I follow Alexander Beiner, Co-Founder of Rebel Wisdom, on Medium. I became quite interested in his July 17th article, Sleeping Woke: Cancel Culture and Simulated Religion. Destructive attacks are a troubling tactic used in the culture wars.
Nothing demonstrates Wokeism’s religious tenets more than what has come to be known as cancel culture. This is a term used to refer to the tactic of trying to erase someone from public discourse — either through publicly shaming, de-platforming or demanding they be fired. Many infringements can lead to cancellation — whether it’s a tweet from a decade previously that’s considered racist or transphobic, or simply a ‘problematic’ essay like this one.
I read A Letter on Justice and Open Debate which will appear in the Letters section of the October issue of Harper's Magazine. I went through the list of 153 signatories, noting that I recognized only 19 names and thus reminded of how much I do not know. But those that ring a bell are all people that I respect. There is nothing in the short, three paragraph letter that I find problematic. I share the views expressed by Alexander Beiner.
I so became aware of the resignation letter of Bari Weiss from The New York Times which I read. This matter adds to my declining respect for the mainstream media. I was reminded of the article written by Greg Henriques, The Hammer, the Dance, and the Red Religion in which he writes,
When I was growing up in the 1980s, the big three networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS), along with major newspapers like the Times and the Washington Post, would offer information about the world, governance, policy, and current events... Unfortunately, things have changed over the past 30 years, and this adequacy and legitimacy has faded dramatically. To put it bluntly, our foundational institutions of governance, media, academic knowledge structures, education, and infrastructure among others have been failing. The short story is that our society is operating on archaic and outmoded knowledge, values, codes, and governance systems.
When I still lived in Calgary I occassionally read The Dish, a blog by Andrew Sullivan. I followed him when he moved to New York magazine in 2016. I read his final column there, See You Next Friday: A Farewell Letter, in which he calmly expains what he thinks happened.
What has happened, I think, is relatively simple: A critical mass of the staff and management at New York Magazine and Vox Media no longer want to associate with me, and, in a time of ever tightening budgets, I’m a luxury item they don’t want to afford. And that’s entirely their prerogative.
I continued to read several articles comment on and analyzing these events.
Harper’s Scarlet Letter by Berny Belvedere on ARC on Medium.
I want to explore the letter and one particular response to it because, as an episode in how the discourse works today, it reveals something important about our ongoing capacity to meaningfully share a dialogue space, without which none of us can usefully discuss any of the other things on our hierarchy of contemporary moral problems.
The Whispered Left-Wing Dissent on “Cancel Culture” by Bonny Brooks on ARC on Medium.
It is an inconvenient truth for both cancel culture deniers and right-wing populists that these pitchfork-driven firings and platform withdrawals, are, in the end, more about corporate risk management and decades of litigation culture than they are about the whims of some splenetic keyboard warriors people call left-wing.
After all, corporations don’t speak truth to power. They are the power.
A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate on The Objective.
This letter was a group effort, started by journalists of color with contributions from the larger journalism, academic, and publishing community. While a few of us organized the writing process, our role was to facilitate the group’s voice, not set the content or direction. Contributions were seen by all the collaborators and accepted through consensus. There is no particular order to this list of signatories, nor did any one person do the bulk of the work in writing the letter.
(I did not recognize any of the signatories in this large group.)
The Harper’s letter cites six nonspecific examples to justify their argument. It’s possible to guess what incidents the signatories might be referring to, and it’s likely that if they listed specific examples, most wouldn’t hold water. But the instances they reference are not part of a new trend at all, as we explain below.
Navigating Post-Truth by Jeff Krasno on Commune
This is how my grandparents and the rest of America got its news. Walter Cronkite, dubbed “the most trusted man in America,” was the anchorman for the CBS Evening News for 19 years. It didn’t much matter where you stood on the political spectrum, when Cronkite said it, it was accepted fact.
I regularly watched Walter Cronkite until he retired in 1981. He would be shocked by the situation today. But there is no going back to "the good old days."
This is how I spend some of my time - reading, thinking, writing, trying to undersatand the world I live in as best I can.
This story continues to interest me but I am not adding everything I read to this post. It seems to be a topic many people want to comment on. However, several writers are of particular interest to me and I will add three more links.
Why is everyone so mean to Bari Weiss by Robert Wright
I think her approach to the anti-Semitism problem seriously damages American political discourse. And her approach is shared by lots of influential people and institutions—which makes her that much more important as a case study. So here are the bullet points from my case study—five things about Bari Weiss’s writing that trigger me:
We Need a Renaissance, Not Another Revolution by Andrew Sweeny
The age of 19th Century ideology is over — even if the ghost of Maoist child armies are alive and well in ‘cancel culture’. And even if these angry children still hold massive sway over the mob, the good news is that they are committing suicide with increasing violence and speed, through their own absurdity.
THE CANCEL GOD by Peter Limberg & Lubomir Arsov
If we are afraid to speak what we believe to be true, we cannot engage in real dialogue. If we cannot engage in real dialogue, we cannot collectively figure out how to respond to the existential risks that threaten our existence. If we cannot figure out how to respond to these risks, then our existence will be collectively threatened, and we risk going extinct.
Okay, as this issue goes on and on, I will add one more article.
The Cancel Culture Checklist by Jonathan Rauch Aug 6
Cancel culture now poses a real threat to intellectual freedom in the United States. According to a recent poll by the Cato Institute, a third of Americans say that they are personally worried about losing their jobs or missing out on career opportunities if they express their real political opinions. Americans in all walks of life have been publicly shamed, pressured into ritualistic apologies or summarily fired.