This week saw two odd but parallel stories. The first featured a white Minnesota woman named Shiloh Hendrix, who allegedly spotted a Somali child rifling her diaper bag at the park; she then reportedly called the child the N-word. An irate park-goer with a rather questionable background then followed her down the street while filming her and yelling at her; she responded by doubling down. The video, as it generally does nowadays, went viral. Hendrix claims that her address has been publicly revealed, and that she is under threat — and so she took to GiveSendGo to ask for money. She quickly raised over $500,000.
Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, a similar case broke into the news. A young Muslim man named Mo Khan posted a video to his Instagram from a Barstool restaurant, in which he reportedly asked waitresses to bring out a sign reading “F— The Jews.” This prompted Barstool owner Dave Portnoy, who is Jewish, to call him out publicly. Khan then posted his own video begging for money, claiming that he was being victimized by cancel culture. To date, he has raised approximately $15,000.
So, what’s going on? There is an ongoing argument breaking into the open about “cancel culture” — meaning, variously, criticism, ostracization or other social sanction for behavior or opinion. The first perspective, which was the dominant left-wing perspective for over a decade, suggests that cancellation is itself a positive good and ought to be widely applied: that any violation of taboo, no matter how minor, ought to be socially punished. This perspective, as applied, was censorious and ugly; it forbade useful conversations about vital but controversial topics.
The right responded by embracing a counter-perspective: that social sanction and even criticism should be treated as wrong. The problem with the Cancel Nothing perspective is that if there is never any social sanction or criticism for bad behavior or terrible opinion, we slide into a world of total moral relativism, in which the ugliest opinions and expressions are given equal credibility with decent or even controversial but useful opinions.
The reality of social consequences for ugly behavior and argument is more complex: Sometimes people deserve blowback. Not all blowback is created equal. Criticism is not social ostracization is not firing is not violence. So, for example, you have no duty to hire or have over to dinner someone who shouts the N-word at children or who says that white people are colonizers and evil — but you also shouldn’t post that person’s address online so people can harass them.
We all know this in our daily lives. If there’s a nasty fellow at the local diner who sits around grumbling over the Jews or the whites or the blacks, we all simply avoid that guy.
And that’s generally the end of it. In practice, the emergent and informal standards of the social fabric work just fine. Most issues remain personal.
But the social media age has ended all that. Now mobs form to destroy people for reasons both good and bad — and so we’re all forced to decide whether we think that person in question is bad or good, hero or villain, deserving of shame or of support. And we must decide what level of shame and what level of support. These are complicated questions.
Add to that the fact that we, as a society, no longer hold in common any conception of what constitutes appropriate behavior or argument, and we quickly descend into a world of bright lines: Cancel Everything or Cancel Nothing.
So, what is the solution? The solution is to prosecute those who violate the law — if you incite violence against someone because they said something nasty to a child on the playground, you should go to jail; to adjudicate, on a case-by-case basis and with dispassion, the nature of the behavior or speech; to defend those who are innocent and those whose “cancellation” is disproportionate.
But will that happen? It’s increasingly unlikely in a world in which the most extreme behavior and opinion receive the loudest applause. Those who shout to Cancel Everything drive support for those who shout to Cancel Nothing, and vice versa. If we wish for a better world and a better conversation, we ought to acknowledge that we are all human — that we all deserve both criticism and mercy, when appropriate. Perhaps to build that better world, we all ought to log off for a while.
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