I want to talk to whoever's in charge
I posted my thoughts on cancel culture on twitter yesterday, and seemed to resonate with quite a few people.
I’m not going to write yet another think piece about what “cancel culture” is or how it works.
But I think it springs from a broader cultural shift that I haven’t seen discussed enough, and that’s what feels to me like a generational change in relationship with authority. Of course, many of the people participating in cancel mobs are not that young (and frankly should know better), but I think a lot of the extremely-online are emotionally if not physically young.
So when I talk about a changing relationship with authority, I mean that if there was a defining attribute of the “young people” up until the 1990s at least, it was of rebelling against parents: in ways large and small.
Even those who were not aggressively “stick it to the man” in their mindset wanted to at least get away from their parents as quickly as possible.
However, in generation helicopter-parent, not only is this not happening, but nor do kids want it to. Claire Potter observed this in her Tenured Radical blog some years ago, that parents hang around with their freshman kids when bringing them to college.
This means that being dropped off at college is now at least a two-day event, if not longer, where the moment between meeting your roommates and one of them saying happily, "Who wants to get high?" has been prolonged indefinitely. And it appears that the conservatives are right: masculinity has been eroded. Whereas we used to rely on those fathers with fabulous boundaries to snip the old umbilical, they too are organizing the tee shirt drawer and claiming that there seems to be something wrong with the fan belt that requires another night at Ye Olde College Inne.
This relationship to authority comes from having grown up at a time that parents, “the man” or “the state” has only ever given them things they think are good. They’ve not been spanked by their parents or threatened with the draft; the state rains down things they agree with (like gay marriage).
Even when they vehemently dislike particular politicians, the mindset seems to be to demand the state to step in more firmly to make things better (surveys show that support for “free speech” as a principle is startlingly low, or perhaps less startling to anyone who has seen what’s been happening on college campuses in the last few years). if you believe some speech should be controlled, someone has to do the controlling.
Freddie de Boer analysed this some time ago as “Planet of Cops”, where people want their social order to be enforced. But I think it’s not that they want to be cops - they want to be SNITCHES. While someone else does the actual enforcement. A tangential version of this is white women calling the cops on people of color, which I addressed a couple of years back. It comes from a comfortable relationship with authority, and a culture of expecting some external force to step in to resolve any conflicts.
Of course, the idea that more government is better is a particularly sheltered view, so I’m talking here of people of relatively affluent backgrounds, who attend selective universities: but of course this slice of society (from which I came too) has an outsized voice in all “generational” discourse, and always has.
I find the whole mindset utterly bizarre. I wanted my baby boomer parents to leave me alone when I was a teenager. I would have been MORTIFIED to have them call my professors while I was an undergrad (nor would it have occurred to them to do that either). Of course I emerged from the womb a libertarian, so I was even less inclined towards the government than my peers - but they wanted their parents off their back too.
In The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt talk about “safetyism” and its various forms, and of course this need for emotional “safety” requires someone to create and police the safe spaces. An authority force who can be appealed to. This is parents, teachers, college administrators - and yes, HR departments. These authorities are meant to protect from all harm, but also give the client (and yes, client is probably the best term) what they want.
I think often of this letter published by “Ask a Manager”. The author, a student doing a summer internship, had launched an intern rebellion over the dresscode, and got pinkslipped for it (an outcome that shocked her). She shows a lot of the characteristics I’ve seen of students in recent years. She’s clearly bright, polite - but has been raised to believe that if you ask nicely, you get what you want (and if you don’t, take your issue further up the chain - and there is always someone further up the chain).
Any “no” is simply a starting point for a negotiation. As the “Ask a Manager” correspondent concluded:
I feel my dismissal was unfair and would like to ask them to reconsider but I’m not sure the best way to go about it. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
She still thought that if she just asked the right way, they’d take her back!
The idea that a “petitition” is a resolution technique is one that has caught on particularly online (anyone can click “sign” on change.org) because it requires so little effort. And somehow the idea that support from a large enough number of unverifiable internet randos is proof of moral righteousness. See, everyone agrees with me.
This is of course the engine of the cancellation campaign. (If petitions still required standing outside the Stop & Shop with a clipboard and getting people’s full details - nobody would ever get cancelled. Can you imagine? “Excuse me? Would you sign this petition? We’re trying to get a guy who lives in another state fired. Yes, he’s really bad. He said something we don’t like on Facebook”).