have to. But I have to use some term, and I’d prefer it be easily comprehensible.

What cancel culture is is basically the demand that those we disapprove of be materially punished for their sins, in ways that have nothing to do with law enforcement or the justice system - combined with over-zealous drives that tend to either punish the innocent, or inflict punishments on the guilty that are wildly disproportionate to the offence. It could be summed pithily as “we must not rest until all the bad people are gone forever”. It is a phenomenon that tends to deny reality in this way: it seeks a level of society-wide moral hygiene that is literally impossible, and in so doing indulges the vengeful and violent impulses of its proponents, all of whom will deny that it even exists.

The reason that people won’t see the Serbian crusade against Tony Jones as cancel culture is because people think cancel culture is both something new, and something left-wing. Some are fond of saying things like, “How can you be worried about cancel culture when the right are banning books?” But of course, the right banning books IS cancel culture - cancel culture crosses political divides and is a creation of anyone who believes that censorship, public denunciation and destruction of careers is the correct response to anything they find objectionable.

People think it’s left-wing and new because it’s only recently that the term “cancel culture” has been applied to the phenomenon, and almost always in association with left-wing pushes to declare prominent people persona non grata for their offences against progressive ideals.

But it’s all the same thing.

Cancel culture is demanding speakers get kicked off literary festival panels, holding JK Rowling up as the Great Satan and demanding anyone who’s ever made an offensive joke grovel for forgiveness, sure. But it’s also throwing people in prison for insulting the king of Thailand. It’s putting a fatwa on Salman Rushdie. It’s The Life Of Brian being banned in Norway and Ireland and numerous counties across England, and Mary Whitehouse trying to scrub TV screens of filth. It’s Lenny Bruce being arrested, Lolita being banned. Let’s be blunt, cancel culture is executing Socrates for corrupting the youth.

Ten years ago two masked gunmen entered the offices of French magazine Charlie Hebdo and murdered twelve people because the magazine had published cartoons that the gunmen didn’t like. That was the extent of the murderers’ complaint: because the magazine’s cartoons offended them, they considered the righteous course to kill writers, journalists, artists, a maintenance worker and two police officers for their association with the magazine.

This horrendous atrocity was, obviously an act of utterly deranged evil. That some people have become so twisted by hatred and indoctrination that they will do terrible, terrible things for absurd reasons was no revelation. The revelation came in the response to the massacre by many others. Not by terrorists, or Islamic extremists, but by other writers and artists around the world, who - and this still takes my breath away - actually took the murderers’ side. Ah, yes, murder is terrible, they intoned with sweet reasonableness - but had not these gunmen been unacceptably provoked? Were not the cartoons that Charlie Hebdo published truly, foully offensive to millions? Did not these so-called journalists bring it all on themselves? What did they expect, anyway? After all, freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences, right?

That’s the mantra of the cancel culture movement: “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences”. “Cancel culture is really just consequences culture”. “People who complain about cancel culture are just upset that they can’t speak without consequences anymore”.

This is awfully convenient, of course. Who could deny that speech has consequences? If you call someone a cunt, you can hardly expect them not to respond - that’s consequences! If you make a racist joke, you can hardly expect people not to complain - that’s consequences! If you abuse someone on Twitter, you can hardly expect to keep your job - that’s consequences! If you hold unpleasant political views, you can hardly expect to be allowed to have any kind of career. If you support Israel you can hardly expect people not to vandalise your business. If you insult Muslims you can hardly expect not to get murdered at work. Consequences, consequences, consequences.

“Speech has consequences” can be easily stretched to apply to any outraged mob and its wishes to see someone brought down, humiliated, destroyed, rendered destitute or unemployable or literally dead. Because these are all consequences, aren’t they? And hey, if we ruin a person’s life because we were offended by what they said, you can’t actually complain on free speech grounds, because free speech, as we all know, only applies to being free from government censorship. We read it in an XKCD cartoon, it must be true. And the author of XKCD never got shot to death in his office, so he must never have offended anyone.

But why on earth would I be conflating all these utterly different cases? The Serbian Council of Australia whining about a joke is clearly not in the same galaxy as the murder of 12 innocent people.

Well, no, it’s not. They are vastly different cases. But they have one thing in common: the belief, deepseated in so many, that when someone upsets me in some way, they must be punished. That speech MUST have consequences, and those consequences should be as severe as we can possibly make them. That belief is a delusion, and I will not indulge it.

Cancel culture has the name “culture” in it because it’s not defined by specific actions or outcomes, it’s defined by that belief and the dissemination of it amongst the population as a self-evident truth. The proof that cancel culture exists is not in hitting a quota of people “actually cancelled”, it’s in the fact that the desire to cancel is rife, and the efforts to convince us all that cancellation is good and righteous constantly ongoing. When someone wants to deny the existence of cancel culture, they always point to someone like Rowling or Ricky Gervais, and their continued success, as evidence: this extremely offensive person hasn’t been punished for their actions, so how can cancel culture be real?

Well, they’re telling on themselves, because those people never say, “Celebrity X hasn’t been cancelled, and that’s a good thing.” It always takes the form of “Celebrity X hasn’t been cancelled even though they obviously should have been.” And that’s your proof right there: cancel culture isn’t the cancellations, it’s the hordes salivating in anticipation of their next target, and shaking their fist angrily every time they fail to nail one.

I’m not buying it, and I never will. Being offended is not a mortal injury, people you dislike having career success doesn’t hurt you, and the world will always have bad people who don’t deserve happiness and fulfilment but get it anyway. You can’t police immorality out of the world one cancellation at a time, and you shouldn’t try. Doing so will only make this world a nastier, more brutal place, and see plenty of people suffer savage punishments that they simply do not deserve. Of course, this means that maybe a few people who do deserve it will slip through and not suffer harsh justice for their violations. C’est la vie. Like the Djoker, you’ll just have to put on the big boy pants and deal with it.

And now, to find a better term than “Cancel culture”, because I’m sick to death of it.