Cancel culture

Every human society has ways of canceling someone; no human society can survive without such mechanisms.

Either the government enforces social decorum or civil-society does it.

When civil-society does this, there are two main forms:

1. mob rule

2. gate keepers

Mob rule is notorious for getting it wrong, for overdoing it, and for then looking foolish. In the old days, many women were burned as witches, and then later the village regretted burning the woman and remembered how pious she was.

For the professions, the best gate keepers are often professional organizations: the medical boards that review complaints against doctors, or the bar that reviews complaints against lawyers. But this only works when the individual has a livelihood that is independent of the government, while being regulated by the government. This particular form of gatekeeping does not work with the police, because the government directly employs the police. In such situations, the best model to follow is that followed by the military: the superior officers must be held accountable for the discipline of their troops, and poor discipline must be a black mark on the record of whoever is in command.

Someone, somewhere, needs to enforce social and professional norms. If you'd like to see civil society professional organizations play a larger role in enforcing professional norms (I do agree with this) the libel rules need to be relaxed sufficiently that the professional organization can conduct an investigation without running afoul of libel law. For instance, if you want medical organizations to play a larger role in enforcing professional behavior around medical professionals, then those medical organizations need to be able to fearlessly investigate a reported violation, without having to worry about a counter-suit.

But if you believe the medical professional organizations should have no such role, then the government will play that role. By no stretch of the imagination will a human society allow anyone to do anything at any time, without any person having to fear some pushback.

There is no human society, in all of history, that operated without any rules. Either society engages in shaming or every social violation needs to be elevated to the level of the courts (either for libel suits brought citizens against citizens, or for regulatory action brought by the government).

You can argue, reasonably, that social media allows for mob rule when it comes to social shaming, and you can argue that social shaming worked better in the past when there was a certain amount of "gate keeping" around who was allowed to shame people. Perhaps peer review works better, for enforcing social norms, then a mob of screaming idiots on the Internet. Perhaps you prefer the "dexio" of the educated rather than the "demo" of pure democracy.

But if you argue that social norm violations should be punished by civil-society-gate-keepers then you also have to declare if you are comfortable with the old style village priest denouncing someone in the village as a sinner, and if you are not comfortable with that, you also have to explain how you think things can be different. Where one institution dominates a whole town, that institution gains some of the powers of the government, even if it formally has no such powers. It takes a pluralism of institutions for civil-society to work correctly. One would have to be willing to support efforts to build up such pluralism, if one wanted to see civil-society institutions overseeing social norms.

Put differently, if you don’t want the government to be responsible for shaming people, and you dislike the unstructured mob-rule of social media, and you don’t want to go back to the days when the village priest oversaw social shaming, then you’d have to explain a system of social shaming that is in line with modern liberal democracy.

Most people, most of the time, are part of some institution — young people are in school, many families go to church, many people work. Institutions play a role in establishing social norms. But in recent decades some of our most important institutions have been weakened. Churches have faced falling attendance. Schools have lost funding and face an eternal budget squeeze. An institution in crisis is more likely to give in to populist pressures. Put differently, a strong institution can be an effective fire break against mob rule and rumors, but a weak institution will simply go along with mob rule and rumors. Therefore a reliance on civil-society has to include a commitment to keeping our institutions strong.

Especially difficult is developing a model that would apply to bad behavior in sexual matters. Difficult questions arise:

1. should one’s sex life be considered entirely private?

2. but what if one person in a relationship wants to make it public?

3. assuming the behavior is bad but not criminal, does society have the right to offer an opinion?

4. would the opinion be fair?

5. would the facts be known?

6. are members of the public allowed to do anything based on rumors?

7. if the rumors are untrue, how easy should it be for the accused to pursue libel suits against those who spread the rumors? do social media companies have any right to protect the privacy of those who spread rumors?

If we favor civil-society shaming over criminal prosecution, then where do we draw the limit on social shaming? How bad can behavior be before it is criminal?

Social shaming can limit criminal behavior, but it can also be used by criminals against their victims. Harvey Weinstein was accused of bad behavior by more than 60 women, and he was found guilty of three charges of rape. That he was a vicious abuser of women was an open secret in Hollywood for decades. Had more people spoken up earlier, then Weinstein’s criminal career might have been cut short, however, Weinstein was able to threaten most people in ways that kept them silent. He could ensure that an actress was blacklisted from future work. He could ruin lives. He could, and he did, spread rumors that some actresses were “a nightmare to work with” and this ended the career of some actresses. Weinstein used social shaming as a weapon. And so all of the old questions of power and accountability come up, whenever we think of using civil-society for enforcing social shaming. How do we ensure the right people are doing the shaming? What system would be consonant with modern liberal democracy?

Again, society will try to protect itself from bad behavior, so the question is whether all bad behavior should be considered criminal behavior or whether there is room for social stigma. If we rely on social stigma, instead of the government, then who gets to enforce those social stigmas? Someone will do it, the only question is who, and what sort of pushback should they face when allies of the accuser realize the accuser was wrong, or lying?

An odd fact of the current moment is some people will complain about the doctrine of substantive due process when it is applied to the police but then the same people will expect due process from non-governmental institutions — an expectation we’ve never had of non-governmental institutions. Seriously, at no point in the last 500 years did we expect private institutions to live by the same rules we apply to the government. Indeed, the argument for civil-society is that we should want some institutions that are not limited by the same rules and bureaucracy as the government. Or to put that another way, if we are going to insist that civil-society organizations have to obey all of the rules and procedures as the government, then we might as well abolish civil-society and concentrate all power in the government. The argument for a liberal society, one with a large civil society, has always been that power should be distributed throughout society, and arbitrary rules at some institution are safe so long as people only join that institution voluntarily and can leave at any time, voluntarily. That is, so long as relationship between an individual and institution is voluntary and consensual then we can allow the institution to have arbitrary rules about what goes on within the institution. No due process is needed.

The choices we face:

1. allow mob rule when it comes to social shaming

2. concentrate all power in the government and treat all bad behavior as a criminal matter

3. strengthen the institutions, insulate them from populist pressures, leave them in charge of professional censure, perhaps extend their power

The third option is the only one fully consonant with a liberal democracy with a strong civil society, though it is true that the different democracies have different ideas about how far the government should step into people’s lives. In Britain, and especially Scotland, the local councils will hit people with anti-social charges for a wide range of activities. In the USA, many suburban dwellers have instead developed HOA’s as the non-governmental way to achieve some of the same things.

If all of this feels like a smothering of the individual, I would suggest it is impossible to think clearly about how large groups of people can live together, unless you first internalize the lesson that Sartre taught us: hell is other people. I’m only half-joking when I suggest that you need to accept that as a starting point. Other people are, at a minimum, annoying. If everyone was perfect then we would not need government at all and people like me would not write these kinds of essays.

This essay won’t attempt to spell out a full program. The other essays on this site go further in that direction. This essay is only meant to make clear that “let anyone do whatever they want without any pushback from anyone” is not a serious proposal. There will always be something like “cancel culture.” There always has been, and there always will be, till the end of time. The only question is how it should be governed.