Anatomy of a Book Cancellation
compactmag.com
compactmag.com
Like a control circuit only able to correct the system in one direction, it will drift in that direction without limit. It turns history first to myth, then to fairy tale.
We tightly strapped an infant to a traditional plastic “circumstraint” using Velcro restraints. We also completely immobilized the infant’s head using standard surgical tape. The entire apparatus was then introduced into the MRI chamber. Since no metal objects could be used because of the high magnetic fields, the doctor who performed the surgery used a plastic bell with a sterilized obsidian bade to cut the foreskin. No anesthetic was used.
What should be of no surprise to anyone, anywhere, is that people are deeply unmotivated to ever see the ends in a positive light if they were on the other end of that barrel full of evil means. Moreover, to say that someone should have pride in colonialism should translate to a tacit acknowledgement that colonialism was a great thing (if it's not great, why have pride in it at all?). And if it's a great thing why shouldn't we do it again?
I mean, does anyone genuinely think any value the Nazis produced would make up for the enormity of their evil? Should Germans have pride in Nazis because they helped pioneer rocketry?
To give a simple example, the question is "Did the Umayyad caliphate bring new irrigation techniques to Spain? What was the overall balance between harm and benefit they brought to Spain's population?", and not "Do the new irrigation techniques justify their colonization of Spain?"
Somehow, we are able to dispassionately examine the harms and benefits when it comes to Islamic-ruled Spain. So why should we look at Britain's empire any differently?
"Then, in late November 2017, I published a column in The Times of London, in which I referred approvingly to Bruce Gilley’s controversial article ,'The Case for Colonialism,' and argued that we Britons have reason to feel pride as well as shame about our imperial past"
Neglecting what should be an obvious comment on Britons having pride in the results of colonialism (re: ends) despite the shame behind their ancestors' actions (re: means), the problem has never been related to how much evil benefits anyone. It's always been about how unnecessary evil is and the fact that there were always better options than evil.
For example, the Wikipedia article on a different colonial empire, the Umayyad caliphate, is positively aglow with all the good it did (in addition to enslaving some of its subjects): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Andalus
Same reason people aren't interested in objectively discussing the 'harms and benefits' the USSR brought to Poland[1].
Because there are people still alive who remember the occupation. A lot of them in fact. And the ones who weren't alive then are dealing with all the direct consequences thereof.
[1] Or of a Russian annexation of Crimea / the rest of Ukraine. Empires look kind of scary and nasty when you're on the receiving end of them.
Because it's politically useful to demonize their enemies, got it. In any case, if someone openly isn't interested in an objective view of history, then by definition they've confessed to wanting only propaganda.
(Interestingly that article starts with mention of the massacre of Namibians by Germans. I don't think anyone is being "cancelled" over that, possibly because everyone involved was "cancelled" a lot harder in the middle of the 20th century for some reason)
For HN the current debate (28 comments) really reflects how charged this topic is.
Cancellation of ideas is a topic worth discussing. If we can't discuss it here, a much more rational place than other venues, where can this be meaningfully discussed?
While I acknowledge that the spread of hateful messages online can lead to tragic consequences, such as suicide, it is difficult to determine which political side causes more harm through speech. The impact of speech on individuals varies greatly, and not all individuals are equally resilient to criticism.
In my opinion, businesses with a monopoly must serve all customers regardless of their beliefs or opinions. However, businesses without a monopoly are free to work with whomever they please, as long as they don't discriminate based on factors like ethnicity or gender. The rejection of a message or idea is not the same as denying service, as long as there are still other competitors who are willing to work with the individual in question.
In conclusion, I do not believe in the existence of "cancel culture." I welcome further discussion and arguments that may change my mind.
> Original, confusing message by me:
After book burning, we burned people. Do we cancel people into their graves next? Yes, hateful messages get humans to commit suicide. But I don't know if (politically right?) not canceled messages vs. a (leftist?) cancel culture cause more self-harm.
That said, I believe every business that holds a monopoly must serve anyone. Any other business may deal with whomever they want and reject on any grounds, unless these are explicitly forbidden. Ethnicity or gender may fit as non-reasons for denying service. Not liking a message and not wanting to share it is different, if there are still competitors that will offer to work with you.
TL;DR IMHO there is no such thing as cancel culture. Change my mind.
Yes. And out of them, too:
A Confederate General's Remains Are Being Moved Out Of Memphis - https://www.npr.org/2021/06/19/1008371491/confederate-genera...
Perhaps you should take a moment to read the published article again. This is not the case of targeted harassment with the intent or even ability to cause self harm. It is a case of an academic, who’s job is to produce works that provide an accurate understanding of history so that better decisions can be made by leaders, having a book canceled due to political pressure from a privileged vocal elite. The facts of history do not conform to ideology, since history is an analysis of the past based on remnants left by it in the present.
The second part of your argument seems to be a neoliberal one that people should be free to do business with whomever they please. Of course the flaw with neoliberalism is it’s constant infiltration by political elements. As soon as a business decision is driven by political considerations rather than profit, the laws of neoliberal economics break down. Profit matters less than political salience, since political salience generates access to grant funding from state and non state actors.
But no, I asked which political camp caused more deaths by using their voices to influence others. Which is an unfair metric, since not every camp has the same amount of members and not all targets of online opinions are in the same way resilient.
<edit> On second thought, the original problem in the article was that people voice their opinions on a book they did not read. I responded here by voicing some possible opinions without knowing all the facts: Is the author in the right or wrong? Is he a scientist that was cancelled due to political outrage, or does some argument against the book have merit? Is he part of a privileged elite of white old men, or did, as you claim, the privileged cancel culture destroy a rightous man out of spite and ignorance? I honestly have no clue, probably none of these.
History is the process of reinterpreting old evidence in the thinking of your current generations' values, too - objectively, every single author surely is flawed. The scientific process should be upheld, so the question for me is, if a free scientific press is damaged, in the US at least, by thinking bans? I am not from the US, but here, everyone that says "is one even still allowed to say" ends the sentence with "that other skin colors are inferior to mine", but usually hides it with "I was born into riches, I don't share with foreigners", and still actually voices their "now-forbidden" opinion.
That's why I replied to this simple "cancel culture" post instead of discussing the posting, about which I have no additional information. </edit>
(Actually, comparing just the numbers for the self-harm subset would even "objectively" be unfair when having a far larger number of deaths through more direct means. In the EU, after the '80s, right-winger kill people while left-wingers commit other crimes but mostly stopped with that. So we would need to do a 100-year regression or something - last I checked after Paris in 2015, RAF killed more people than the al quaida in Europe. [Count of any terror attacks per year here: https://de.statista.com/infografik/5378/terrorattacken-in-we..., death tolls are now pretty close though - and blowing up north stream pipelines is probably not in there, since "terror" by most-probably-G9 states is mostly not in any statistics since WE don't do terror, since 1945, by subjective definition] So I am counting civilian movements only, unless we want to count left-wing-ish stalin/lenin vs. right-wingers Hitler et al.)
Or, in the words of ChatGPT for that original, non-edited content:
Thank you for your response. I recognize that my comments were slightly conflicting and I made them to see which one was incorrect. *I now understand that it is not possible to compare the harm caused by speech on either side, as the number of individuals affected and their levels of resilience vary greatly.* [Edit: wow, chatGPT actually got that right. I was making comparisons through an objective lens, because 1. That is what utilitarians and to some extent rationalists, do, and 2. b/c online I am way more into QAnon/Querdenken/Lateral Thinking/Trolling than in real life, where I hate the faulty science and reasoning of these people with pre-disposed opininos. But I still am liable to make the same mistakes. I am no Carl Sagan. Yet.]
I also recognize that comparing the numbers of self-harm incidents caused by speech would not be a fair metric. The number of deaths caused by direct means is far greater and would make any such comparison inherently unfair. Additionally, it would be difficult to accurately compare the harm caused by different political ideologies over the course of 100 years or more, as the definition of terrorism and the statistics surrounding it have changed over time. For this reason, I will limit my analysis to movements and actions taken by civilians, rather than terrorist organizations.
A quote from the original post: "They [his critics] could engage rationally, even if forcefully."
A quote from [1]: "That debate [on empire] should be equitable, rational and based on all the available evidence."
So I think the debate might be a bit more nuanced than can be gleaned from blog posts and columns? I guess I would be wary of taking a side here without significantly more background reading.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/03/histor...
Poor guy
Free association is also an important liberal right.
This is just such a weird perspective.
The vast majority of people attempting to get published during the "Golden Age of Science Fiction" for starters.
Even reading the autobiographical writings of those that became big names you'll find a seemingly endless runway of rejection before liftoff, cancelled acceptances, demands for rewrites, multiple publisher approaches, etc.
One publisher getting cold feet isn't the end of the world, ask any writer that's made it.
Then we can know that their work is superior, probably due to their privilege.
Or maybe it would've been better to destroy his work completely? Then the world will be better off for it.
Am I doing it right?
I had thought the revolution was to destroy all that, remove the czar, bring in autocratic states, etc.
I feel like there is a distinction here but I can't easily point to it. But they were very anti-empire afaik
Because what some ruler calls him- or herself isn't really a useful category.
If you accept this definition, the USSR was an empire in the exact same sense the Romans or the British were, they just instantiated the template a little differently.
The ideals of the exceptional Republic make it the perfect overseer of the implementation of its system upon inferior nations that lack the vision or commitment to find and implement the perfect ideals. My impression from how it is coverred in the US is that the UK's early colonialism was simple feudal empire (the Queen is pleased with your venture) and late colonialism was of the Republican empire sort (they need our assigned administration to at least become a poor model of us).
(If you mean Napoleon, he was of course defeated and Austria setup a plan to contain France's ambitions, but his colonial aims could already be seen in his short lived satellite government in Switzerland.)
That is a peculiar definition of "colonialist".
For instance, the ancient Romans colonized Great Britain, despite the fact that the Romans and the Britons were both "white". The Arabs colonized Spain, despite the fact that the Arabs were "non-white" (by some definitions) and the Spaniards were "white". The Mongols colonized a whole bunch of areas, of pretty much every ethnicity that exists in Eastern Europe and a large swath of Asia. And so on.
Also it’s just “Ukraine”, not “the Ukraine”.
In en-gb "the Ukraine" is the established form; without "the" it sounds strange. There's no academy that dictates acceptable form for English language. Do you think it's unclear? Is there a good reason to be a language fascist on this point?
The “the Ukraine” form was used to refer to Ukrainian territory being part of the USSR or the Russian empire in the past. But the language seems to have evolved now to omit the article.
Also I don’t think I’m being a fascist about it at all.
Everything to do with colonialism = bad is such a boneheaded simplification, thank god there are academics brave enough to look at it from a non-hysterical perspective
Also pride leading to invasion is a non sequitur, Germans can be proud of Autobahns without wanting to invade Poland again
European colonialism. Take a look at Wikipedia's article on Muslim-colonized Spain, and it's almost nothing but praise. The entire opening section doesn't even mention the slavery of non-Muslims that was practiced.
Under the Caliphate of Córdoba, al-Andalus was a center of learning, and the city of Córdoba, the second largest in Europe, became one of the leading cultural and economic centers throughout the Mediterranean Basin, Europe, and the Islamic world. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Andalus
Of course it was driven top-down, but I don't see how that has any bearing on anything. The US didn't invade Iraq because there was some kind of grassroots fear of it in particular, and the English didn't get an empire spanning half the world because some blokes down at the local thought it was a swell idea.
The “Ethics and Empire” project continues and grows, and the book “Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning” was published despite the initial publisher exercising their option to withdraw and not publish.
Comments such as "research is only allowed to conclude .. " etc. are not supported here, just adages about twists and turns in the road that none of us anticipate.
The ability of people to refuse to understand that which they don't want to never ceases to amaze me.
His colleagues abandoned him, and his institution disavowed his work. That on rare occasion academics are famous, foolish, and stubborn enough to get their work out despite such disincentives does not mean such threats are not effective for the vast majority.
They hear the message loud and clear: If you go against the zeitgeist, you better be ready to weather the storm that'll bring upon you.
Sure, Leopold Kronecker shat on Cantor from a great height .. welcome to the entire history of acedemia.
In this case things came good a lot faster than they did for Cantor.
Happily, I was able to repair it.
Four fresh historians—including one dissenter from the Centre for Global History—stepped up, three of them, as it happens, wearing slightly darker-than-pink skins.
And since 2019, the three annual conferences have attracted more than 40 historians from Oxbridge and elsewhere in Britain, and from California to the Netherlands.
“Ethics and Empire” will complete its work in the summer of 2023.
So, that story has a happy ending: The attempted cancellation failed, albeit not for want of concerted trying.