Dave Chapelle, Free Speech, and Cancel Culture:
The Wonderful New World of Disguised Discrimination
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Let's just start with the truth as it will make this entire newsletter easier: speech has never been free. Nor will it ever be free. I'm not referring to consequential costs, although these certainly exist and will be touched on. I'm speaking, first and foremost, about costs of transmission. If you are going to be communicating to an audience beyond immediate family and close friends, you are going to be needing a platform.
Platforms, however, come with gatekeepers; they are also expensive to use and access. Traditionally, platforms were places of public gatherings under the control of a political authority. As we've advanced, we reframed the rules of this game such that commercial enterprises took over the transmission of speech while political authorities were charged with setting boundaries and enforcing consequences for speech. When people talk about freedom of speech, they usually mean the latter - freedom from political influence - even though commercial organizations have prejudices of their own, and political gatekeeping is usually quite necessary
Even if speech could be fully free, it doesn't often deserve those liberties. If your idea of a good afternoon is reading written legislation, in which case I am afraid of your idea of a bad afternoon, you will have come across these restrictions: libel, slander, perjury, hate speech, sedition, etc. Of course, setting restrictions like these come with the justified question of who is setting them and why. Trade-offs of this nature embody the primary problem of legislating or controlling behaviour: Leave things alone and they spiral out of control, but subject them to rules and you inevitably start playing favourites. Regardless of these problems, we usually recognise these are useful constraints and speech was not and could not be fully free.
It is at this scene that the Internet makes its glorious introduction and rescues the damsel of free speech from the distress of constraints in what would surely be the most successful romance of our times. We're talking Twilight with an actual storyline. What the internet does to speech is exponentially lower its costs of transmission. It is a direct, almost costless highway between your thoughts and everyone else's eyeballs. Cancel Culture is not the bastardization of free speech as many routinely claim. It is the result of giving a megaphone to everyone's inner thoughts. It is free speech becoming, you know, virtually free.
DAVE CHAPELLE AND WHAT CANCEL CULTURE IS AND ISN'T
Dave Chapelle released The Closer a few weeks ago. Compared to much of his earlier work, it was actually gentler material. But it was material with an agenda. Some of Chapelle's jokes were that difficult combination of hurtful and funny. If you've had any experience with human beings, you know hurtful and funny is the hardest pill to swallow. It makes Aspirin taste like jelly beans. Within days, there was serious backlash. The LGBT community was understandably incensed about the material. And then, as usual, Cancel Culture got criticised. In the words of Ricky Gervais:
If it's choosing not to watch a comedian because you don't like them, that's everyone’s right. But when people are trying to get someone fired because they don't like their opinion about something that's nothing to do with their job, then that's what I call Cancel Culture, and that's not cool.
Ricky Gervais is not unique in this point of view. Earlier this year, British Journalist Piers Morgan had this to say,
If our rights to free speech are denied, then democracy as we know it will die. It’s time to cancel the Cancel Culture, before it kills our culture.
None of these criticisms is new. Cancel Culture itself has been cancelled so many times that you wonder what to do with the irony - is all the cancelling a proof of the movement or is it a negation of what it represents.
A lot of the criticisms of Cancel Culture usually sound like Piers Morgan's statement. They argue that it has curtailed free speech by preventing honest and open conversation. Yet this is very funny rhetoric. If you have the right to dismiss a group or a person, they have the right to verbally respond negatively. And if they have the right to express criticism of your opinions, you have to right to criticise those criticisms. Free speech is not free speech exclusive to a certain person or group or party. That's ego preservation. Everyone wants that sometimes. But personal desires do not determine what collective concepts get to mean.
The underlying problem is the popular belief that if we guaranteed complete freedom of speech, the truth will prevail. Yet, Rule 1 of history is the truth will only survive in its most entertaining but still believable version. The only tool required in getting the truth to shed some of its accuracy is time. Myths occur under these conditions: a man drawing a convincing picture in which he pulls the sky out of the ground will become a man pulling the sky out of the ground given the assistance of a few thousand years. In fact, we rarely require such drastic jumps. If you've ever been in a clique or a gathering, you have first-hand experience of this problem. You can track the rumours as they change shape into more and more damaging versions.
Rule 2 is lies don't need such assistance to spread. Hence, in the battle between truth and falsehood, falsehood is armed with an armoured tank and truth is armed with a pair of scissors.
For this reason, nearly all cancellings grow nasty: things quickly slide from a critique of circumstance to a critique of character. X did something ( once said in a bad joke that black people look way better in sports uniforms than in business attire) becomes X is someone ( a good for nothing supremacist, absolutely ignorant, totally shameless, unschooled, untaught, unenlightened racist). Sometimes, these leaps are justified. Other times, it's the Fundamental Attribution Error at work. The fundamental attribution error is our basic human tendency to interpret someone's action as being a sign of his or her moral nature while with ourselves, we interpret similar actions as due to external circumstances.
By way of example, Gloria cheated because she's dumb and lazy, but I cheated because things have been so hard lately, and the professor brought out untaught material. Neither of these interpretations may be false. But they are certainly different ways of explaining the same action. Cancel Culture takes the fundamental attribution error and gives it perpetual batteries. It takes a mistake and it frames it as an identity. There's an eloquent analysis of this dangerous drift by Natalie Wynn in her insightful video essay on Cancel Culture.
Cancel Me once, Shame on Me. Cancel Me Twice, uhhh, Never Gonna Happen.
Everyone on the battlefield of free speech knows the best way to win is to be as well defended as possible, that is, to not say or do anything that may lead to you being cancelled. A great piece of offense, say some witty comeback against an offensive celebrity retweeted twenty-two thousand times, may win you good points with the Morality Police and some internet fame. But a bad defense can literally end your life. This is one of those instances where literally means literally.
On February 15, 2020, Caroline Flack committed suicide after she was cancelled. She's not an isolated example. Now, I have to be careful with extrapolations here. People who kill themselves after being cancelled usually have deep personal issues, unrelated with the cancelling, that may make them less resistant to the idea of suicide. Still, the cancelling certainly doesn't help. And it's not an enjoyable experience, irrespective of the eventual outcome, to be the target of collective fury.
Unfortunately, nearly all people have prejudices, and almost all prejudices have a nasty habit of revealing themselves in public. What then shall be done? Step forth, therefore, with all gallantness, ye charming knight by the name of disguised discrimination.
Disguised discrimination was not a thing in past centuries. Courageous discrimination held sway in unchallenged power. You see, courageous discrimination isn't really courageous. It's just discrimination taking place in the safety of a group who share the same prejudices. People said nasty and terrible things in the general public without trying to sugar-coat them because there weren't any significant consequences. Privilege did not need to pay tax in the kingdom of public opinion. Indeed, not many other people needed to either.
The zeitgeist has changed. Courageous and blatant discrimination has mutated into disguised discrimination in which prejudice clothes itself in the language of objectivity and what is discussed is not the object of the prejudice but a larger sociopolitical context that necessarily implicates them.
For instance, consider Excerpt 101 from Lessons in Disguised Discrimination:
You do not say you dislike black people; you hammer instead on their over-representation among convicts and criminals.
You do not say you disdain feminism. Rather, you discuss possible connections between a moral decline and the massive intake of women into professional work.
You conveniently ignore that moral decline depends on the definitions used or that black over-representation in criminal activity is partly due to your and others’ dislike.
You press repeat for other prejudices that have your full support.
To be clear, these objections aren't untrue. Black people constitute a significant proportion of convicts. If you define things to suit your moral tastes, will that be Kant or Mill for sugar, there will inevitably be correlations between your interpretation of moral decline and the steady eradication of the nuclear family arrangement. The real point is the truth of these objections are precisely why they are so useful for disguised discrimination. The best clothes for prejudice is some version of the truth.
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN
I don't blame people sentenced in the unrelenting court of Cancel Culture simply because owning up to your mistakes is naturally difficult. Owning up to them in the face of derision and pressure from a multitude of strangers multiplies this difficulty. Tacitus in his Agricola tells us the man hates whom he has hurt. Well, he also hates those who have hurt him. Especially when hurting him was the point of the hurting.
But I do not blame those doing the sentencing either. The truth is people and institutions hardly change until they have something significant to lose. Cancelling, with all the wonderful things it can do to your reputation, provides those incentives. It also supplies the possibility of a more equal discourse between the historically privileged and the historically maligned.
As I alluded to earlier, the mother of cancel culture and its attendant problems is the unjustified assumption that free speech is an undiluted benefit. It is not. Nothing is ever fully good in and of itself because nothing is ever just itself. Every act, ideal, concept, practice, or statement means a sacrifice of something else, material or immaterial, now or eventually. An excess of speech means, among other things, a levy on attention. An excess of access means, among other things, a profusion of banality. In many ways, we have not dispelled discrimination so much as allowed it to transfigure itelf into a more acceptable means of navigating public opinion.
At the end of the day, sometimes, we need cancelling. Sometimes, we do not. Knowing when to dial things up and down is an incompletable exercise. And no one will ever solve these problems in their entirety. Speech needs freedom. It also needs censorship. Which side of the fence you sit on depends most likely on what you've just done.
HEY! OVER HERE
If you've read the About page, you will know that every Sunday, I will be reviewing works of fiction and non-fiction that were initially published before 2005. I also promised I would be leaving hints regarding the book to be reviewed on Sunday. The first five persons to guess the title correctly and text the answer to my email will be entitled to free access of this newsletter for an entire month. Since this newsletter is still fully free, and will be for a while, all rewards are currently intellectual bragging rights.
You can send the answers here to Tiwaonibonoje14@gmail.com
Wednesday’s Hint (Genre of Book):
Fiction, Romance, Coming of age.
TILL NEXT TIME, STAY COOL.