Steel-Manning Complaints About Cancel Culture

I Know! Hear me out a second

You hear a lot about “cancel culture” these days. Look, I don’t have an intro here. Just roll with it.

A lot of times complaints about cancel culture are merely complaints about being held responsible and accountable for your actions and words. For instance, a couple of months ago there was an article in the New York Times about a conductor for an orchestra who, upset about what he thought was unfair treatment from a critic, took some dog feces and rubbed it in her face. He was, as is to be expected, fired and shunned. When interviewed, he complained about cancel culture, and the article was pretty sympathetic towards him in that regard. This is, of course, very silly. Yeah, you, an alleged professional, rubbed feces in someone’s face. There’s gonna be consequences for that! You can’t live in a world without consequences! You can’t just evade any accountability by calling the fact you were shunned for an objectively disgusting and unprofessional act “cancel culture”. Come on.

”Does he deserve to lose his career over that?”

I mean, would you hire someone who smeared dog feces on someone? That’s just a natural consequence of his actions. I’m sure people will pay for private lessons from him. He’ll be fine.

But I do think there is a valid critique to be made of “cancel culture” as currently understood. Let me use an example.

How do you define “racism”?